Customer Reviews

The Monster in the Mirror: Looking for H. P. Lovecraft

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While most of these essays have appeared in the Lovecraft Studies over the last c. 15 years, Waugh has added two completely new pieces at the end and substantial material to the older works. What makes this book so valuable amidst the articles and books generated by the lastest HPL vogue is the author's self-admitted new-critical orientation, i.e., close attention to imagery, diction and figurative language that became popular in college classrooms way back in the fourties and seems to have survived deconstruction, new historicism, etc., as a means of making sense of literature.
The result is essayism in the best sense: Waugh ferrets out image-patterns, cognate words and extended metaphors, finding analogies in mainstream western literature - everything from Sophocles to Ezra Pound - and ties his findings to a variety of non-dogmatic themes: Lovecraft's self-education, race, authenticity, shoggoths, Leopardi's poetry, biblical traditions, you name it. The prose in sometimes thick with allusions and rapid metaphorical leaps - if you were raised on critics like Empson and Blackmur, you'll feel at home - and often requires attentive re-reading.
But the effort is worth it: Waugh is streets ahead of the often reductive or method-driven recent work that wants to pin down Lovecraft's meanings to his "thought" as expressed in the letters and essays, or demonstrate how wonderfully his works (like everything else on earth) can be deconstructed. Waugh certainly has some strong interpretive positions - no one can read the central essays on "The Outsider" without having his/her views challenged - but the overall effect is that of a well-conducted, new-critical class discussion: a real openness to the work at hand that encourages new ideas rather than submission to the author's methodology.
As Lovecraft's work finds a place in maintream literature - witness his Library of America volume and the new Penguin editions - it's a pleasure to find a guide versed in the nuts and bolts of close reading. Along with S.T Joshi's biography and Maurice Levy's Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic, this volume belongs on the shelf of anyone devoted to HPL.