There Are Worse Imaginary Friends Than An Octopus Monster

I am very fortunate to work in a profession where my nerdliness is not only tolerated, but encouraged to grow like some kind of heinous, flesh eating monster plant. Such was the case this past week when the subject of conversation turned to H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the Cthulhu mythology. Much to my surprise, it would appear that far less people know about Cthulhu than I imagined. Shocking, I know! It’s sort of like that time my sister didn’t even know what a necromancer was! I thought doctors were supposed to be smart!

Anyway, who the heck is Cthulhu? Well, the simple answer is he’s a bad ass octopus-dragon-man being who’s trapped in a frozen underwater city, because if he wasn’t, he’d be busy taking over our dimension or at the very least, hanging out with his fleet of Cthulhu cult worshippers. Lovecraft first brought Cthulhu onto the literary scene in 1928 for the pulp magazine “Weird Tales.” A fairly appropriate title, I’d say.

I’ve always wondered, what exactly was going on in the brain of young Howard Phillips Lovecraft, considering just how weird his tales are. I mean how crazy does a man have to be to invent a maniacal squid alien monster living in an ice city? He certainly has an interesting history, riddled with despair and mental disease. With all that happened, I suppose the real wonder would be if Lovecraft had become a boring, stable investment banker instead.

The family madness goes all the way back to when little Lovecraft was only three years old, when his father, a traveling jewelry and precious metal salesman, was first institutionalized after going “acutely psychotic” in a Chicago hotel room. What on earth does that mean? Well, apparently it means he had syphilis and went mad from it. Sources are unsure if young Lovecraft ever knew the true nature of his father’s illness, though, so if you’re reading my blog, ghost of H.P. Lovecraft, sorry you had to read about your crazy father‘s STD on a web diary.

Thank goodness Lovecraft wasn’t completely alone after his father’s death. No, he had Whipple Van Buren Phillips to take care of him. Suddenly the name Cthulhu doesn’t seem all that weird. Seriously, I want to time travel back to this era just to meet Whipple Van Buren Phillips and say, “Hello Mr. Phillips,” and have him say, “Please! My friends call me Whipple!” Anyway, we science fiction/horror nerds should all say a little thank you to good old Whipple, for he was the first one to introduce young Lovecraft to the macabre and strange, telling the boy ghost stories he’d written himself, much to H.P.’s mother’s dismay. Well, dear old Ma had very little to say in the end. She ended up in the same mental institution as her dear husband did, though not necessarily from the same STD. And despite Lovecraft’s moderate success, he only continued to grow poorer and poorer the older he got, until finally dying of intestinal cancer, Bright’s disease, and malnutrition at the age of 47.

In conclusion, writers have horrible lives.

No, that’s not the point I’m trying to make. I would simply like to pose the question, was it the harsh circumstances of his life that lead Lovecraft’s mind to wander to these dark, disturbed worlds? Had he been wealthier and happier with more stable, less diseasy parents, would his lack of misery led to a lack in creativity as well? Or would his mastery of prose simply have churned out brighter stories and adventures? How fine is the line between genius and totally whackadoodle crazypants?

And if you have an answer to this question, I’d love to hear it. Because, I may or may not have written a story where some sort of demonic earth monster rips a bunch of gold prospectors to pieces before nailing their body parts to a tree, and I’d kind of like to know exactly how crazy that makes me.