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H. P. Lovecraft

Hmmm its cheap enough so I may give it look. Pity nobody's down an on-line multiplayer game based on the Cthulhu Mythos - that could be fun :)
 
lupinwick said:
Hmmm its cheap enough so I may give it look. Pity nobody's down an on-line multiplayer game based on the Cthulhu Mythos - that could be fun :)
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That would be good but a bit too niche. The development company had Mountains of Madness slated for their next project but no-one has picked it up post their demise.

Having waited five years for this release I am determined to get it working though....
 
I noticed this is due out this year:

http://www.cthulhuthemovie.com/

Cthulhu is loosely based on the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), in which we are introduced to the Cthulhu mythos, an elaborate cosmology of incomprehensibly alien gods able to move between dimensions whose existence dwarfs and will soon destroy humankind, The Cthulhu itself, whose name is only an approximation of inhuman speech, has lain asleep on the ocean floor since the dawn of time and is being summoned by human and half-human followers to rise and claim the world. Like many others, we believe this agenda is being pursued by those who live among us innocuously, but whose actions promote sprawl, pollution, climate change and war.

We’re also into the gay stuff, so there’s some of that as well.
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Source as above. I have no idea what that last comment means..... :?

Also 'Cthulhu is loosely based ' feels me with an unspeakable fear.

Oh wait:

A Seattle history professor, drawn back to his estranged family on the Oregon coast to execute his late mother's estate, is reaquainted with his best friend from childhood, with whom he has a long-awaited tryst. Caught in an accelerating series of events, he discovers aspects of his father's New Age cult which take on a dangerous and apocalyptic significance
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Source

Aha so it's a Shadow Over Innsmouth meets Brokeback Mountain kind of a deal. Also the creeping terror continues when I note that it also stars Tori Spelling!

Well who knows it might be alright. *winces*
 
I imagine Lovecraft would have had a fear of cold temperatures. He apparently was one of the people who have hardly any body heat. So in cold temperatures he probably would freeze very quickly. Someone said shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a corpse, due to him being so cold.
 
Heckler20 said:
Aha so it's a Shadow Over Innsmouth meets Brokeback Mountain kind of a deal. Also the creeping terror continues when I note that it also stars Tori Spelling!
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Innsmouth 90210
 
Xanatico said:
I imagine Lovecraft would have had a fear of cold temperatures.
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He did indeed. It's what inspired him to write "cool air" among other things.
 
Heckler20 said:
Huzzah, after five years in development hell, several companies going bust and the entire development team being made redundant:

Call of Cthulhu : Dark Corners of the Earth is finally released for PC tomorrow! It came out for Xbox just before Xmas and I was actually on the verge of buying one just to play it but my patience has been rewarded.

Now let's just hope it's not pants. ;)
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I just got this through the post today, and would hearti;y recommend it! Absolutely no problems on install and playing (although it only supports a handful of graphics cards), and it's got a bit of a heart-pounder going on as well! The sanity effects are well done too. Bloody tricky in parts as well, which is always good ;)

Pretty faithful to HPL as well, which is a bonus.
 
agentbuffy said:
I just got this through the post today, and would hearti;y recommend it! Absolutely no problems on install and playing (although it only supports a handful of graphics cards), and it's got a bit of a heart-pounder going on as well! The sanity effects are well done too. Bloody tricky in parts as well, which is always good ;)

Pretty faithful to HPL as well, which is a bonus.
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I concur, I feared it might be a bit too Doomy, in a see monster, shoot monster sort of a fashion but it's much closer to the feel of Lovecraft in a mankind alone and largely defenseless. One of the few games to really give me sweaty palms, genuinely disturbing but not in a gory way.

A great achievement and a real shame that the company that created it has gone under.
 
We've got a new indy production in pre-production that looks promising:

http://www.dunwichthemovie.com/

The small New England village of Dunwich harbors many secrets, but none so dark as the origin of Wilbur Whateley. Born to an albino mother and raised in seclusion by his occultist grandfather, Wilbur shuns the outside world in favor of his family's dark mythology.

Set in the early 1920s, "Dunwich" is an intimate tale of the Whateley clan and of a mysterious man who threatens to take Wilbur from his family.

Inspired by the macabre tales of H.P. Lovecraft, "Dunwich" was written, produced and directed by Sarah Tarling and Christian Matzke.
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That looks like it might be ok, let's hope they do manage to stick to the Lovecraftian feel though.
 
I recently played Dark corners of the earth - Cthulhu Mythos :) I thought it was a great game and very immersive. The storyline was good and it was very difficult in sections.
Escape from Innismouth apparently was very faithful to the story which I read about 15 years ago so cant fully remember, anyhow the whole sequence which must be at least 5- 10 minutes of locking doors and moving furniture and jumping balconies avoiding axe weilding maniacs had me in a panic. I took some advice and turned the sound off to try to settle my nerves to complete the sequence, which worked.
It only becomes the first person shooter half way through the game as you don't have any weapons in the first half and have to make your way through by stealth. Pitty about the ending, I would have much rather seen him retired, sipping pina coladas on a beach in Mexico.
I would love to see the film if I knew where to find it.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/pip/t8iz3/

Sunday Feature
Weird Tales: The Strange Life of H P Lovecraft

Sunday 3 December 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)

Weird Tales: The Strange Life of H P Lovecraft.

