Lovecraft's Influence On Modern English Literature

H.P. Lovecraft & Stephen King: deliria of horror geniuses.

César Castellón Gort [e-mail] Abstract
Many times has been discussed Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s influence on modern horror literature. However, little has been said about his specific influence on Stephen King. That is what I intend to discover in my work. To do so I will analyze one of King’s masterpieces It. This novel by King is filled with Lovecraftian elements. There are parallelisms between King’s entities and Lovecraftian gods, King’s characters and Lovecraft’s characters, King’s settings and Lovecraft’s settings, etc. Analyzing King’s work, one can see how

To begin with, Lovecraft plays with the immensity of space and how the human being is only a very small part of it and that no matter what we do, existence makes no sense. In addition, out in space, according to Lovecraft, there are ‘things’ we should be afraid of, grotesque figures that can make the fearless human being run away in dread. As he says in the opening sentence of The Call of Cthulhu (one of his most famous works where he summarizes he’s view of humanity’s position in relation to the universe): "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" (Lovecraft 45). Many authors have added stories to Lovecraft’s collection Cthulhu Mythos, all of them centered upon "the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky" (Lovecraft 59). And when “the stars. . . come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity” these gods will come alive. These “gods’” existence is ambiguous as they are “not composed altogether of flesh and blood” (Lovecraft 60) and their true forms are “not made of matter” (Lovecraft 60). Lovecraft adds that The Great Old Ones are in a grey zone, they are beyond human conceptions such as good and evil. That’s why

Eventually in Pet Sematary it is suggested that the creature –the Wendigo- feeds on human pain, just like the entity in It does. Moreover, one of Pet Sematary protagonists says that the Wendigo’s “power goes through phases, same as the moon. It’s been full of power before, and I’m ascared is coming around to full again” (King 246). The influence from a cosmic cycle is very frequent in Lovecraft’s works and it definitely dominates It. Contrary to Pet Sematary where cosmic motif is only mentioned, It uses this as integral to its