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Lovecraft Mythos Is Reality ?

A few months ago i remember reading several different reports within the space of a few weeks of the discovery of different new species of squid, one of which was a very weird looking deep sea giant squid which had different tentacles and other organs to any other squid known. (thread on here about that somewhere?), and something else about the numbers of giant squid increasing exponentially due to climate changes. Around the same time I heard of the huge, mysterious stone temple complex of Nan Madol, on an artificially built island somewhere in the Pacific. Coincidentally, this was just after I had re-read a lot of the Lovecraft stuff i read as a kid... well it gave me some rather scary thoughts...
 
Re: HPL's Eldritch Style

FraterLibre said:
"Anyone else find Lovecraft's style verbose or flowery or over-the-top or even concise or well-suited to his topics and presentations?"
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Look at the opening paragraphs of THE DUNWICH HORROR. This is American prose at its very best, without a single word out-of-place or unneccessary. The very few times Lovecraft's syntax IS purplish or "over the top" are short passages WITHIN a few stories, where this is used for effect to "describe" events and things which language simply cannot truly describe. (Like the actual color of the monster in Ambrose Bierce's THE DAMNED THING.) It's like the jazz trumpeter who spends his career attempting to reach an impossible note, with the wonder and the glory being the attempt itself.

And

"If one looks at the many pastiches of Lovecraft, one sees how difficult it truly is to hit the Lovecraft tone smack on the nose. "
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To write an effective Lovecraft tale you have to maintain his scholarly tone. A Mythos story told from the viewpoint of a rock musician just doesn't seem to work. Look how many excellent stories in the style of M. R. James continue to be written. They are composed by scholars in their own fields and they also stand on their own as well as Jamesian pastiches.

That's the trouble with the great majority of Lovecraftian pastiches - they fail miserably at standing on their own as horror stories.
 
If you want purple prose from an HP Lovecraft wannabee, try Clark Ashton Smith.

that secret cave in the bowels of Voormithadreth . . . abides from eldermost eons the god Tsathoggua. You shall know Tsathoggua by his great girth and his batlike furriness and the look of a sleepy black toad which he has eternally. He will rise not from his place, even in the ravening of hunger, but will wait in divine slothfulness for the sacrifice.
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Clark Ashton Smith's great strength was his poetry. When he published STARTREADER AND OTHER POEMS at the age of 19 or so reviewers immediately hailed him as one of the greatest of American poets! The trouble was that American poetry immediately moved out from under Smith as his very good 19th century style was rendered old-fashioned overnight by the Imagists and the free-versers.

L. Sprague de Camp wrote in his biography of Lovecraft that Smith's poetry will eventually be rediscovered.

I'm still waiting.
 
Both Howard Lovecraft and Robert Howard seem to have arrived at an idea in the 1920s which orthodox archaeology and anthropology have begun to dabble with just since the year 2000 - that there may have been a previously-unknown culture or civilization before, during and/or just after the most recent Ice Ages.

Whether Lovecraft and Howard actually BELIEVED in the existence of such a world or merely invented it for fictional purposes is moot. And while nobody would argue that Howard's Hyborian Age is an actual depiction of our putative Ice Age "nations" it is as accurate an impression as anybody in the late 1920s or the early 1930s could have created.

And modern alternative Egyptology could have been ripped right from the pages of Lovecraft's "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" - as indeed it may have been.
 
Hi, I'd really like to get into Lovecraft but there seems to be an absolute mountain of his stuff, any suggestions on what I should start with?
 
EssexSpook said:
Hi, I'd really like to get into Lovecraft but there seems to be an absolute mountain of his stuff, any suggestions on what I should start with?
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There is a collection called Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales of Horror that contains the majority of his better shorter work including The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Insmouth and The Shadow out of Time. Best off starting with this as these arguably are some of the key Mythos stories.

There is also an Omnibus of his novellas which includes The Mountains of Madness and The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. This would be my second choice.

Unless you are a completist I wouldn't bother with the third volume Dagon and Other Macabre Tales that contains pretty much everything else. Still a few pearls in the rough but an awful lot of rough to plough through to find them.
 
Agreed, the second Omnibus book is the best of the three - especially if you have not read any of his writing before.

For best results read alone, late at night :)
 
I can't remember which Omnibus it's contained in but "The Colour Out Of Space" is superb, it evokes such a feeling of menace and other worldly horror, you'll never look at a tree blowing in the wind in the same way.

"The Haunter Of The Dark" is worth reading too.

-----Zoltan
 
Brilliant, thanks for the links, I'll get ordering 'Hunter of the Dark', then progress from there!
 
EssexSpook said:
"Hi, I'd really like to get into Lovecraft but there seems to be an absolute mountain of his stuff, any suggestions on what I should start with?"
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There's really not all that much Lovecraft - about as many Mythos stories as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales.

"The Dunwich Horror" is one of the few really perfect tales I know. And the opening paragraphs represent American narrative at its very strongest - no hint of "purple prose" here (or anywhere else for that matter). "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Rats in the Walls" are all nearly as good. "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is absolutely permeated with the smokily funereal incenses of oldest Aegypt. (And, no, that's NOT the same thing as "purple prose" either.)

"The Haunter of the Dark" has a few very minor structural problems but please remember that the yarn is ENTIRELY FIRST-DRAFT! God, let me write twentieth drafts like this man wrote first!

One of the neatest things about the stories is how many of the individual tales refer to and re-inforce each other, creating a really marvellous tapestry effect.
 
