Customer Reviews

H.P. Lovecraft: A Life

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There is little I can add to the kudos already present on this page in reference to "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life." It is every bit as good as the previous readers have said it is: magnificently detailed, critical yet sympathethic, and, yes, "compulsively readable." The point I wish to add is this. The folks who have already reviewed this book here all seem to be inveterate Lovecraftians; in contrast, I am not. While I am slowly warming to Lovecraft as I read more of his fiction, I really ordered this book simply to obtain some background on the writer for a class I teach which will touch briefly on his work. I never had any intention of actually reading all 600 pages---there was some specific information I was looking for, and really only planned to skim the volume. Well! Five days later I staggered away from this magnificent book, dizzy from reading, exhilarated, moved, overwhelmed. The point is: if you have any interest in literary biography, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It is one of the finest examples of the genre published in the past 30 years, and even if you do not much care about Lovecraft the writer, S.T. Joshi will make you care about Lovecraft the man. It should be required reading for anyone planning to write a biography.

"H.P. Lovecraft: A Life" is a great achievement.

The good: Until S.T. Joshi's book, the only serious, widely-available biographical information on HPL apart from his letters was 'H.P. Lovecraft; A Biography' (1975) by L. Sprague de Camp, which left many gaps and open questions. Joshi's book fills in the gaps and then some. It is the closest thing we have to a definitive Lovecraft bio, and if you're a Lovecraft scholar of any seriousness, you'll eventually need to read it.

The not-so-good: While Joshi's book reads like a rigorously well-researched first draft, I wish he'd consulted a manuscript editor before publication. This massive, expensive and ponderous 708-page book could perhaps be edited into a more readable and reasonably-priced 300-page book, with another 100 pages of small print endnotes, merely by removing Joshi and his scholarship from the foreground and replacing them with Lovecraft. For example:

- Joshi includes himself in the story, using the first person pronoun on nearly every page. "I..." this and "I..." that. While Joshi is likely the world's foremost Lovecraft scholar, and I appreciate his excellent and exhaustive efforts as a researcher, I did not plunk down such a hefty cover price to read about his adventures in scholarship. Easily 200 pages of this 708 page book are about the adventures of Joshi, Lovecraft scholar. That information belongs either in a short appendix or separate article. He'll print a quotation and then add, "To this analysis there is really very little to add...," or "I don't think I can add much to this," or "That last remark may be a little sanguine, but let it pass," seemingly for no other purpose than to firmly return the spotlight, which had momentarily alighted on Lovecraft, to himself. On nearly every page I felt that trapped "captive audience" feeling you get with professors who use class time to speak at length about their personal lives. Surely by now it has become standard practice for biographers to not include the personal "I" in their biographies, at least when they've never met the subject.

- While most biographies focus on the subject and relegate sources and disputes to footnotes and endnotes, Joshi foregrounds the sources and points of contention, which has the odd effect of almost burying the subject. You'll often read four paragraphs of sources and conjecture containing a single sentence of actual biographical information. If Lovecraft did X, but there's some dispute, I'd prefer the main body to say "Lovecraft probably did X," with a small-print footnote citing sources and contentions. I paid to read about Lovecraft, not Lovecraft scholarship. I often feel like I'm being punished, forced to read 708 pages to get 300 pages of information.

- As another reviewer pointed out, Joshi frequently expresses his personal opinions in a tone suggesting that he believes them to be indisputable fact. Especially disconcerting is Joshi's careful habit of never missing an opportunity to denigrate Lovecraft himself. A tiny sampling of Joshi's descriptions of Lovecraft and his work includes: clownish error, clumsily, embarrassing, paranoia, pompous, pseudo-philosophical, trying to do too much, moping, overly given to histrionics, painfully inept, pitiable wish-fulfilment [sic], a pretty sorry excuse for a story, offensive, dubious and pathetic. It's almost as though, while Joshi must have some respect for Lovecraft, he is careful to constantly place himself "above" Lovecraft emotionally. I can sympathize with Joshi, who as a serious scholar must sometimes find himself exasperated by uninformed intellectuals who still underrate Lovecraft's genuine contribution. However, I feel that the body of a biography is not the best place for Joshi to distance himself from Lovecraft's sillier decisions. If Joshi dislikes something, surely he need not bolster his personal opinion by inflating it into a grandiose pretend-fact, pompously lecturing the reader as to what we ought to despise or where to place our "well-deserved contempt."