Geoff Ward examines the strange life and terrifying world of the man hailed as America's greatest horror writer since Poe.

During his life Lovecraft's work was confined to lurid pulp magazines and he died in penury in 1937. Today, however, his writings are considered modern classics and published in prestigious editions.

Among the writers considering his legacy are Neil Gaiman, S T Joshi, Kelly Link, Peter Straub and China Mieville.
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Recomendations

Could any one recomend me some anthologies of H.P Lovecrafts work either book or Audio book.

I already own the 3 Omnibus editions: At the mountains of Madness, Dagon and other macabre and Haunter of the Dark.
 
I'm halfway through a commemorative edition of "Necronomicon, The Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft". It's a hardback in black simulated leather and is on sale now in W H Smith for £20 - a handsome addition to any library!

ISBN 978-0-575-08156-7
 
Seriously?

26 years of being a spooky kid and nobody, NOBODY said to me...

"Hey you like wierd stuff and your husband is into cephlapods. You should read this guy"

I'm very disappointed in the world that I had to do this all by myself.

I'M NOW OBSESSED. And I'm coming close to getting over my fear of the betentacled creatures of the deep.
 
Lovecraft was proof of that old adage about the thin line between genius and madness. You can feel the insanity in a Lovecraft story.
 
i find him massively boring, the same way I do Poe, and I'm not sure there's a single Lovecraft story that isn;t written first person with a male narrator.

A very important writer but imo as with a number of important writers, important for what he wrote not so much how he wrote it.

Herbert West:Reanimator is possibly one of the better tales, imo if you're going to watch the movie watch it first or you'll spit nails at everything they changed.

Also go watch From Beyond as well, which bears minimal resemblance to the 10 page long story it's adapted from but does have the redeeming feature of Barbara Crampton in bondage gear being given ECT by a nurse who looks like he's about to cream himself.
 
If we're talking movies, critic Kim Newman thinks Ghostbusters is the best Hollywood Lovecraft. He calls it National Lampoon's Call of Cthulhu.

Though now there is an actual Call of Cthulhu movie...
 
BRF brackets Lovecraft with Poe as authors that don't work for her. I feel the same way, despite approaching them both many times in many different moods, their obsessions never become mine and they become hard work, like sitting up all night with a patient.

I was reading John Cowper Powys on Poe as poet last night and he brackets him with Melville as a genius of the sublime, comparing him to Coleridge! I'd suggest, myself, that the sublime is something that no one should take as a theme: it ought to creep up on us. Powys is very interesting on the subject of Melville's humour-which-is-not-funny.

Back to Lovecraft. He was clearly a very well-read man. His essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature is well worth reading; it gives us a splendid reading-list of authors I would much rather read than his own fiction. As a critic, he is very sound so we must assume his fictional practice was determined by the marketplace. He may have simply lacked the energy to break out of Weird Tales - a view that would turn him into a Poe-like anti-hero, suffering from his ancient but tired bloodline.

HPL's stories always seem terrible as I am chewing, though the fishy after-taste lingers in a way which implies the experience has not been entirely fruitless. :spinning

edit:

A good essay on HPL here:
Laura Miller on Lovecraft
 
Just an alert that HPL is one of the specialist subjects on Mastermind tonight, BBC Two, eight o'clock. Test your knowledge!
 
Anyone watch it? Our man won, and very smug he looked to, though no wonder when everyone else was so rubbish. I got a few of the questions right, though some were a bit obvious (Providence, Cthulhu). He looked like a real fan judging by the relish he answered with.
 
gncxx said:
Anyone watch it? Our man won, and very smug he looked to, though no wonder when everyone else was so rubbish. I got a few of the questions right, though some were a bit obvious (Providence, Cthulhu). He looked like a real fan judging by the relish he answered with.
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Did you see his eyes? He was also dripping water...
 
Glad to see that the first comment on the page (at least by the way I have them sorted) draws attention to Lovecraft's essay on Supernatural Fiction, which is a very good survey. Though some of his stories leave a lingering fishy odour, they do make horrible reading in the bad sense of the word!

I'm not sure if Lovecraft or Poe is the most dreadful writer I wish was wonderful. :(

non edit: I thought a bit about 'more' versus 'most' in the last sentence but I think the two are contestants in a wider field. On the other hand, they are the only options in the sentence. :?
 
OneWingedBird said:
They were both pretty awful, but i'd say Poe is the worse.
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Oh no. Sorry. No. Poe was writing in the early years of the 19th century. His prose was sometimes affected, he was after all, a real doomed romantic, often looking backwards rather forward for effect. However, he could turn in a pretty effective, believable tale with the best of them and excelled at conjuring an atmosphere of the morbid and claustrophobic like no other. Almost single handed, he invented detective fiction and SF. An outsider for his time and place, nonetheless, he was an extremely effective writer for his day.

Lovecraft wrote in the early years of the 20th century, as if he was writing in the early years of the 19th century and looking further back for effect. But, part of the fun of reading Lovecraft is just how ludicrously over written and redundant some of his prose actually is.
 
I don't feel that any such allowances need to be made about Hoffmann, Novalis or Baudelaire - to take three writers of fantastic fiction more or less at random. But Poe and Lovecraft seem impressive only at a distance.

Maybe an age thing. I find Mahler better to remember than experience these days. :)

edit: Missing 'be' in first sentence.
 
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