HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

I had great fun going around Boston last year looking at Lovecraftian locations.

Pickman's Model

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

At The Mountains Of Madness

The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward

The Thing On The Doorstep

The Whisperer In Darkness

The Picture In The House

As for his other writings: he likes long build-ups, and it doesn't always work. As soon as you guess what The Big Secret is, the tension deflates immediately. 'Shadow over Innsmouth' is a dud in that respect but 'The Lurking Fear' works v well.

cuddly cthulu here:
http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html

andy

nice to be able to understand the cthulu references in swamp thing, hell boy and everything else (simpsons even) that has come since though.

andy

ph34r!

http://www.toyvault.com/cthulhu/images/cthulhusanta.jpg

http://www.toyvault.com/cthulhu/images/cthulhusanta.jpg (if that doesn't work)

Yes, but you learn way too early what "they" are and what their motivation is, and the punchline feels a bit forced. The "lurking fear" remains undisclosed until the very end, and BOY IS IT DISGUSTING!!! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-hrm-

Are the Cthulhu novels any good?

Thanks!

>Are the Cthulhu novels any good?

?. Lovecraft wrote only three very-very-short novels, none of which feature Cthulhu. Anything w/ Cthulhu not written by HP is guaranteed to suck.

And I always thought HPL was a misogynist.

The only story that the Big C makes a personal appearance in is "Call of Cthulhu." If by Cthulhu you mean the "Cthulhu mythos", as in the pantheon of dieties including Cthulhu, then yes, they are good, you've already read a few (e.g "Shadow over Innsmouth").

>And I always thought HPL was a misogynist.

He was that too, but since women hardly ever appear in his stories, its not really obvious in his writing. (exception = "thingie on the doorstep")

Still an amazingly effective writer, though -- fitting in brutalist materialism into the realm of the 'supernatural' (and seeing how he modified the subjects of his stories over time) = classic. Go for the annotated collections from S. T. Joshi if you can find them.

very few of his stories actually mention Cthulhu. both short novels "The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At The Mountains Of Madness" probably mention Him in passing, but they are still canonical 'cthulhu mythos' stories. And crackers.

amusingly, popular comic "Vertigo Pop: London" is essentially a ripoff of a Lovecraft story.

and yes, Lovecraft was racist, misogynist, snobbish and ultra-conservative.

all this talk of Lovecraft makes me want to go up to Vermont on my next US trip.

Actually the true horror is when he learns.... he is one of THEM!

I picked up one of the collections when I was in high school and absolutely loved it.

"Mountains of Madness" = Totally awesome!

Clark Ashton Smith - He was a much better writer in the traditional sense than HPL, but he didn't have the ideas that Lovecraft had. Still, "The City of the Singing Flame" and "The Master of the Asteroid" are classic.

what do people think of the "Call Of Cthulhu" roleplaying game?

i'd certainly go for classicness. The case of charles dexter ward is grateness. At the mountains of madness is pretty good and they do a great roleplaying one based on that too but i don't think they have one based on charles dexter ward.

I like reading his short stories and stuff late at night when i'm too tired to decipher poe, not that' they're really grately similar i guess. except for the whole slow build, terror brimming at the seams kind of thing.

...uses more than one adjective in a row, i.e.: "Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?" ("The Unnamable")

...uses a purposely vague description. (i.e. "unspeakable horror")

...refers to an other-worldy location. (i.e., Sarnath, Kadath in the Cold Waste, and the like. "The Dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath" will put you under the table easily.)

...refers to an other-worldy entity by proper name. (Remember, Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep are proper names of single entities, but Mi-Go and shoggoth are not; they are types of entities.)

...states anything racist, sexist, fascist, or generally non-PC. This rule makes "The Horror at Red Hook" particularly nasty to get through. Don't debate too much about what is racist or sexist, though... When in doubt, drink.

...uses the "British" spelling of any word, such as "colour" or "favour".

...any time a character winds up at a temple or church.

...any time a "forbidden" book is mentioned in the story. This includes De Vermis Mysteris, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and, of course, The Necronomicon, among others.

the funniest bit in the documentary is the letter Lovecraft wrote before going to volunteer for the first world war ("The blood of the fjords flows through me!") and then the letter he wrote after being classed as permanently unfit for any military service.

or does it?

DV: But Asenath wasn't really Asenath, her father(?) exchanged minds with her. He found out that a female brain was somehow inferior to a male one, and that is why he went about seducing Edward Derby in order to mind-switch with him. Implying, of course, that women were dumb.

As pointed out, in person Lovecraft was said by all to be a nice and well-manned and charming individual. And later in life he dropped most/all of his reactionary beliefs and even began to lean toward socialist politics. So his racism/sexism/anglophilia was mostly just protracted adolescent nonsense.

Or maybe that makes it more funny??

This person also stayed up all night on two occasions freaking about the implications of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in relation to whether or not he had any of the massacrists personality traits and if it made him a terrible person. The last episode of Twin Peaks also set him off in similar fashion about "dirty" versus "clean" and various personality traits he was certain he shared with Windom Earle. So maybe the whole Cthulhu thing was relative to a bigger issue than HP Lovecraft.

In retrospect, it implies more about my sanity than his that I put up with it, but regardless it was obviously the workings of a completely unhinged mind. Monty Python quotes would've been the saving grace of nonseriousness.

Occultists will, generally, believe anything they want to believe in.
The Necronomicon is no more fake than any other "real" occult book of forbiden knowledge.

Ned: If Lovecraft survived, I believe he would have continued his trend of writing more science-fictiony type stuff. He became disenchanted with his more occult/magical stuff, which he refered to as "Yog-Sothothery".

The stories are great, also; the best editions are the hardbacks put out by Arkham House. They also published his letters, which are often quite interesting--to the likes of R.E. Howard etc.

Makes sense. "At the Mountains of Madness" certainly showed the way (and was plenty chilling enough without that sheer freakout at the end, a little bit of the ol' Yog there).

Yeeps, Ally.

I know nothing of Lovecraft's works besides this, of course. He was referred to as sort of a scientist by the ex, imagine my surprise to read this thread.

Actually though, I think most of Lovecraft's stories are
good. I never read any of the novels. And I also disagree
that he was a bad/good author; sure his language was
sensationalistic and overblow, but it still has a great
flow to it. And he is archaic but the first books I
ever read were Edgar Rice Burroughs and Lang's Coloured
Fairy Tale series, so I think I've always been very
comfortable with that type of language.

I understand these trends intensified as his life continued. One of his last manuscripts was destroyed except for a single page, and on that page only one sentence appears in full:

"It was with a terrible and dawning horror that I realised that something unsmurfy had taken place."

95% of his horror-type writing is beyond classic, especially because the stilted writing makes it sound like it's actual lost antique blasphemies that have been hidden in Stygian tombs for eons beyond count. His Dunsany stuff is crap, "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the one thing by him I could never get thru. He has some poetry too which is awful, if you can find it. Have never read his political essays but those are probably pretty un-PC and not really worth reading unless you are ultra-completist.

"As with so much genre fiction, Lovecraft's oeuvre isn't for everyone."

'Look at him, he's too imaginative.' Fuck you, no one's OEUVRE is for everyone. Lovecraft is in a direct line from Nathaniel Hawthorne, EA Poe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Stephen King. But I guess the Wall Street Journal writing about literature is like the Wall Street Journal writing about music.

My two fave Lovecraft stories are The Colour Out of Space, which reminds me(or it should be the other way around, I think) of Brian Aldiss' The Saliva Tree and

Favorite section of any of the CoC roleplaying books: the sidebar in Cthulhu Now! that finally addresses the question of "What happens when you drop a nuclear bomb on Cthulhu?"

A. Cthulhu blows apart but then reassembles back together. Only now he's radioactive.

This may be the dorkiest thread on ILE.

This may be the dorkiest thread on ILE.

-- Edward III (ehonaue...), October 13th, 2006.

hardly!

According to the epitaph on his grave, he *is* Providence.

Examples?

Ned, I assume nobody took you there during Terrastock 6?

Ed -- alas no! We wuz too busy with the rock and roll, I guess.

I've been there too. Even picked up the $$ "Lovecraft's Providence" at the Brown bookstore.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/hellocthulhu.gif

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering

Or trying to find breakfast...

