Herbert West: Re-Animator
"Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality."
Herbert West is one of Lovecraft’s most famous characters; he is the Re-Animator some may be familiar with through popular movies if not necessarily Lovecraft’s prose. His fundamental personality is outlined in the metaphorical imagery in this observation by the narrator of his tale.
Lovecraftian Language
"I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham."
The rich, discursive nature of the symbol-laden imagery in this sentence is a suitable example of Lovecraft’s general approach to writing. The language is Gothic, the construction enables a sense of paranoia on behalf the reader and the allusions perhaps verging on abstruse to the general public. It helps, for instance, to know that Eblis is a spirit of malevolence in Islamic theology. Arkham, by contrast, is a reference that is now inextricably linked to the insane asylum in Batman mythology, but in the world of Lovecraft is actually a fictional village home to a university wielding greater influence throughout the writer’s canon.
"The Crawling Chaos"
"Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos"
In the story titled after him, Lovecraft introduces Nyarlathotep. Somewhat weirdly, however, the character has no association with a story titled “The Crawling Chaos” found later in the same collection. With an appearance similar to that of an Egyptian pharaoh, the character’s metaphorical nickname is eventually revealed and manifested over the course of many later appearances in Lovecraft’s fiction as as an agent of chaos making his way around the world in various manifestations of physical appearance.
Dagon
"Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds."
The densely metaphorical language here describes sea deity known as Dagon. “Dagon” is one of the earliest stories written in the Lovecraft canon and this imagery-laden description acts as a sort of preview for the kind monstrous creatures that will populate his fiction and create his legacy later on.
"The Cats of Ulthar"
"For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir."
With this quote from the opening paragraph of one of Lovecraft’s most popular stories “The Cats of Ulthar” it is easy to understand why cat lovers would be particularly drawn to the author. Coming from the same man who wrote in a non-fictional essay that his pet preference “are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality” it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the narrator of the this story from the author who created him.