Why are Joshi's opinions in the book at all? Doesn't he trust his readers to form our own opinions? Almost once per page I felt some resentment at being forced to play captive audience to Joshi's unwelcome editorial opinions and emotional self-positioning in order to gain access to his excellent scholarship. Toward the end Joshi finally provides his editorial rationalization, introducing the topic by slamming previous Lovecraft biographer de Camp with: "[de Camp]'s schoolmasterly chiding of Lovecraft [is] ...galling." Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Joshi goes on to claim that "passing value judgments... is the proper function of any biographer." Excuse me? As with all of Joshi's most dubious assumptions, he provides not a single citation or justification for this opinion, but merely states it as fact. Many (perhaps most) professional biographers would strongly disagree. I found myself bursting into incredulous laughter when Joshi finally declares, "...on occasion one feels as if Lovecraft is having some difficulty shutting up."

In closing, I hope this book is re-released soon with S.T. Joshi's presence as a character, editorial opinions, emotional self-positioning and research experiences either cut entirely or summarized in an appendix or endnotes. Then it wouldn't hurt to have a professional book doctor rewrite with an eye to smoother prose and readability. THAT edition will be the definitive Lovecraft biography.

ADDENDUM: One commentor to this post announced that a new 2-volume version will be published in 2010 by Hippocampus Press. If anyone from Hippocampus Press reads this, PLEASE do not compound the error already made by Necronomicon Press by republishing the hundreds of pages of material focused on Joshi at the expense of Lovecraft. Get this right and you might publish the definitive Lovecraft bio; repeat the error and your 2-volume edition will become an historical footnote the moment a serious biographer replaces it with a version that respects the reader.

ADDENDUM 2: Alas! The two-volume I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft is even more focused on Joshi at the expense of Lovecraft than the single-volume edition.

Joshi's work is not only thorough and scholarly, creating a well-rounded and moving impression of Lovecraft and his own interests (as opposed to the interests of his biographers), it is also thoroughly entertaining and compulsively readable. More importantly, it is now back in print for the price of $30. Buy it, read it, and join me in hoping that one day S.T. Joshi will find a publisher for the complete and unabridged version. Yes, even this massive volume is abridged.

Clocking in at 654 pages, this sprawling biography will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the horror scribe -- along with some things you'll wish you hadn't discovered, like how Lovecraft was a more zealous racist than was the norm in his day. Joshi is long-winded, for sure, like the grandfather who, when you ask him how the light switch turns the lamp on, proceeds to tell you the history of electricity, starting with two sticks being rubbed together. You'll be hard-pressed to remember all the details afterward, but the story of Lovecraft's life is smartly woven, divulging the world as viewed through the writer's eyes and those around him. Like a criminologist apt at identifying with a killer, Joshi truly seems to understand his subject down to the crumbs on his coat.

Despite it's "out of print" listing above, this book is again available in a new paperback edition from us, the original publisher, Necronomicon Press ... please urge Amazon.com to begin offering it again ...

Joshi's book is an awesome thing to behold. If Lovecraft will go on in the 21st century to be one of America's great writers, much credit will go to Joshi for his incredible research, storytelling and critical view of a very curious man.

At times I felt like skipping around and reading chapters which tell of Lovecraft's life during the creation of a specific story (my favorites like "Call of Cthulhu" and "At the Mountains of Madness") -- easy to due thanks for the great Index compiled for this work. The whole book is very thought provoking -- even if you thought you knew enough about Lovecraft's life. The disassembling of the (Derelith's) mythos too is good to have made official with the keen research Joshi has done.

Have recommended this to friends both Lovecraft-lovers and ones-not-necessarily-so. An example of what a good literary biography should be.

I agree with all the other reviews here... if you have realy gotten into HPL, then you will enjoy reading this--it's hard to imagine that anyone else will produce anything more comprehensive. Buy it now before it goes out of print again and used copies cost several hundred dollars. If your interest in HPL is a bit less obsessive but you'd still like to read his bio, there is a shorter version of this book called "A Dreamer and Visionary."

One of the few things that bothered me in the book was when Joshi gets hung up with certain adjectives--for example, in earlier sections of the book he uses the word "delightful" several times a page when describing examples of Lovecraft's writing, which began to get on my nerves.

I was disappointed there was no section of photographs--Lovecraft's inscrutable lantern-jawed visage is an integral part of his mystique.

I re-read "Lovecraft Remembered" after reading this, and found it much more enjoyable the second time around--"A Life" gives you all the context you need to understand how the various people who wrote commentaries used in "Remembered" fit into Lovecraft's life. In fact, for the real obsessives out there, get a copy of "Lovecraft Remembered", the various volumes of his collected letters, and you have the raw materials to make up your own bio!