Tsathoggua was created by Clark Ashton Smith, not Lovecraft. I hope this Luc Sante moron gets fired for that.

I always loved that one. Anyone know the name so i can go read it....NOW?

The Shunned House.

not too good.

It's not like I'm drawing from a very deep pool of knowledge, but I can't really think of another early 20th century writer who writes about other races and classes with the same virulent and obsessive disgust as Lovecraft. It's probably partly because, as that article says, Lovecraft was afraid of/disgusted by everything, and I don't think it's a reason not to read his books, but it's still pretty notable. At the risk of being condescending, just because everyone was racist back then doesn't mean that some weren't more racist (or at least more actively interested in race) than others.

He was married to a Jewish woman(as I recall), and while he obviously thought black people were more closely related to apes that whites, in doing so he admits he has the same origins and they fall between.
Furthermore, I can't think of an instance where he as an author in any way speaks poorly of a race of people any more 'virulently' than any other author of his time(if possibly a bit more bluntly, subtlety was never his strong suit when it comes to matters of human interaction). He speaks of primitive cultures as the kind who would commit what modern society calls heinous acts and bang away at drums around fires and throw spears at unsuspecting travellers. Thing is, that's
A: a plot device. SOMEONE has to worship the Old Ones
B: not something to be viewed as a negative in that world. THEY are the 'correct' culture in those stories!

He, if anything, was a bit of a narcissist. Anything that related to himself or his tastes was viewed as better. New England is where all his stories take place, or are 'based from' in some way. That's the ONLY place the upper-class people he wrote as could come from in his mind. They were all white, they all liked the same things as him, and so on.
He really comes off more IGNORANT than anything.

And this makes him different from the racists of his era how?

no, he wasn't an unbelieveably vile human being. Political leaders are vile, not this guy. This guy was just an antiquated tightass from New England who was fucking neurotic and was able to channel his imagination into these weird stories.

My take is that Houellebecq is right on when he writes about HPL "failing at life."

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), Today 3:52 PM. (Ned) (later)

he ain't no houllebecq girl

You have me on H.G. Wells, but his writing style is different from the what really became what is now called 'speculative fiction.'
The more pulp fiction style, writting with fascination, amazement, etc.
I always found H.G. Wells to lack feeling, and be more of a drawn out 'what if.'

This is all a matter of tastes, in any case.

Would I have hung out with him? No.
Would I have exchanged letters? probably.

October 18, 2006 - Guillermo del Toro is gearing up to shoot Hellboy 2: The Golden Army in January, but he's already planning his next project after that. In a chat with IGN, the fan favorite director revealed that his long-developing adaptation of HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness might be next on his schedule.

"Mountains of Madness, which is a project I've had for several years, if it comes to fruition I'd rather do that immediately while the iron is hot," del Toro says. "But it all depends on so many factors — creative, personal — that every time I predict what I'm going to do next, I fail."

Details on when/how/if the project is going to happen are sketchy, but del Toro has a clear idea of how he will portray the classic horror tale on screen, and he says it will definitely be a studio picture. Adapting Lovecraft's unique style to the movies has proven to be a difficult undertaking for filmmakers in the past, but the helmer says that he's enhanced At the Mountains of Madness' story (about an expedition to Antarctica that turns creepy fast) so that it will work on screen.

"The albino penguins, the gigantic city… The hard thing about that novel is it's very much a record of an expedition, so the narrative is brilliant in that it's a little bit dry but it's not character-based," he says. "There are many characters that you don't know — you don't even know who the hell the expedition is [made up of] until you have it referenced in another book of Lovecraft's."

Fleshing out those characters will be key to making the film work, he explains.

"You need to create the character dynamics and the arc of the story, which is not in the book," says del Toro. "Also, the horror in the book is only ambiguous and it's kept open at the end. And you can still capture that atmosphere, but then you have to take it and go to a climax [in the movie]. Which in the book is really a climax by almost using negative space in the narrative; it's what you don't see that makes it. That essentially goes against the very essence of show business, because you don't show anything. I think that what we're doing is good and it's as good as we can [do when] adapting Lovecraft. But it's a project that's been with us for several years now. It's not an easy project to set up."

one documentary I heard about him pointed out certain ambiguities in HPL's creepy racist vision - that his actual commitment to racism was weak, in that it could collapse when he was brought face to face with the object of his fear and loathing. So he rants away about TEH JEW and then marries a Jewish woman. However, he did seem to externalise problems in his own life by positioning them on non-WASP types. There is some amazingly racist rant about the degenerate races infesting New York that he sent to a pal when his attempt to earn a living there (as a repo man) came to naught.

BTW, if you want a cheap laugh, see if you can find a copy of the job application letters he was sending out when he was in New York looking for work.

"A repo man's life is always...squamous."

"I do not know of this 'relationship' you speak of."

I can answer this one. There were three just in the last year or two:

(1) Some guys in L.A. made an excellent period adaption of CoC. Silent, B&W.

http://www.cthulhulives.org/store/images/CoCDVDfront.gif

(2) Also, a short film called Experiment 17. A fake docu about what happened when the Wehrmacht found a copy of the Necromicon after they raided the Bibliotheque Nationale.

(3) Late Bloomer, a short based on Clay McLoed Chapman's monologue where a 7th grade sex-ed class goes insane after learning forbidden knowledge.

However, John Carpenter and Peter Straub are already confirmed, so this is gunna be fun.

It has Tori Spelling in it.

Unless The GZeus is younger than 5, it's almost certain that Stuart Gordon's Dagon came out in his lifetime as well. Bryan Moore's take on Cool Air is pretty damn good, as is Christian Matzke's Nyarlathotep (and his Imperfect Solution).

There's a festival every year in portland about this:

http://www.hplfilmfestival.com/

I've volunteered there this year & last. The guy who run it also operates Lurker Films, which specializes in HPL adaptations and other weird stories.

not so un-nameable after all!

Yeah, the filmmakers brought footage of the Cthulhu flick in progress to the festival last night. I think they're still working on it in Astoria.

ha ha

they had an adaptation of "Dream of the Witch House" in that Masters of terror thing. It was OK

I kinda wish that more of thoes Master of Horror thing had a standalone appeal, like the "Homecoming" ep(zombie vets from Iraq return to vote).

http://myspace-358.vo.llnwd.net/00280/85/36/280096358_l.jpg

seriously though... i liked it a lot, it's really in the spirit of hpl.

i'm enjoying this luc sante article! it made me LOL!

and Ryleh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYrQRcy45RQ

an animated short from france

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/sci_nat_enl_1161188217/img/1.jpg

Full story here.

Yeah, the best part is the early creepy part, but Dagon quickly devolves into crap.

Ironically, Re-animator, which is about 80% black comedy, is the best Lovecraft adapt so far.

Lucky you. I keep seeing this thread as "HP Lovesauce".

http://static.flickr.com/23/40492213_9650d24cf4.jpg?v=0

and go here if it doesn't.

Now there's a Freudian slip...

http://www.giantstep.net/events/676

BBC Radio 3 did a bio thing on HPL, available for this week

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/pip/96knh/

Weird Tales: The Strange Life of HP Lovecraft
Listen to this episode for up to 7 days after broadcast

Sunday 10 June 2007 20:00-20:45 (Radio 3)

Geoff Ward examines the strange life and terrifying world of the man hailed as America's greatest horror writer since Poe.

During his life, Lovecraft's work was confined to lurid pulp magazines and he died in penury in 1937. Today, however, his writings are considered modern classics and published in prestigious editions. How did such a weird, wild and ungodly writer get canonised? Among the writers considering his legacy are Neil Gaiman, ST Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville.
Duration:

45 minutes

Good cast of usual suspects (unfamiliar with Link, though) -- no Clive Barker? Then again Ramsay Campbell would be even more appropriate for a UK-based documentary.

> no Clive Barker? Then again Ramsay Campbell would be even more appropriate for a UK-based documentary.

this is an odd thing to say given that both barker and campbell were born in the same town 8)

was surprised to see campbell is still writing - haven't seen anything of his on bookshelves for years (haven't been looking that hard tbh). last thing i read of his was Dark Feasts ('87) (ditto Barker and Cabal in '88)

No Mark E. Smith!

this is an odd thing to say given that both barker and campbell were born in the same town 8)

Amazing! (I meant more that Campbell still lives/works in the UK, is all.) But Dadaismus is right most of all; MES on HPL could be endlessly listened to.

