Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the fathers of modern fantasy literature, though he is better known for his contributions to horror. Born in 1890 in Providence, he died in poverty in 1938, never having known success in his lifetime. His work, which was the first to link scientific materialism and the supernatural, is characterized by the idea that behind the apparent banality of our existence lies a sickening and blasphemous truth. This truth cannot be revealed to the world, and Lovecraft himself shared it with us only in fragments to protect us from our own curiosity. There is resistance, opposition, even rebellion in the author’s inability to testify about the cosmic horrors that seem to watch humanity from beyond. To convey this resistance, I needed to explore the limits of the photographic medium. So I used cliché-verre, a technique of etching photographic material to create a mixed negative, blending the realistic aspect of photography with the graphic effects of drawing. Neither photographs alone nor illustration could reproduce this particular blend of horror and oneirism that characterizes the work of the master of Providence.
This work was displayed in November 2012 at Galerie 154: 154, rue Oberkampf, 75011, Paris.
I.
That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing. . . .
II.
Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.
III.
Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. . . .
The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves.
IV.
When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams . . . Then . . . those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth.
V.
Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause. . . . How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
VI.
The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there—Iä! Shub-Niggurath!—The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t take me. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . .
VII.
At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots—surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience.
VIII.
I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks. . . . Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.
IX.
He knew his room was in the old Witch House. . . . A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had . . . given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
X.
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. . . . It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened.
XI.
At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected.
XII.
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. . . .
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried.
Mr. Perrotin's work will be presented at the Providence Art Club from August 13 to
September 6 as part of NecronomiCon in Providence, RI. Mr. Perrotin will also be attending the convention in person in late August.
A PDF or ePub copy of the NYRSF issue in which this article first appeared is available for purchase at Weightless Books.
A printed copy of issues 295 and 296 is available for purchase from lulu.com.
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