HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

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."

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.