I recall his cameo as being one of the more amusing bits of the Planetary/Authority crossover.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070723_antarctic_mountains.html

The Plateau of Leng! They've found it!

i have the library of america edition of his TALES. i need to read that, then my harlan ellison omnibus.

http://www.hplfilmfestival.com/current/schedule/img/2007poster.jpg

HPL film fest going on this weekend in portland! wooooo!

Wow, some great looking stuff in there. Let's hope for an early Lurker release of some of the best of it.

suffice it to say that this one is probably my fave from this year:

http://www.9livesofmara.com/maraposter_final.jpg

in terms of weirdness and foul-mouthed children and actual decent filmmaking & acting

http://www.9livesofmara.com/

http://www.lolthulhu.com/

The HPL Historical Society, who did the silent 'Call of Cthulhu' , have a trailer for their new production, 'Whisperer in Darkness' up at their site. Release is slated for 2008.

glad to see 'The Thing' is getting it's due as a Lovecraft film. matches At The Mountains of Madness closer than In the Mouth of Madness.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/cthulhu/

haha

funny i just read shadow over innsmouth yesterday

Tori Spelling and HP Lovecraft- together at last!

oh I'll see that movie all right

I like how it boasts of winning an award at a Lovecraft conference. Must have been up aqainst some strong competition!

Has anyone ever read The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long?
#
Transdimensional beasts that pursue hapless meddling scientists thru the medium of geometry, right on!

lol "esoteric order of dagon" church sign

I was put off Lovecraft for forever because his fanbase doesn't really do him many favors. But I'm glad I finally overcame my prejudices, because he really is quite fantastic (noting that I have not yet read any of the stories which are generally labeled 'dud'). I generally tend to judge art on the basis of how successful it is at what it's trying to achieve (rather than how it measures up to some arbitrary canon), and on that front Lovecraft wins.

That film doesn't look too bad. It should be set in the 20s though.

http://www.quedat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/star-nosed_mole.jpg

The Star-nosed Mole (Condylura cristata) is a small North American mole found in eastern Canada and the north-eastern United States. It is the only member of the tribe Condylurini and the genus Condylura.

WHy doesn't someone make a movie out of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward? It would be super-easy to adapt, and my 12-year-old self tells me that it's bowel-loosening scary.

They did.

posters for this year's fest are out. Take yer pick:

http://hplfilmfestival.com/sites/hplfilmfestival.com/files/news/HPLFF2008MignolaPoster.jpg or http://hplfilmfestival.com/sites/hplfilmfestival.com/files/HPLFF08.jpg

I saw the Cthulhu movie last week. It's really really good. Definitely lacking in regards to the acting and cinematography in a few spots, but the overall story and vibe are surprisingly awesome.

I'd say excluding loose affiliates like The Thing, this is probably the best Lovecraft adaptation I've seen. Sure, I have more love in my heart for the kitsch of Dunwich Horror and the hilarious gross-out of Reanimator and From Beyond. But this new one is a must-see for anyone into HPL. Tori Spelling is weird treat; honestly though, she's overshadowed by many other people and... things. (there's a lot more people than things though)

is a weird treat.

Nice posters, looks like a great event. Wish there was something like this in the UK.

<3 the republican cthulhu logo

http://www.cthulhulives.org/store/images/alertidol.jpg

Nice. I like how that idol's been interpreted by artists -- there's just enough description to work with while leaving room for variety.

B+ needs a bigger bowl.

This thread was wrongly defined since the beginning. It should be HP Lovecraft- Eldritch or Inchoate?

http://metal-archives.com/band.php?id=17281

Until corrected, I am pronouncing the last bit of this band's name as "Cha-cha-cha!" and nobody better correct me.

Apparently never linked on here so:

Propnomicon.

HP Lovecraft film festival was in Portland a few weeks back. I missed it again.

"Next year!" he screamed, while shaking a pale, impotent fist at the heavens, raging with swarms of unknown and unspeakable daemonic wrath.

Cool link Ned. Thanks.

All-time anti-Semitic classic.

his wife was a jewess iirc, but his racist tendencies are not to be denied. there are some really sad "armchair eugenecist" segments in his collected letters.

eugenicist rather.

Lovecraft is one of my favorite writers ever, but he's a fascinating human being. I mean, he was terrified of anyone that wasn't an upper-class male WASP from New England, and yet he married a woman who was a Russian Jew living in New York. I'm just glad he wasn't around when the Nazis came to prominence, because I suspect he would have taken some positions that would preclude me from enjoying his work.

Hmm. Well never thought I'd see Ron Howard and Lovecraft mentioned in a story together.

lovecrafts whole THING is hating the other--makes for awful politics and worse interpersonal relationships but AMAZING short stories

btw does anyone have any DUNSANY recommendations

its that time of year to be reading rad horror/fantasy stories

in the land of time collection has pretty much every dunsany story u need i think

dunsay was a little too... for me.

too HARD 4 u

"dunsay" wtf

lol ian i feel the same way abt lovecraft tbh just...

i can feel that. sometimes he's a little much, but when he's on it's really fucking on.

and i love reading his letters. there are five large volumes + ephemera and it's really interesting reading.

i do want to read houellebecq's (who can also be too ott) book on him tho which i read about in the nyrb

kind of o_O that max missed the u dunsay joke - too easy?

too involved in baseball atm

houellebecq wishes he was as bizarrely racist and xenophobic as lovecraft can but its all positioning for him instead of genuine visceral disgust at non-WASPs--he just comes across as a poseur

trying not to think about baseball atm

excerpts of houllebecq i read in bookstores seemed sub-literotica.com at best.

its all positioning for him instead of genuine visceral disgust at non-WASPs--he just comes across as a poseur

idk i genuinely believe he wants to fuck hot teenagers and is disgusted w/anyone who wants to prevent this from happening pretty sure thats not a pose tbh

stop projecting!!

if holloubecq were actually hardcore the way he thinks he is he would be disgusted at the thought of sex and female genetalia

lol if holloubecq were as hardcore as he thinks/fronts hed be writing unformatted rapefic on alt.sci.cyborgstories. or hed be vladimir sorokin i think. all this aside id still like to read that book on lovecraft he wrote *shrug*

any 'serious' lovecraft criticism is probably worth reading to be honest. never seen the hollebecqueeeue around though.

haha max's wasp love knows no bounds

Are S.T. Joshi's books good?

Joshi has made himself into the major academic authority on Lovecraft over the years. He has his quirks, but he's thorough, professional and I think the fact that HPL is being taken increasingly seriously outside the world of fandom is down to his efforts.

Anyway, the hell with Holloubecq, check out W. H. Pugmire for a really original take on the mythos.

the hooleybeck book is terrible, i think: can't really remember why i thought that, though

other than because it's terrible

I posted this on a Jack Chick thread, didn't get much response:
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=135

I find it hilarious.

Lovecraft shouldn't need to be patronized by hip literary nazis to be cool.

There's a fairly cool Charles Stross story called "A Colder War" that's actually meant to be his version of a direct sequel to "At the Mountains of Madness" It updates the Lovecraftian madness within the context of the different madness of the Cold War. Here it is: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Stross also has a couple of novels set in a similar setting: "The Atrocity Archives"; which explicitly goes into the Nazi occultist/Cthulhu which is obvious a connection to make as anyone has ever thought of. And "The Jennifer Morgue" which deals with the fallout from the Cold War

There a Bruce Sterling story in his "Globalhead" collection called "The Unthinkable" which goes over the same ground as "A Colder War", admittedly with not as apocalyptic a conclusion...

Stross knows his HPL and is a thoroughly righteous dude. Buy his books.

I met him many, many years ago at a student sf convention at Leeds Uni. I suspect he, like the rest of us, has mellowed with age. :)

Dunsany is very, very twee. Too much for me, anyway. But he influenced all the best people.

Clark Ashton Smith and Arthur Machen seem to be the what-to-read-after-HPL recommendations these days. But I've only read a couple of CAS stories and no Machen.

Michel Hollaback just sounds too damn annoying and k-punk-worthy.

