H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider & The Beast in the Cave LP Read by Andrew Leman, score by Anima Morte
Newly commissioned art by Jeremy Hush
Excerpt from the newly commissioned liner notes by S. T. Joshi:
Lovecraft reports that he wrote his very first story, “The Noble Eavesdropper,” around the age of six—and takes care to note that it was “pre-Poe.” What he means by this is that when he stumbled upon the stories of Edgar Allan Poe at the age of eight, he was so overwhelmed that his previous interests—in the Arabian Nights and Greek mythology—fell to the wayside for “the miasmatic exhalations of the tomb!” But if he found Poe’s work engaging, it was not reflected in the stories he wrote from 1898 to 1902. These tales—notably “The Mystery of the Grave-Yard” (c. 1898) and “The Mysterious Ship” (1902)—betray the influence, not of Poe, but of the dime novels that Lovecraft was apparently reading in great quantities. The first-named tale is not even supernatural, but a moderately clever mystery story starring a know-it-all detective, King John.
It was only with “The Beast in the Cave” that any tale of Lovecraft’s can truly deserve the designation “Lovecraftian.” It contains many of the essential features of the classic tales he wrote in the final decade of his life: the relentless focus on the terror that descends upon a lone individual; the weird but not explicitly supernatural nature of the horrific entity; and, of course, a prose style that displays the pervasive influence of Poe but modifies it with a leavening of contemporary science.
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