a revealing passage from Lovecraft: vague, but damnably suggestive

This passage from “The Whisperer in Darkness,” which refers to the photographs of footprints of the flying crab-creatures sent by Akeley to Wilmarth, could also function as a description of Lovecraft’s own work:

“…in spite of the vagueness of most of [the photos], they had a damnably suggestive power…”

Much like Poe, his stylistic ancestor even more than his forerunner in the “scary” genre, Lovecraft systematically produces that which is “vague, yet damnably suggestive.”

If there is one theme that is typically Lovecraftian, it is not the tininess of humans in the cosmos, nor even the more literal theme of extremely horrifying extraterrestrial monsters hiding in New England and elsewhere; the latter is merely the vehicle he uses.

Instead, the central Lovecraftian theme is the gap between realities and their manifestations: whether it be the gap between horrifying events and the traces of them discovered later (the camp scene in “At the Mountains of Madness”), the inadequacy of language to describe the fabulous anatomies of the various creatures (Wilbur’s decaying corpse in the Miskatonic library), even the inadequacy of the known structure of space-time and Euclidean geometry to serve as physical sites for his monsters.

With most writers, when they begin to talk about the impossibility of describing this or that entity in words, they draw attention to themselves; it becomes an exercise in self-reflexivity. In Lovecraft’s case, there’s nothing self-reflexive about this process at all: the thing itself is shown to be incommensurable with any possible description of it, yet he makes an attempt anyway, in such a manner that we do gain some vague sense of what the thing looks like (though not enough to draw or paint it, and this is why I’m an iconoclast in Lovecraft’s case: no Lovecraft paintings, sculptures, or films should be allowed). No other writers I can think of are more effective at undermining their own language in a way that makes the things they describe even more vivid.