Lovecraft’s Murder Mystery: Revisit Poe’s Haunted House

Abstract

H.P. Lovecraft admired Edgar Allen Poe as his “God of Fiction,” having stumbled upon the literary works of Poe at the age of eight. To Lovecraft, Poe then served to replace Greek mythology and the Arabian Nights as his muse. Unfortunately, the degree to which his writing style and mood were thus significantly influenced by Poe is unknown, since very few of his works completed during his juvenile years remain today. Moreover, he did not admit the implicit influence of Poe until 1935. Joshi attributed Lovecraft’s denial of Poe’s influence to Harold Bloom’s concept of the “anxiety of influence.”¹ However, it is still possible to trace the impact of Poe in Lovecraft’s literary works. Lovecraft’s idea of cosmic decline stemmed from his early reading of Poe, adroitly applying Poe’s gothic setting of terror to his own 20^th-century stories. Throughout his body of work, however, Lovecraft developed a more pessimistic tone of cosmicism, with his Cthulhu Mythos and weird fiction; therein, his works stand apart from Poe’s. The following is a comparison and contrast of Lovecraft’s murder stories and those of Poe.