HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

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.