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.

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