SOURCE: Nelson, Victoria. “H. P. Lovecraft and The Great Heresies.” Raritan: Quarterly Review 15 (winter 1996): 92-121.

In the following essay, Nelson compares descriptions of psychic horror in the fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft and Schreber's Memoirs.

Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

—Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Four Corners” is a bit of generic roadside slang for that fixed point in the landscape where a quaternity of boundaries meet. At a similar nexus within the human psyche three territories rigorously fenced off from each other by Western Enlightenment culture—philosophy, religion, psychology—converge with a fourth, the artist's imagination. Only a handful of literary maps to this inner “region of the Great Heresies”—so dubbed by the Polish Jewish fantastic writer Bruno Schulz—have been drawn during this past and passing era of Modernism-Postmodernism. Those I wish to examine here belong...