Lovecraft and Poe

Happy snowtime-in-Ithaca!
I haven't updated this blog in a while.  To be honest, I haven't been doing an awful lot, beyond catching up on my sleep and (to a lesser extent) my reading.  Not my thesis reading, mind you -- nothing that productive.
One particular book that's taken up a fair amount of my time is H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon.  Like several of the books that I borrowed from Olin library for pleasure reading, it's horror literature, a genre with which I have very limited experience.  Other than some of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, and Maupassant's "Le Horla" (all from the 19th century, I might add), I don't know horror.
Lovecraft writes mostly about the occult: descents into crypts, mysterious countryside killings, demon worshipers, that kind of thing.  From what I know, Lovecraft, in literature, connects early horror writers such as Poe and Maupassant to later horror writers, such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc.
Already a Poe fan (though not exactly an expert), I'm glad to say that there are a fair amount of similarities between Poe's writing and Lovecraft's.  Although I realize that I risk teleology (i.e. trying to show some kind of progression from Poe's horror fiction to that of the late 20th century), as a literary exercise, I'm going to compare -- and contrast -- these two masters of horror.
First of all, although both authors are very literary, Lovecraft is more succinct.  Poe, sometimes to his credit, and sometimes not, can be very wordy.  "A Descent into the Maelstrom," for instance, lasts unbearably long.  Some of Lovecraft's stories, by contrast (and some of the good ones) seem shorter than Poe's poems.  "The Statement of Randolph Carter," for instance, is only a few pages long, but manages to tell a thrilling story in its limited space.  This, in many instances, is a major improvement: Poe is sometimes painfully literary, dwelling on such details as the precise dimensions of protagonists' reading preferences ("The Fall of the House of Usher" comes to mind).
Second of all, Poe's tales dwell far more on the psychological than do Lovecraft's.  The best examples of this are two of Poe's masterpieces, "The Telltale Heart" and "The Raven" (notably, both fairly hort).  All of the story's action occur in the protagonist's own mind.  Not to say that Lovecraft doesn't wind up his readers: in "The Lurking Fear" and "The Rats in the Walls," the mysteries of the killings and of the bizarre noises, respectively, keep the reader in suspense.  However, there's typically something far more substantial about Lovecraft's frights than Poe's.  Which brings us to another enormous difference between the two writers.
Lovecraft portrays actual monsters.  Organic, flesh-and-blood monsters running around, whose existence is not explainable through normal laws of nature.  "The Unnameable," for instance, makes this point explicit.  While the narrator's interlocutor scoffs at his belief in a horrific monster, and, moreover, the belief that the image of its face has remained suspended in certain windowpanes, the narrator (a horror writer) firmly does, and spends most of the story providing what he considers to be valid proof of the monster's existence.  The conversation reaches it climax at nightfall, when the monster they'd been discussing ambushes them -- and the two characters awaken in hospital beds.  The wound marks that cover their bodies could only have been the result of a real, horned, clawed monster, and the two characters bluff the hospital staff by telling them that they had been attacked by an enraged bull.  Meanwhile, the closest to any living nonhuman monsters I can think of in Poe's stories are the ape in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the horse in "Metzengerstein."  The overwhelming majority of Poe's demons and monsters are all part of the human psyche ("The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Telltale Heart"), or the forces of nature themselves ("Into the Maelstrom" and "The Masque of the Red Death").
The point of Lovecraft's "The Unnameable", it seems to me, is that the narrator's horror stories (and, by extension, Lovecraft's own) are as piercing and frightening as they are, because they are based on reliable, historical fact.  This is something else that Poe's and Lovecraft's stories share in common: their attempt towards perfect, chilling reality.  Although I can't find the citation right now, Orwell wrote about Poe's stories (citing "The Black Cat" in particular) that, though some of the characters and their actions seem insane, their's is a self-contained madness, in which everything makes cohesive sense, suspending readers' sense of disbelief.  And the self-contained sense of each story hammers the  nerves of the reader, forcing him or her to imagine the most frightening of all possible scenarios, given the circumstances.
Which brings us to the fourth and final distinction.  Although both Poe and Lovecraft imagine some pretty terrible scenarios, they would respond somewhat differently if asked to name the most frightening thing imaginable.  Poe would respond either "live burial" ("Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Live Burial") or "death by wasting disease" (most poetry, "The Masque of the Red Death" as well as events in Poe's own family).  Lovecraft would respond "having one's face chewed off" ("The Lurking Fear") or "chewing off another's face" ("The Rats in the Walls").  This, in my opinion, is crucial, and explains why Lovecraft's stories are so much more frightening than Poe's: although both authors perfectly depict frightening scenarios, the eighty or so years that separated the two makes all the difference in terms of zeitgeist, and there is simply a greater disparity between our own fears and Poe's, and our own fears and Lovecraft's.  Lovecraft's "The Colour from Out of Space" (which resembles Maupassant's "Le Horla" in some respects) terrifies me more than anything else I have ever read, and I doubt that Poe could ever have devised anything as weird and creepy.  Do not mistake me -- Poe ages well, but he still ages.  "MS. Found in a Bottle," for instance, which helped to make Poe's reputation, is a dull read.  Even "The Masque of the Read Death," one of my favorites, has put an 11-year-old to sleep when I tried to read it to him once -- not only because of its lengthy descriptive passages, but because 21st-century Americans fear plagues far less than did 19th-century Americans.
Read both authors' works -- don't pass up either one.  If you don't want to sleep, choose Lovecraft, but if you relish good writing style, choose Poe.
~JD
"Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear -- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness" (Lovecraft, "Pickmans's Model," Necronomicon, p. 191).