Read Machen, jon! The Great God Pan & The White People are the places to start imo.

Oh dude I do plan to. I expect big things.

Worth mentioning from our own era-- Thomas fuckin Ligotti.

Ligotti is great - "Grimscribe" is as perfect a collection of weird ficton as you'll find.

As for Dunsany. the Fantasy Masterworks collection "Time and the Gods" is about much Dunsany as anyone needs, and yours for less than a tenner. Yes, it's twee and fey and all the rest of it, but there is an absolute bleak cynicism at it's core which redeems all his excesses.

And, again, W.H. Pugmire is the greatest writer currently active in this genre. The Cthulhu mythos from the drag queen's point of view. Incredible.

Yeah, Ligotti rules. Shadow At the Bottom of the World is the only one I've been able track down for cheap, though. Anyone read the newish one, the "tales of corporate horror" or whatever?

I'll check out Pugmire. Any place I should start?

My only Dunsany contact came from was on a podcast. It was kind of goofy; I think I'd like him more if I was actually reading. The one Machen story I read was pretty good, same for CA Smith.

How do people rate Algernon Blackwood? I know Lovecraft himself loved him, but that seems to be the only time anyone ever mentions him. I have a collection I read a bit of in high school, and don't really remember it (although the version of The Wendigo I read in one of those "Scary Stories" books as a kid still gives me chills when I think about it).

Is Shadow At The Bottom Of The World a real recent Ligotti? Because in the 00's he has actually started to get too deeply depressing for me to handle, really.

It's not just depressing so much as dull - since Nightmare Factory, he's been proselytizing for a kind of philosophical nihilism and it's just as sad and boring as if he'd taken up Scientology.

That's a good way to put it.

How do people rate Algernon Blackwood? I know Lovecraft himself loved him, but that seems to be the only time anyone ever mentions him. I have a collection I read a bit of in high school, and don't really remember it (although the version of The Wendigo I read in one of those "Scary Stories" books as a kid still gives me chills when I think about it).

That's one of the keepers, the other is "The Willows," which is subtler but no less unnerving. After that, a bit pick-and-choose.

Then there's M. R. James, my eternal favorite of the time (and Joshi's least favorite out of that generation).

xpost Shadow at the Bottom is just sort of a greatest hits package, I think.

agreed on Ligotti's nihilist hardman fronting, although I thought it worked well in his intro to Roland Topor's The Tenant.

MR James be born be born

Yog Sothoth rape me lord

Sludge Hai Choi etc etc

Co-sign on "The Willows" and M. R. James.

Le Fanu and Oliver Onions also come to mind as go-to guys for creeping dread.

I don't always have the patience for Le Fanu, but he's got some great stuff. I really love the one about the guy who gets to close to the spirit world on account of drinking too much green tea. And "Carmilla", of course.

Will check out Oliver Onions.

*too close, gah

which ligotti (non lol comics) do u guys rec?

If you can find the Robinson "Nightmare Factory" story anthology, that's the best starter. I don't have "Shadow at the Bottom of the World", but it looks pretty good.

If you like Lovecraft, and want more, try Clark Ashton Smith (The fantasy masterworks collection is great) and William Hope Hodgson ('The House on the Borderland' and 'Carnacki', though approach everything else with caution.)

Another good collection of Lovecraftian stories is Ramsey Campbell's Cold Print.

I'm just reading what Ligotti I can find at the mo, which is only the most recent stuff: Teatro Grotesco & My Work is Not Yet Done (the corporate horror one). Finding it terrific, sort of awkward - the nihilism is ok with me, like he's plugging into 20th century Euro misery, but then that pushes towards a bit of lecturing or social comment or moments of style where he's doing say Thomas Bernhard, which breaks any uncanny or immersive thing going on. But so far TG is successful enough to be unsettling & impressive; and MWINYD guns along a little more, seems less hung up on its literariness. I'd like to read more, the earlier stuff especially.

I figure he'll be hailed with 'omg it's horror but proper literature' by establishment types over the next while. Is this happening already? (not really in England, where I don't think he's been published much till recently).

Anyone have that collection of letters by/to Lovecraft?
Does it include his crazy jew-paranoia screeds from when he was in New York City?

Ditto on the Nightmare Factory recommendation for Ligotti, or if not that, Grimscribe.

Vicerory-- Arkham house published five (i think?) volumes of his selected leters. I have one of them. While I can't think of any particular notes about New York & race mixing, there is iirc an expression of appreciation of eugenics and his belief that white europeens are superior to people with other skin colors and/or skull shapes.

the guy was obsessed with skull shape.

There's a good Joshi essay on Lovecraft here: http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/lovecraft.html

all those posts upthread about ally's ex are so damned classic

xpost: Pugmire's recent collection "Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts" is probably the place to start. In the cold light of day, "greatest writer currently active in the genre" is perhaps putting it a bit strong, unless you're talking pure Cthulhu mythos writing; but he's certainly a unique voice, and I'm grabbing anything he puts out.

Algernon Blackwood is superbly atmospheric writer at his best, but was very prolific, and a lot of his output is just fair-to-middling weird horror of it's time. Check out the 'John Silence' stories though, or the 'Ancient Sorceries' collection.

Agree that it's only a matter of time before Ligotti shows up on literary mainstream radar. (Probably as and when he's picked up by Houllebeque!) He has been published in England though: Almost all his work has had UK editions as it has come out, initially from Robinson, latterly from Virgin. There are also a series of really lavish limited editions from David Tibet's Durtro press.

Anyway, in the spirit of the season:

http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/4591/cthulhupumpkinia8.jpg

yes!

the boundless daemon sultan azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes

Pfft. Typical stoner.

puffing greedily at chambers lit beyond time and space. . . .

so ive been reading ligotti's teatro grottesco "purity" is p amazing i think and there a couple of the others - "town manager" and the title story - with some narrative drive are really good but the ones that just kind of drift esp "red tower" i dont really like or "enjoy" and they v much blend into one other. thats my biggest complaint i really wish he could manage a different voice or conceit since the horror of meaninglessness wears on u after awhile

xpost - Oliver Onions, yes.

And as mentioned way up thread -- Robert W Chambers "The King in Yellow" is really great, and was a huge inspiration to Lovecraft.

Ligotti - I have "Shadow at the Bottom of the World". Titular story is great. But then I never read any others afterward.

Pugmire is news to me. Sounds interesting. I haven't picked it up yet, but supposedly Gene Wolfe's latest "An Evil Guest" has some very strong Lovecraft/noire elements.

'The Great God Pan' is seriously mental good stuff, and another vote here for that Charles Stross story (rather more successful than his sex-robots/PG Wodehouse mash-up).

there are so many lovecraft collections out there...which are the essential ones to start with?

The ones that Joshi edited for Arkham were the gold standard for a while, but they're now out of print/hard to find. But there's a handy backup online:

http://hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/

Joshi is one of the three folks behind the site, so pretty much you're looking at something definitive there. That said I do recommend the two annotated editions he did for DTP a few years back -- covers a lot of the key stories and some curios with all kinds of additional background info etc.

The Penguin Classics 'Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories', edited by Joshi, is a good first step, though it doesn't contain 'At the Mountains of Madness', which is pretty essential. (That's in 'The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories', also edited by Joshi, which would actually be another equally good starting point.)

Hey thanks James, had missed Joshi had done two Penguin collections -- that being the case, look for those! And yeah, "At the Mountains of Madness" is pretty crucial, I've actually just been rereading it lately.

do those two penguin collections contain any overlap? i imagine not?

Oh weird, the Arkham editions are back -- the company had collapsed a while ago and I'd thought they were gone, but behold:

http://www.arkhamhouse.com/

Handy. As for the Penguins, no overlap -- here are the three Joshi's done for them, with content listing:

http://hplovecraft.com/writings/sources/ccweird.asp

http://hplovecraft.com/writings/sources/dwhows.asp

http://hplovecraft.com/writings/sources/tdows.asp

thanking u -_-

Then there's this, for which you won't be thanking me. (It riffs on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth.")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tTHn2tHhcI

No overlap in the Penguins--there's also a third volume, 'Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories', if you want to be a completist, but all the very best stuff's in the first 2.