I first discovered Lovecraft quite by accident in a small NJ library over 15 years ago. I saw a book on the rack called The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and was impressed by the cover. Needless to say I've read everything by Lovecraft and am an ardent fan. This book is packed w/ information on everything from Lovecraft's political views to his belief of man's meaningless place in the universe. The biography is chock full of HP's letters and offers great insight into his approach to weird fiction and the necessary ingredients of a well-crafted horror tale. Riddled throughout the account of HP's life is Joshi's own criticisms of Lovecraft's stories. Most of the time I agree although he seems to enjoy Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (which I never really liked) and down-plays The Lurking Fear (one of my favorites). Nevertheless this is a creditable work and certainly one of the best, albeit few, biographies I've ever read.

Unlike De Camp in his earlier biography, Joshi doesn't consider HPL to be a failed version of what he might have been had he at various key points in his life been just that little bit more commerce-minded: instead he accepts Lovecraft as he was and goes on from there. I think Joshi brings out what it is about Lovecraft & his work that continues to fascinate today: the curious fact that an erudite, scholarly autodidact should, from an early age, have been so caught up in a melodramatic 'pulp' aesthetic that for the rest of his life he focussed the entirety of his self-expression - emotional, intellectual and philosophical - through that aesthetic. Hence Lovecraft's stories have, even at their most garish & mechanical, an (admittedly sometimes near-subliminal) intellectually rich underpinning, and it is this bleed-through of a higher aesthetic that lifts them above the acres of hackwork that surrounded them when first published in Weird Tales, (try reading even a 'best of' by those other writers today!), gives them a psychological curiosity, and has given them their unexpected longevity.

Joshi's analysis of the 'Cthulhu Mythos' is, I think, exactly right: he defines the Mythos (not HPL's coinage, of course), as 'a fictional technique' for presenting Lovecraft's philosophy - which Joshi defines astutely as 'an anti-theology' which makes manifest (as we see with the cultists in Call of Cthulhu) the delusive nature of all religious belief, and asserts the meaningless of human existence in a vast, uncaring, mechanistic universe.

This analysis justifies what would otherwise be an excessively lengthy exploration of Lovecraft's political and philosophical beliefs, given that he published no significant writing on those subjects, and was only considered a great thinker by his friends and epistolary correspondents. It also highlights the unalloyed perversity of August Derleth in imposing a Catholic-inflected cosmology onto Lovecraft's atheistic vision. How strange that he was so fascinated by HPL & his work, but couldn't accept what Joshi rightly points out is its absolute core!

Joshi manages to address various differing opinions in the world of Lovecraft Studies without becoming pedantic or petty, and takes trouble to credit other researchers and academics for their insights.

As a biography this book is full of interest, and Joshi's pursuit of detail is relentless - occasionally to the point of obsessiveness, it has to be said, but some of the details he uncovers are highly revealing. His account of Lovecraft's death I found surprisingly moving, but I did not, as I did on finishing the De Camp biography, regret his life - except in the single matter of his clinging on to racist beliefs and self-diminishing prejudices.

I have very few criticisms. There are no photographs, and I think the cover is horrid - & certainly is not a good likeness of HPL. Occasionally Joshi is so aesthetically aligned with his subject he indulges him (as he does with certain of his amateur endeavors); occasionally Joshi is over-definitive in his judgment of the merits of various yarns. I think he slightly misses the mark at various points when he comments of (eg the denoument of Herbert West) that HPL must have been sending up his own style to *intentionally* comic effect. This, I think, is not quite right: rather, it seems to me, he allowed his discipline to slip, and reverted to the garish style of the Argosy yarns that he had read as a child, the style of which had so fundamentally informed his entire notion of the form of aesthetic and psychological self-expression that he could never quite discard it. Lovecraft knew it was a failing on his part, but sometimes let it off the leash regardless. I'm sure he never thought of his verbal pyrotechnics as anything other than, on sober reflection, accidentally funny.

Aside from those very modest quibbles, I found Joshi's judgments & assessments at all times perceptive and thought-provoking, and his 'Life' a highly-readable achievement in biography.

I highly recommend this biography of Lovecraft's life. There is something very relaxing about the way Lovecraft did things-- relaxing to read about. It puts the reader in a good mood to hear about Lovecraft's travels, his publishing squabbles, his loyal friendships, and his love of cats. Joshi's treatment of America's esteemed weird fiction writer is very detailed and intelligent.