Horror Story Devices via Fritz Leiber

He also made it clear that many of Lovecraft's stories were based on actual events that transpired in his neck of the woods, or sometimes in news reports of happenings elsewhere.

"In passing, it is to be noted that Lovecraft, like Poe, was fascinated by great natural catastrophes and new scientific discoveries and explorations, as is understandable in one who chose cosmic horror for his theme. It is likely that reports of such events engendered many of his stories. "The Whisperer in Darkness" begins with the Vermont floods of 1927, and one notes other possible linkages: reports of oceanic earthqaukes and uphevals and "Dagon" and "The Call of Cthulu"; the inundation of acres of woodland by a man-made reservoir and "The Colour out of Space"; threat of demolition of some old warehouses on South Water Street, Providence and the poem "Brick Row," which is dated December 7, 1929, and may have been the germ of Lovecraft's greatest sonnet cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth," written between December 27, 1929 and January 4, 1930; regional decay and degeneracy and "The Lurking Fear" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"; the ravages of German submarine warfare and "The Temple"; polar exploration and "At the Mountains of Madness"; discovery of the planet Pluto by C W Tombaugh in 1930 and "The Whisperer in Darkness," featuring that discovery and written in the same year. ​

One thing Lovecraft admitted to Leiber in their letters is that his characters were so paper-thin. But then he was writing supernatural horror, which doesn't focus on character but on an event. He still seemed to believe his characters should have had a bit more dimension or personality (though Leiber said Lovecraft's self-criticism was too self-effacing). Personally I'm not convinved his stories required, or even would work with more fleshed-out characters. Character was never the main focus. It was always on either supernatural horror or cosmic horror, depending on the period it was written in.

"The universe of modern science engendered a profounder horror in Lovecraft's writings than that stemming solely from its non-human inhabitants. For the chief reason that man fears the universe revealed by materialistic science is that it is a purposeless, soulless place. To quote Lovecraft's "The Silver Key," man can hardly bear the realization that "the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness."​

Here's a quote from another of Leiber's essays in Fafhrd and Me called My Life and Writings, one of his autobiographical pieces that originally appeared as an 8 part series in his column for Fantasy Review. This isn't about Lovecraft, but about the focus of a story. I mentioned in my last entry above that Lovecraft's stories tended to focus mainly on supernatural or cosmic horror, so they didn't require (and wouldn't work with) fully developed characters like you'd see in a character-oriented piece. Leiber sometimes wrote stories focused mainly on supernatural horror, but here he's specifically talking about his first-published piece Adept's Gambit, a tale of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser:

"I gathered my resources together and envisioned a pattern for Fafhrd-Mouser tales that would essentailly be a supernatural horror story building slowly to a frightening yet wondrous ending, but with enough knavery, swordplay and humor along the way to keep things moving lively and and make the yarn both romantic and earthy."
​

Wow, I'm actually surprised to see him say it's essentially a supernatural horror story. I remembered it a bit differently. But the key is in "but with enough knavery, swordplay, and humor along the way to keep things moving lively and to make the yarn both romantic and earthy." That I think shifts the focus away from strictly supernatural horror and makes it more character-friendly, as well as allowing in the elements of humor, knavery (!) Romanticsm and earthiness. I say Romanticism because he isn't talking about a Valentine's Day idea of romance, about love between a man and a woman, but about high romance in the original sense of the term, which springs etymologically from Rome, and that were originally tales of wandering Roman knights (I've seen them called this, but it sounds wrong to me) encountering adventure in strange exotic places. By earthiness I assume he means groundedness—these stories do have a strong sense of being grounded in certain aspects of reality even though they're quite fanciful in other ways. Lovecraft wanted none of these elements to distract from the pure supernatural or cosmic horror he was so carefully crafting.

I never really thought of the Fafhrd/Mouser stories as primarily horror, though most of them do contain some of it. I tend to think of them as charming fanciful sword and sorcery adventure tales primarily. But now that I've seen their creator say this, I can see that most of them do lean strongly toward Weird horror, at least at times. I think it's because the characters are so compelling and delightful, though not deeply developed, that they tend to dominate the reading experience. And also the horror is never overwhelming—especially to them. They face it bravely and never lose their nerve, and as far as I can recall they always triumph over it, though at times that involves mainly just escaping from it, hopefully with a little of the treasure they probably came for.

knavery
Other forms: knaveries

The quality of acting like a villain or a rascal is knavery. You'll know that knavery happened last night if you wake to find toilet paper strung from the branches of your trees.