At least that video told me how to pronounce N'Harlothep (didn't check the spelling)

which are the essential ones to start with?
go with this one first
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Innsmouth-Other-Stories-Horror/dp/0590045431
you get houdini in pyramidal dungeons (a la re howard0, the first real extraterrestrial science fiction story ("in the walls of eryx"), and the title story, some seriously bloodchilling post-poe/hawthorne shit

There's a fairly cool Charles Stross story called "A Colder War" that's actually meant to be his version of a direct sequel to "At the Mountains of Madness" It updates the Lovecraftian madness within the context of the different madness of the Cold War. Here it is: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Stross also has a couple of novels set in a similar setting: "The Atrocity Archives"; which explicitly goes into the Nazi occultist/Cthulhu which is obvious a connection to make as anyone has ever thought of. And "The Jennifer Morgue" which deals with the fallout from the Cold War

There a Bruce Sterling story in his "Globalhead" collection called "The Unthinkable" which goes over the same ground as "A Colder War", admittedly with not as apocalyptic a conclusion...

― Stone Monkey, Friday, October 23, 2009 9:17 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Stross knows his HPL and is a thoroughly righteous dude. Buy his books.

― Soukesian, Friday, October 23, 2009 9:19 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

^^"A Colder War" is really really good! If you have a chance to read it, do so!

It's got a scene with a fictionalized Stephen Jay Gould elaborating on the biology of the Old Ones..it's so cool (in a geeky way)

barnes & noble sells a complete and unabridged lovecraft book for $12.95

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/HP-Lovecraft/H-P-Lovecraft/e/9781435107939

though it's out of stock online you may be able to pick it up in-store?

a 1098 page hardcover is a bit much to take on the train imo.

ok that's true

Thread should be called: Classic or Jervas Dudley?

If only.

Random thought today -- Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" (ie Eric Idle's breezy song from The Meaning of Life about earth, the Milky Way, etc.) is near perfectly parallel to Lovecraft's world (well, universal) view. There's all the same sense of huge cosmic perspective and our infinitely small place in the scheme of it all but where Lovecraft put it all in stark mind-altering terms Idle goes for a hint of warm empathy plus outright snark with the final line. (See also Douglas Adams' Total Perspective Vortex for something that falls squarely between both extremes, actually.)

http://images.slashdot.org/articles/08/08/22/0242231-2.png

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/55/156586685_2815921b43.jpg

sorry, i know they are old but they still crack me up.

^always loved that first one.

"there are so many lovecraft collections out there...which are the essential ones to start with?"

Arkham editions are the best, but for a starter set, I always recommend Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre trade paperback with the complete Michael Whelan wraparound cover.

http://ebooks-imgs.connect.com/product/400/000/000/000/000/031/787/400000000000000031787_s4.jpg

(It's quite funny. I'm totally riffing on The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for my NaNoWriMo project, but HP Lovecraft is something totally new and unknown to the chick lit crowd, so I think I'm getting away with it.)

Maybe after the success of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies you could do things the other way round, and present us with The Dirty Drone Rock Boy Over Innsmouth.

...if I could get the chicklit world to accept Richard D. James as a romantic hero, I'd be all over this.

I think this should be possible - write about his lovely long hair being tussled by the wind, or something.

Surely you mean - "his lovely long tentacles, being tussled by the wind..."

"I stared into his watery and unblinking eyes".

"The vapid horrors that I glimpsed within I will have to leave for others to describe."

lol i saw the worst adaptation of the dunwich horror on syfy recently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbWyUEKSVd0

Hey! Lovecraft fanatics.

Did the Deep Ones in the Shadow Over Innsmouth have an actual species or cultural name, apart from "Deep Ones"?

I think they're only called Deep Ones in the story, but is there anything else in the apocrypha?

Pretty sure they are only referred to as Deep Ones. "Residents of Y'ha-nthlei" is too cumbersome? Derleth may have grafted on some more backstory, but knowing him it's probably to give them more of a role as emissaries of Dagon and Hydra.

Well, Y'ha-nthleic Genetic Material is kind of a mouthful. I'm sticking to calling them Deep Ones, but I need something to call that... lineage.

I've had to work out a whole way to genetically handle the way they interbreed with humans. Because, technically, they must be only semi-compatible, like horses and donkeys, so their offspring might be sterile. I'm getting around that enough to get Y'ha-nthleic genetic material into my townspeople by making it gender-linked. Male hybrids are sterile, but female hybrids can interbreed with humans. (The gender of the offspring is really dependent on which sex chromosome was provided by the Y'ha-nthleic partner.)

See what I mean? It's complicated.

I had quite some... brain bending trying to figure out Cthulhu's genitalia, though. Seeing as squid sex really is quite icky. (I was listening to Aphex Twin at the time, so I decided to give him a Calyx, like a flower.)

new trailer for the new film!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd5gWGfnK5M

these are the same guys who did the excellent period adaptation of Call of Cthulhu

my fav lovecraft story!

I was in a used bookstore last weekend when this guy comes in and walks up to the counter.

Guy: Do you have any titleless books?
Owner: Excuse me?
Guy: Titleless books. Do you have anything in the back room or in storage that has no name or you just don't know what it is?
Owner's wife: Oh, I thought you said Titleist books - like a book about golf balls!
Owner: That's what I thought too! No, we don't have anything like that here. Is there something specific I could help you try to find?
Guy: I'm looking for the Necronomicon.
Owner: The Necronomicon? What is that?
Guy: It's a rare book. There are only supposed to be 3 copies in all the world. It's rumored that one is in The British Museum in London.
Owner: Hmm...well, do you know the author?
Guy: Well, it's referenced in the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Owner: Oh, Lovecraft! I think he's a horror writer.
Owner's wife: Ooooo...
Owner: But you don't know who the actual author of the book is?

The guy didn't know who wrote the Necromonicon and so the best the shop owner could do was to guide him gently over to the horror and fantasy paperbacks, where there was mostly some Stephen King and Anne Rice.

Dude leaves and walks back in the door about 5 minutes later: "It turns out that the Necronomicon is a fictional book that H.P. Lovecraft made up for his stories."

Phew. I was worried for a second there.

ahahaha no way thats brilliant

They spent a minute or two trying to determine who the author could be and the whole time I was biting my tongue, because I wanted more than anything in the world to jump out from behind the shelves and yell "I've heard it was written the 'Mad Arab' Abdul Alhazrad!" then cackle and run out the door.

You should have gone the distance and then be devoured by invisible demons. (That might sting a bit, true.)

i have two anthologies of short stories but only scraped the surface. read "Dagon" and "the nameless city" so far.

but seriously kkvg, that's the best story. i wish you'd said something.

It is an amazing story.

"Morning. Just wondering - got any books knocking about the back bound in an unusual leather that might at first be mistaken for pigskin, or that drive you mad if you gaze upon the contents?"

I mean he could have bothered his arse looking up the ISBN no at least?

978-0380751921

There. Not hard, was it?

too bad they didn't have the 70s paperback version in stock. here ya go...

some nerd in my high school performed "The Conjuration of the Fire God" for his AP English class project.

That was before he founded Tool, yes?

nah that's the 1995 july re-issue necromnicon, not worth a damn that one, doesn't even have the original illustrations iirc

i wish you'd said something.

I was waiting for the shop owner to issue me store credit for two boxes of books that I'd brought in and didn't want to jeopardize my chance at $20.

lol i remember seeing a 'necronomicon' in a book store in nyc last time i was there (it was just some kind of humanitarian joke book though)

was inspired by this thread to look at some cthulhu mythos websites and oh god this is golden

http://www.mythostomes.com/content/view/85/1/

highlights:

The Book of Old Ones,” by “Scorpio,” is a small, sixty-seven page grimoire which utilizes the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. The book treats the Old Ones, horrifying god-monsters from beyond reality, as helpful house-elves. The thrust of the book is that Mythos abominations can be invoked easily to conveniently solve all sorts of common, every-day problems. For those of you expecting a sanity-shattering book of evil, this is not it

The tome begins with a brief introduction explaining the Mythos, and Scorpio's system of magic. This introduction makes it clear that Scorpio did not do his homework when it comes to the Mythos he bases his belief system upon. He links the Old Ones to the four elements as Derleth did, something Lovecraft never would have done. He also attributes the discredited “black magic” quote to Lovecraft.

