February 28, 2025

Greetings Everyone!

I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest book! You can get it on Amazon, Bloomsbury and other on-line sites

In my previous posting, I argued that H. P. Lovecraft’s theory of devolution derives, in part, from  Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  Lovecraft was also influenced by  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of  Dorian Gray, written around the same time.

The plot is fairly well-known: Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, wishes that he could stay young and beautiful while his portrait ages.  He gets his wish; he looks exactly the same for twenty years; the painting, however, grows old and ugly.

Dorian complicates the issue by living a terrible, evil life—he commits murder and he drives men as well as women to suicide.  The portrait reveals Dorian’s inner corruption and it ends up looking even worse than simply an ugly, old man; it looks like a  misshapen, degenerate monster—a half-human, half simian monster.

At the end of the book, Dorian can no longer stand seeing himself like this and he stabs the portrait; the painting  becomes beautiful again, but Dorian dies, and he leaves behind  the ugly, deformed body of his alter ego—much as  Jekyll in death left behind the hideous body of Hyde.

The moral of Wilde’s story is the same as Stevenson’s: devolution is stronger than evolution!

The themes of degeneration and devolution are also central to Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula.  And this goes for J. Sheridan Le
Fanu’s equally famous novel Carmilla.   We shall look at these books in my next two postings.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/

JLS