HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

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.