The book then describes “the ritual of the Old Ones,” which will help you “align yourself with the magical power of the Old Ones.” This seems like a really bad idea. Why would any sane person want to get closer to what Lovecraft called “abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy?”

I'm not sure if this book is supposed to be taken seriously. It reads like a parody in places. I mean, “The Deep Ones Helped Kevin N. Regain His Lost Virility?” "How the Byakhee can bring love into your life?" Can this be serious? Channeling servitors of Nyarlathotep to write a self-help book? The end result would be something like "The Book of Old Ones."

When I feel stressed out, I call on my spirit animal, the black goat with 1000 young.

did you try amazon?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Necronomicon-Weird-Fiction-Lovecraft-Gollancz/dp/0575081562

(and hammersmith whsmith has a copy.)

http://chud.com/articles/articles/24627/1/DEL-TORO-TO-FINALLY-CLIMB-THE-MOUNTAINS-OF-MADNESS/Page1.html

would watch

Yup

a much better use of his talents than this new Haunted Mansion movie. looking forward to it.

http://muzski.darkfolio.com/gallery/470268

Thanks, those are great!

ho ho, blocked as potential nudity by my work overlords.

No nudity, only shadows out of time.

Also, The Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, As Drawn By Children: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/11/16/children-draw-h-p-lovecraft-cthulhu/

if ilx had avatars

http://i52.tinypic.com/keuesy.png

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/07/h-p-lovecrafts-commonplace-book/

i found some of those obscurely moving e.g. Man with unnatural face—oddity of speaking—found to be a mask—Revelation.

148 Vampire dog.

haha

H.P. Lovecraft's advice column

Dear Howie,

My girlfriend has metamorphosed into a kind of polyhedron with many pairs of feelers, membraneous wings, and fanged orifices on stalks. Should I talk to her about this, or keep hoping it’s just a phase? Snapshot enclosed.

Amateur Photographer

Dear Amateur Photographer: –

I do not know long it was before I dared to inspect your snapshot. Once I did, I immediately fell wholly to the floor. How much time passed after that, do not ask me to guess, but a momentary fragment of memory shows me racing dementedly past a long stone colonnade towards a curious hummock. After that, mercifully, all is blackness. My aunts discovered me beside a nearby megalith, with my faculties paralyzed, a mark on my forehead bespeaking all too vividly the ravages of some snail-like marsupial. It was months before I regained the ability to talk any language but proto-Algonquian. Now my senses have somewhat cleared, I recommend you break things off with your fiancée as tactfully as possible, not letting her suspect you have noticed any change or blemish. Hers is such an image as — but I cannot go on. I have barricaded myself indoors, and hope never to look at another photograph, or touch any variety of leafy vegetable. Even Dalgaard’s worst prophesies fell short of the unspeakable reality! A rank odor now pervades everything, the hills resonate with sustained prehuman howling, and I keep losing my place in the Unrecommended Codex of Naarg,

Yrs Strkly. Trrfd., – HPL.

202 A monstrous derelict—found and boarded by a castaway or shipwreck survivor.

it wasn't a predator ship!

Can we just have an Oblique Strategies-like thread with one of those commonplace book entries a day, please.

where should i start if i've never read any lovecraft?

Start with the three-volume Penguin set (or the equivalent Arkham House editions if you can find them at a library). Go forThe Call of Cthulhu (Penguin) or The Dunwixh Horror (Arkham House) first.

Or if you mean an individual story, try The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space or The Whisperer in Darkness.

individual stories won't really do it tho. you kinda have to immerse.

telephone thing otm

lmao the whisperer in darkness is fucking hilarious

he does a lot of different styles and i agree w/ rogermexico about immerse

which is probably why the best anthologies front load w/ a ton of short pieces

the shorter pieces tend toward more fantastic and the longer ones tend toward straightlaced w/ a twist at the end

i think starting with the more overtly weird stories helps you suspend disbelief when you read the long investigative ones (mountains of madness, call of cthulhu, dunwich horror, shadow out of innsmouth, etc)

Barnes & Noble has the complete stories of H.P. Lovecraft for like 13 bucks in their store. If you have a Kindle, it's public domain, so you can find all of it in the e-reader format for free.

Here you go: http://cthulhuchick.com/free-complete-lovecraft-ebook-nook-kindle/

Via Gotham City Comics:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/251640_4279510598751_771978851_n.jpg

brilliant

post on FB so i can share it

that's terrific

xpost -- Already did! Check earlier in my timeline today.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.8144

Fuck, he was right!

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/rawfile/2013/03/Seal-660x933.jpg

:D

VINDICATED

classic. fucking obsessed with this stuff right now.

Like Poe in that, assuming you're a certain kind of child, you go from taking the stories (and sensibility) overly seriously during early adolescence, perhaps dismissing it when you reach young adulthood, and then coming back to it and finding it's still possible to really enjoy and even take seriously these strange American authors.

An impossibly ancient city of lizard-things hidden under the desert, imagined in obsessive detail = immune to satire.

Also, everyday life in Arizona AMIRITE

My new roommate is a fellow appreciator so if you ever hear about us being killed by squamous things you know what to blame.

good interview with pre-eminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi
http://heathenharvest.org/2014/01/12/gods-of-the-godless-a-discussion-on-h-p-lovecraft-with-s-t-joshi/

thanks for linking that!

he looks like a badass

What if HP Lovecraft was Cornish?

http://cthrnwall.blogspot.co.uk/

thinking about reading some of the lovecraft i never read - what editions do you guys have? as a kid i had this one and it did the job: http://www.amazon.co.uk/H-P-Lovecraft-Omnibus-Mountains/dp/0586063226/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445677683&sr=1-5&keywords=hp+lovecraft

there are tonnes on amazon. does it even matter?

I have the Barnes and Noble edition of his complete fiction. It's a chronological compilation of the Joshi editions, it's a hardcover, it's cheap, and it's everything in one volume.

as a kid I had the Ballantine paperbacks with John Holmes covers, those paintings still creep me out

arkham house editions for meeee

Those Ballantine covers really used to creep me out as well.

Wow, I've never seen those, pretty gruesome

Ballantine Adult Fantasy series editions for me (HP's and Clark Ashton Smith's stuff)

I always got the four Arkham House editions from the library when I was a kid- The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, and The Horror In the Museum and Other Revisions. The current Penguin Classics (3 volumes) are pretty great, still under Joshi's stewardship, and AFAIK just as complete (albeit without the revisions and collaborations).

http://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/fiction/variorum-lovecraft

This is the definitive edition, there will be cheaper paperback versions eventually.

Friends used to live near a sex shop called Lovecraft. Not very appealing. Now it's a deli, which is also unappealing because just how clean or those surfaces really?

I dig the annotated versions from ST Joshi

Has anybody read Victor Lavelle's "Ballad of Black Tom"? I really dug it. Much like Mat Johnson's _Pym_, you have modern black American writers taking some of HPL's really racist-ass shit and repurposing/reclaiming it to both comment on how fucked it was but also function as cosmic horror itself.

Here's Victor on Fresh Air a coupla months back:

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/29/468558238/the-ballad-of-black-tom-offers-a-tribute-and-critique-of-lovecraft

Yeah, I read it. It was good but too short. Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country is superficially related, and also well worth reading - one of the best books I've read so far this year, in fact.

https://www.cnet.com/news/hagfish-spill-oregon-highway-101-slime-eels/

Turns out "Cthulhu fthagn!" is the sound of him sneezing on the highway.

This adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a podcast series is fun. It’s a bit cackhanded in places, which is inevitable, and suffers from English actors doing American accents a bit, but it’s otherwise pretty good i think.

i see with interest that the sound engineer is David Thomas. That’s surely a fairly common name, but when I see it was recorded in Brighton and Leeds where DT of Pere Ubu lives, it does make me wonder.

nope different guy. obviously.

David Thomas lives in Leeds??!!?

ffs Lewes. autocorrect.

Phew, I wondered if the old fella had taken leave of his senses.

i think i was the one who had taken leave of my senses thinking that an old cantankerous and ill rock musician would be doing sound engineering for a bbc radio series.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/attachment/65a792d7-c485-4b78-b428-916f62ead13e/rspb20182792f03.gif

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.2792

Sollasina cthulhu! so cute!

