HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

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.