A Literary Anthology

Introduction

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic "hall of mirrors," Aldous Huxley a "city of dreadful joy." Where Jack Kerouac found a "huge desert encampment" David Thompson imagined "Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock."

Discussion

In Writing Los Angeles, The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries by over seventy writers. This revelatory anthology brings to life the entrancing surfaces and unsettling contradictions of The City of Angels, from Raymond Chandler's evocation of the murderous moods fed by the Santa Ana winds to John Gregory Dunne's affectionate tribute to "the deceptive perspectives of the pale subtropical light."

There is no arguing the literary influence that Lovecraft exerted over supernatural, horror, and dark science fiction. Combining symbols of archetypal terror (embodiments of mythic, religious, and cross-cultural societal significance) with scientific extrapolations, materialistic concerns, a cynical intellect, and themes invested with philosophical speculation, he sought escape from the natural world in which he so devoutly believed -- and a glimpse of an unknown existence that he longed for -- in his fiction, often refuting reality from within, making the cosmically weird believable by situating his explorations of it just outside the limits of possibility. Fiction was an emotional and intellectual tool of momentary escape from natural laws, where Lovecraft imagined that which he couldn't believe.

Lovecraft's unique themes and distinct approach to the outré remains influential, far surpassing the importance of his earlier Dunsanian and more traditional supernaturalism. His universal motifs and themes, which favored overt cosmicism over the traditional static horrors of the supernaturally-based Gothic tradition, were brought to forceful and convincing life by his nihilistic, uncompromisingly bleak vision of an ignorant species fumbling around in an unknowable cosmos. A universe void of empathy, at best simply unconcerned with humanity, at worst capable of unimaginable destruction, was his canvas. The cosmos according to Lovecraft lacked the conservative moral postering of "good" vs. "evil" once emphasized by the proper Gothic or the Victorian ghost story. There is no moral significance in Lovecraft's fiction, and rather than hampering the emotional effects of his visions, this lack of moral postering makes them more disturbing.

Changing the face of fantasy in the Twentieth century by emphasizing the terrors and awe of the sublime unknown, Lovecraft and a select few of his circle brought fantasy to an unsurpassed level of maturity, particularly by his insistence on employing devices of modern scientific thought and mechanicalism as means to help achieve the horrid, using such as components of a dark aesthetic rather than depending on the supernatural to refute materialistic thought. Lovecraft may be longest remembered for his fragmented creation of the Cthulhu Mythos, that body of belief -- and aesthetic approach -- which he emphasized when courting the unknown. Both a primal sense of outré awe and a more surface representation of certain Gods, myth-cyles, and ...