....two columns of four adradial plates each and nine plated tube feet per ambulacral area; plates of non-peristomial tube feet arranged in longitudinal rows; aboral thecal plates with strong granular ornamentation.

accursed!

Awww, who's a cute little Old One?

Yes but did they worship shoggoths
https://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Scientists-say-monster-penguin-once-swam-New-14302988.php

Racist. Bad writer. Inspiration for the most annoying nerd kitsch milieu. Dud.

I agree with half of that but still classic.

I have read at least two and possibly more stories of his held out to me by a fan as “one of the good ones” or “the best one” and they have been bad. I don’t get it!

I shan’t be reading more but I’m generally curious why ppl think he’s good not bad.

I agree with half of that but still classic.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Friday, March 13, 2020

OTM

afaik why he's good not bad, HPL is to "cosmic horror" as chuck berry is to rock'n'roll. personally creepy, almost unbearably corny, and unassailably classic bc he invented that shit. the genre as we know it would be unimaginable without him.

possibly dud for loosing ST Joshi upon the world

Great synthesiser of various strands of horror. Beautiful imagery, especially the labyrinthian quality, gnarliness and the wet darkness (this is often where he beats writers who try to do his thing). His emphasis on a kind of horrific transcendence.
His essay "Supernatural Horror In Literature" is extremely important in mapping and preserving the genre.

The annoyances in his writing is just something I've grown to expect from a lot of genres I'm into. Most of the comics I like are burdened with deeply flawed writing. Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson and Bram Stoker can be similarly challenging at times, sometimes for different flaws. Brilliance doesn't always come with consistently good writing, sadly.
One of my least favorite things about his writing is something a lot of people tend to praise: the stories in a journal or correspondence mode get bogged down in boring details.

I'm not interested in Joshi's criticism anymore but he does help a lot of writers I'm interested in get their books printed.

rogermexico otm

Yup

But what in the text is good

Like idk Poe invented detectives but Holmes is orders of magnitude better than Dupin, surely, to the point where Dupin is a curiosity for the learned.

Confidential to darragh I am not trolling, this is not trolling

I did recently read Poe's Dupin story "Marie Roget" and that was stunningly boring. Some of the Dupin stories are very clever but I never felt it was anywhere near his best.

'The Colour Out Of Space' was pretty unfocused and kind of dragged for a movie under two hours but it did look pretty sometimes.

I think Shadow over Innsmouth is great. Lovecraft doles out information so the reader identifies with the narrator as they both make new discoveries. This identification means the final twist is genuinely shocking, creepy, and unnerving as if it is happening TO THE READER. This, to me, seems to be a major, not minor innovation/achievement, though I haven't read any real predecessors except Poe.

Dismissing Lovecraft because of his writing is similar to people who dismiss Tolkien because he didn't write real characters and say Game of Thrones is more modern and "better." They are foundational and their antiquarian ways are part of their charm.

I’m not charmed by poor writing. His fans admit he’s a poor stylist and I’m like…ok…

There is more to writing than style.

In this guy’s case I can’t get past it. Anyway post spoilers if you’re gonna talk about the twist being good imo like I said I’m not giving it another go personally.

But I shouldn’t try to argue really

SPOILERS TO 90 YEAR OLD BOOK: Narrator recounts his visit to creepy New England port town where he discovers stories of the Deep Ones, a race of fishy humanoids who live in the sea and breed with humans. The half-breeds start out mostly human and become progressively more fishy as they age. Narrator narrowly escapes the town as he is chased by Deep Ones and their cult. Years later, narrator finds his ancestors came from the town and he notices not so subtle changes in his appearance. Narrator accepts his transformation and returns to the town to swim beneath the sea with his Deep One brethren forever more.

His fans admit he’s a poor stylist and I’m like…ok…

― silby, Saturday, March 14, 2020 1:14 PM

Not really. Despite some awkwardness that gets to be a pain and an over-usage of certain words, I think he's a good stylist; the atmosphere and gnarly ornamental physicality of the prose is a big part of what makes the stories beautiful and memorable. I find it amazing that some "fans" miss this but a lot of fantasy fans want their prose as transparent as possible and think Joss Whedon is exemplary. Yet I don't think he would be nearly so popular if he'd gone for a plain style.

I haven't read everything yet but I think Innsmouth is one of his greatest achievements.

counterpoint: he only used the word squamous once but the world never shuts up abt it

i'm in the "important figure couldn't write for fuck" camp and have always found him exhausting (joshi is worse tho lol): a reason why he counts as "important (if unreadable)" is that his descriptions (even and perhaps especially the bad ones) created lots of unrealised visualisable space for comic book art which took his ball and ran with it (in less racist directions) (mostly)

Lovecraft’s prose style is kinda like Kirby’s drawing style imo - full of force and power and barely able to contain groundbreaking ideas, sort of crude and rough and bizarrely grotesque, but also capable of beauty and awe. both foundational figures.

(running w mark s ref to comics there)

Technically both did a lot of things “wrong”, but it doesnt matter ultimately

I know that he didnt use sqamous much but then his fans read his letters too and he might have used it more in them.

The visuals were already there in many cases. Again, "Shadow Over Innsmouth" is lovely.

Even worse: I fear that many fantasy readers get impatient with visual description and carefully created textures and believe that's what movie adaptations are there for.

Also should have noted one of his greatest strengths: descriptions of settings. MMmmmm… terraces and gambrel roofs.

That's one area even a lot of my favorite writers disappoint me. But I don't feel I can give examples until I've read at least the majority of any given writer.

at Hoover Dam recently I had the experience of sighting down a massive structure with angles that were just a little wrong. it’s disorienting af

Of Lovecraft’s antecedents - Poe is def a better stylist, but his ideas are more earthbound. Dunsany is unreadable imo. Machen is frustrating. RW Chambers is occasionally incredible, but v inconsistent. Lovecraft surpasses them all.

he doesn't surpass m.r. james :D

(never read chambers, agree on all the others)

The titular story in King in Yellow is just chefskiss.jpg, perfect

I always wonder if Nabokov read it, cf Pale Fire

I think all in all, Machen and Dunsany are much better prose writers but debatable whether they more worthwhile.

I'm surprised you found Dunsany unreadable. I've only read his Time And The Gods collection (not the omnibus) so far but despite the occasional mannerism I didn't like, I thought he was terrific.

MR James can be annoying as any of these writers at times.

It's strange that Poe can be such an easy read, but there are a bunch of his stories that I've found more difficult than anything else I've read.

Algernon Blackwood, according to editor David Hartwell in this big Dark Descent horror anthology I'm (still) reading, didn't rate Lovecraft (even tho Lovecraft thought Blackwood was the v tops) - MR James was similarly sniffy abt Lovecraft - what's going on here? A reaction against Lovecraft's vulgarity? Fathers disowning their most loyal son? Literary snobbery - or acute critical discrimination? Has Lovecraft improved over time (readerly time, cosmic time)?

in his piece on LeFanu, James makes a point of trash-talking Poe, so I can see him not getting Lovecraft at all, especially on the basis of early HPL stories

Blackwood must have enjoyed Lovecraft's praise for "The Willows" in Supernatural Horror in Literature but I can imagine him wanting to keep his distance ... HPL's fiction is not much like Blackwood's

for me, Lovecraft has not improved over time, but it seems appropriate that he's canonical now

It might just be a complete disregard for American authors in general... and Blackwood & James were academics, Lovecraft was a pulp magazine writer.

pretty easy to imagine any given reader not grooving on Lovecraft tbh

when I was a young science fiction fiend Lovecraft's rep felt checkered on aesthetic grounds. like, when people would ref him, they'd say he was nuts before they got into anything about the stories. when I started getting more into horror it became clear that to some people he was an absolute giant, but those people still seemed like a sort of those-guys-with-their-obsession sub-category within the broader world of weird fiction. it is interesting to me that the particulars of his imagined cosmos have such broad reach.

Yeah, I feel like MR James's thing was ghost stories and within that frame of reference Lovecraft could easily be seen as just some deranged american sci-fi thing.

I think it was perhaps in correspondence with (Lovecraft's disciple) August Derleth that Blackwood said there was too much love of rotting flesh and not enough spirituality in Lovecraft. He was very polite about it.