The noun knavery comes from knave, an old-fashioned word meaning "rascal or rogue." Shakespeare was especially famous for using knave as an insult, and knavery reflects this sense of a foolish and terrible person who's up to no good. Dirty political tricks can be called knavery, as can rascally practical jokes, and even wickedness, dishonesty, and cruelty.

Definitions of knavery
noun
lack of honesty; acts of lying or cheating or stealing
synonyms: dishonesty
Source
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Interesting in that the final book is called The Knight and Knave of Swords. One of them methinks is more knavely (probably not a word, I know) than the other.

earthiness
noun

earthiness noun (DIRECTNESS)
quality of being open and direct, often in a way that refers to sex and the human body:

I like the earthiness of her writing.
This essentially Mediterranean music combines earthiness with an age-old elegance.​

See
earthy

• He captures the astonishing earthiness of this ancient epic.
• I was taken by his earthiness and his authenticity, which I find rare, living in Hollywood.
• She brings a wholesome earthiness to her role as his wife.

Source​

This just occurred to me, as I was re-reading the above posts. Leiber said horror writers would mine the latest discoveries in science, or whatever the new trends are (spiritualism, occultism, what-have-you). Furthernmore, he said Arthur Machen used the Freudian/Darwinian concepts of monsters inside us waiting to be unleashed from the mysterious depths of the psyche. Well, what's the next logical step? That would be Jung. He never was as well-known as Freud or Darwin, but those familiar with his work see him as having far outstrode his predecessors (like Freud), and creating almost the only form of psychiatry that acknowledges creativity and artists (including writers). Existentialism also acknowledges creativity, but not to the same degree, or I think nearly as profoundly as Jung. So it makes sense that's what Leiber mined for his work.

And here's the meat and potatoes of why I made this thread. These are the devices the title refers to. Really it's more like a meat medallion and one of those little grape-sized baby potatoes. I really wish there were more, but there isn't. This is it. So savor it—make it last. Chew a lot and fill up on water and breadsticks (or bread and cheese, like Lovecraft used to do).

"There were three important elements in Lovecraft's style which he was able to use effectively in both his earlier poetic period and later, more objective style.

"The first is the device of confirmation rather than revelation. (I am indebeted to Harry Kuttner for this neat phrase.) In other words, the story-ending does not come as a surprise but as a final, tone-anticipated "convincer." The reader knows, and is supposed to know, what is coming, but this only prepares and adds to his shivers when the narrator supplies the last and incontrovertible piece of evidence. In the case of Charles Dexter Ward the reader knows from almost the first page that Ward has been supplanted by Joseph Cerwen, yet the narrator does not state this unequivocally until the last sentence of the book. This does not mean that Lovecraft never wrote the revelatory type of story, with its suprise ending. On the contrary he used it in The Lurking Fear and handled it most effectively in The Outsider. But he did come to more and more favor the less startling but sometimes more impressive confirmatory type.

"So closely related to his use of confirmation as to be only another aspect of it, is Lovecraft's employment of the terminal climax—that is, the story in which the high point and the final sentence coincide. Who can forget the supreme chill of: "But by god, Elliott, it was a photograph from life," or "It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did," or "They were, instead, the letters of our family alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in in my own handwriting," or "... the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley?" Use of the terminal climax made it necessary for Lovecraft to develop a special type of story-telling, in which the explanatory and return-to-equilibrium material is all deftly inserted before the finish and while the tension is still mounting. It also necessitated a very careful structure, with everything building from the first word to the last.

"Lovecraft reinforced this structure with what may be called orchestrated prose—sentences that are repeated with a constant addition of more potent adjectives, adverbs, and phrases, just as in a symphony a melody introduced by a single woodwind is at last thundered by the whole orchestra. The Statement of Randolph Carter provides one of the simplest examples. In it, in order, the following phrases occur concerning the moon: "...waning crescent moon...wan, waning crescent moon...pallid, peering crescent moon...accursed waning moon..." subtler and more complex examples can be found in the longer stories.

"Not only sentences, but whole sections, are sometimes repeated, with a growing cloud of atmosphere and detail. The story may first be briefly sketched, then told in part with some reservations, then related more fully as the narrator finally conquors his disinclination or repugnance toward stating the exact details of the horror he experienced."​