Who knows with MR James, he seems like any number of things could make him bristle.

Continuing my evaluation of prose from above, I think Blackwood is often a stunning writer, a lot more deft and agile than Lovecraft, but his longwindedness and belaboring can be irritating.

man, going back through this thread and seeing the "everybody back then was racist" defense being trotted out by one of the worst people ever to post here really brings me back

Still enjoying Dunsany quite a bit, coming to more of a love/hate point with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard, too often a slog but still some of my favorite stuff ever. Despite so much boring work, William Hope Hodgson never grates that much stylistically, my love for him hasn't taken much of a hit yet.

Maybe reading the complete works of most worthwhile writers will make you hate them a little bit?

it is interesting to me that the particulars of his imagined cosmos have such broad reach.

Critics like Clute and Monleon describe the horror/fantasy/sf genres as emerging in reaction to Enlightenment concepts of reason and a rational universe, and Lovecraft, who saw himself as a kind of 18th century philosophe, was a firm believer in that worldview ... despite his gestures toward esotericism, he seems much more skeptical about traditional beliefs in the sacred and transcendent than earlier horror writers were ... that outlook gives his revival of the sacred and transcendent in negative forms a weird SF charge

tl;dr in spite of his archaic style he's a modernist and his cosmic nihilism gets to modern audiences in a way traditional gothic stuff usually doesn't

I'm not sure how Cthulhu plush toys fit into this

Despite my fondness for this stuff it utterly baffles me why people are still so impressed by the cosmic horror concept.

Jess Nevins yet again
http://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=956

Maybe reading the complete works of most worthwhile writers will make you hate them a little bit?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, October 21, 2020 12:54 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't really appreciate Picasso until I took a class devoted entirely to his work and realized that a lot of his work that made its way into the world wasn't actually intended for public consumption and resulted in kinda watering down his genius.

I'm actually working my way through the complete Lovecraft atm and, yeah, I can see why he wasn't big on releasing some of his juvenilia.

Despite my fondness for this stuff it utterly baffles me why people are still so impressed by the cosmic horror concept.

I wonder if it's a lack of satisfaction. The core of cosmic horror is a physical sensation I think most people have felt - a rock at the pit of your stomach, a momentary loss of self, flash attacks of fear and anxiety. The inability of anyone to translate that sensation perfectly into text keeps it alive.

FTR, I find a lot of his stuff effectively creepy in a sui generis way few writers seem able to replicate but his overreliance on xenophobic tropes is easily (and obviously) his weakest point. Beyond even those moments of jaw-droppingly racist shit, it's just this tendency to depict his protagonists as horrified specifically by the physical qualities of some 'monstrous' entity without offering much in the way of non-material reasons for the terror on display. 'It...it's so gross-looking! Ew!'

It's more that I don't get why cosmic horror still seems so new and novel to so many people, even just the idea of there being no god to look after you. This should be a more familiar idea than it seems to be.
I remember people talking about how stoic in the face of grimness the norse myths/old beliefs are I guess not every religion had the idea that the gods are your friends or will do you any favors?

If I was encountering some typical monster of this genre, I think the physical fear and disgust may overwhelm any philosophical horrors.

In the canonical stories, Conan remarks in conversation that it is best to avoid doing anything that would draw Crom's attention, as he hands out only dooms and trouble...

Crom kinda the same way as Cthulu... not much of an ally.

Handled deftly in the first film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFpy5UwsAU

And there's so much repetitive formula in horror like this, part of the feeling that I'm slogging through these writers at this point is that there isn't many real surprises after a certain point. Curious to see who will keep it unpredictable. Dunsany really isn't the same though, he changes the mode of his stories more.

I was going to get them later but I just bought Jess Nevins two books on horror, woohoo!

I see in Lovecraft a sort of anti-gnosticism; rather than knowledge bringing power, it brings dread and unspeakable horror. We're really better off not knowing about seafood cults and Mad Arabs.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

I pretty much still think everything that I used to think about HP Lovecraft, though I am now perhaps more conscious of his problematic racism.

seafood cults

Dread Lobster

On a random whim, I started reading the Illuminatus! trilogy after skipping it all my life and there’s a surprisingly amount of Lovecraft in it. He must have been having a moment in the mid-70s

in the early-mid 70s Ballantine published almost all of Lovecraft's fiction in paperbacks ... prior to that I think most of it was available only in pricey Arkham House editions

I think my first ever was this paperback:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VdU2lrV0L._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

A friend of mine who has a kid says that Cthulhu is now in the Beano, which is something.

Can never wrap my head around kawaii + Lovecraftian grotesque
https://imgur.com/gallery/L76LU

this SCP short, SCP Overlord, (i couldn't find an SCP thread on ilx) is a v good mix of tactical warfare, videocam supernatural perception (think Ringu), and modernised, new england lovecraft:

trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZUj1fNQL8

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-discover-strange-creatures-under-a-half-mile-of-ice/

Whisperer in Darkness was dope, even though I felt at times the narrator had to be the dumbest smart person in the history of man

"Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant bholes"
"Below him the ground was festering with gigantic bholes; and even as he looked, one reared up"
"There were hideous struggles with the bleached, viscous bholes"

OH COME ON

Dud.

I always thought that story was terribly padded, badly structured and he kind of goes overboard to keep talling you how old the place is, but it's got some cool stuff. Shadow Over Innsmouth will probably always be my favorite.

I have a collection of other writers (Ramsey Campbell, Gaiman, etc.) expanding on the Innsmouth mythos... it's not all great but it's pretty fun. Lovecraft was known for encouraging other writers in this kind of shared world-building

N.K. Jemisin wrote a short story (expanded into 2 books) specifically to tackle Lovecraft's racism https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/

She is explicitly not a fan while Victor LaValle takes a more - not sympathetic but maybe more steeped in some level of appreciation to Lovecraft in The Ballad of Black Tom a response to The Horror at Red Hook

read John Langan's The Fisherman novel and Wide Carnivorous Sky collection late last year, they were some of the better Lovecraftian things I've read that aren't implicitly critical takes on the Lovecraft idea (like The Ballad of Black Tom and Lovecraft Country, I bailed on NK Jemisin's first Great Cities book about a quarter of the way in).

I really wanted to like The City We Became, but I just couldn't.

I've read The Ballad of Black Tom and The Fisherman and liked both a lot. Keep meaning to read more by LaValle. I loved Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy but read a description of the city book and winced so hard I thought I felt the skin on the back of my head split.

I also read Lovecraft Country and liked it a lot. The series was pretty disappointing, though, and the new sequel book, The Destroyer of Worlds, was kinda weak. I read it, but I can't even remember any of it now.

Yeah, agreed re: the Lovecraft sequel as unmemorable. Was looking forward to the Atticus divergence, book vs. show, and the sequel book gave him short shrift.

Disappointing, I didn't even know there was a sequel.

I had never read "Medusa's Coil" before - that ending is maybe the most jaw-dropping thing I've ever read in fiction.

Color out of Space is on TV tonight (uk Freeview channel 32). starring... Nicholas Cage...

I had never read "Medusa's Coil" before - that ending is maybe the most jaw-dropping thing I've ever read in fiction.

Having just spent a commute reading "Medusa's Coil" to experience this remarkable ending, I feel like I need to clarify for future thread-readers that it is not jaw-dropping in a good way

I'm plenty compelled by the "cosmic horror" but find it weird that anyone is ever able to see that as distinct from the "xenophobic tropes" and social views and whatnot. They're kinda the same thing: the image of an Anglo-Saxon racial/intellectual aristocracy that is the lone fleeting outcropping of civilization amid an ocean of ancient primitivism, savagery, and dark irrationality that threatens always to engulf it. Still some dope stories and all, but it's not like the worldview is some incidental artifact, right?

It is absolutely intertwined. I guess for me Lovecraft's racism is so clearly pathetic, the product of isolation and a desperate need to be thought of and think of himself of as some sort of super genius, that it becomes somewhat comical and I marvel at how he came up with this distinctive, bizarre style and mythos based on these deeply stupid premises.

Yeah, there is something about that quality that makes it feel weirdly less odious in the fiction -- you get narrators so floridly revolted by a peasant's unrefined skull shape that you're just like hahaha, wait till you see the Scary Geometry