I'm just going to stare sullenly at the wall until someone realizes that they left out "The Dreams in the Witch House" and "The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath". Two suberb tales that I cut my teeth on back in the day. "Witch house" is more classic HPL, while "Dreamquest" is a proper novella which still haunts my darker nightmares.
 
MercuryCrest said:
"I'm just going to stare sullenly at the wall until someone realizes that they left out 'The Dreams in the Witch House' and 'The Dreamquest Of Unknown Kadath'."
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For your immortal soul's sake, man, make absolutely certain that that wall you sullenly stare at is free from weird and crazy angles!

You're absolutely correct - I SHOULD have listed "The Dreams in the Witch House." In fact I DID list it in the first draft of my posting (along with several other titles) but edited it out for brevity's sake.

"Kadath" is a fairly early story, a heavily-Dunsanian pastiche which for me doesn't have quite the power of Lovecraft's mature and wholly-original work. But it does contain some remarkable concepts and passages of great beauty.
 
The first Lovecraft story I ever read was "The Nameless City". It was 2am, dark with the wind whistling throught he trees and I was in my bed reading it. I finished and looked out the window at the shadowed ground outside and could not help but wonder what lay beneath our very feet, unbeknownst to man.

The thing I find so unique about his writing is the agoraphobic horror aspect and the sheer primal possibility of it all. Rather than the story itself scaring you what he does is scare you by making you think of the possiblities of it beign absolutely terrifingly true in our real life. Now THAT is horror at its best.
 
many_angled_one said:
"The thing I find so unique about his writing is the agoraphobic horror aspect and the sheer primal possibility of it all. Rather than the story itself scaring you what he does is scare you by making you think of the possiblities of it beign absolutely terrifingly true in our real life."
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Lovecraft had this remarkable ability to say to the reader, in effect, "The horror's right behind this door, you can hear it scratching at the decaying old wood. But out of mercy to you, dear reader, I'm NOT going to open that door. If anything, I'm going to cement a triple-row of bricks in front of it, because if you caught the slightest glimpse of the horror you'd instantly go raving mad."

The reader says "Thank you so very much!" and then turns the page in the hope that Lovecraft might have changed his mind and opened that door anyway.

Stephen King pointed out that if the author actually describes what festers behind the door, "it was a ten-foot tall rabbit with a cow's head and tentacles," the reader's reaction is always going to be "THAT's a relief! It COULD have been a TWENTY-foot tall RAT with a SHARK's head and CLAWS!"
 
I should clarify, OldTime, that what I consider "classic HPL" is, in reality, what I see in the majority of his tales (that I've read, there are many more which I need to collect), whereas I felt that "DreamQuest" and, shall we say "At the Mountains of Madness" were full enough to stand in there own right (write?). "Mountains" surprises me all the more because The Man actually uses his same long-winded descriptions to set up the science behind the expidition. Though I don't know how much actual research he did, it certainly seems believable, the way he set everything up at the beginning of the story.


Edit: And quite right you are in the above post. He had a knack for the seemingly intense. It could've been a gerbil behind that damned door, but he knew how to make you not want to open it.
 
"It could've been a gerbil behind that damned door, but he knew how to make you not want to open it."
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Well, it wouldn't be quite a gerbil, nor wholly a grizzly bear, nor entirely an elephant, and not totally a fly either. But of course it would have tentacles, LOTS of tentacles, each one with a large eye at the tip.

And its very first word upon glimpsing us would be the Yuggothian equivalent of "Food!"
 
ive lived in lovecrafts hometown (providence) for a while now, and spent some time at his grave. not doing seances or carving random crap into the beautiful birch tree nearby like most people, but just sitting and writing, and hoping a little bit of that creepy sob would rub off on me. being pretty much the most famous writer (aside from poe) that lived or even spent a significant amount of time in providence, i naturally looked into his writing and became a huge fan. not so much of the movies, though in the mouth of madness was rather good i thought.
anyway, my point is, for those of you who have said you havent read much of his stories or any of his poetry, heres a good site for you. his poetry isnt bad, just be warned, a good part of it is just as dense and verbose as his prose.
http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~wcoburn/hpl.html
 
fnordish said:
"his poetry isnt bad, just be warned, a good part of it is just as dense and verbose as his prose."
I have to confess that I've never found Lovecraft's prose "dense and verbose" at all, even when I first discovered it 50 years ago at age 14. Again, read the opening paragraphs of "The Dunwich Horror." This is American narrarative writing at its very best.

Lovecraft's poetry is another matter. It was NOT his great strength. Most of it was slavish (and sluggish) imitations of Thomas Gray's "Elegy on a Country Churchyard." Only towards the very end of his life did Lovecraft develope his own poetic voice, but for those too-short remaining years it was Gangbusters. Read "St. Toad's" in the FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH for one of the most disturbing and haunting poems I've ever read.

Thanks much for the link, Fnordish. I found one essay and two poems I'd never seen before.
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Theirs a game calld Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth on pc any one playd it.
 
megadeth16 said:
Theirs a game calld Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth on pc any one playd it.
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I bought that last week! I'm currently blundering around Innsmouth.
 
megadeth16 said:
Theirs a game calld Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth on pc any one playd it.
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It's really rather good, unfortunately the company were cursed by the Great Old Ones for their delving into things that man should not know and went out of business.

Very atmospheric with parts that are genuinely panicked.
 
Heckler20 said:
megadeth16 said:
Theirs a game calld Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth on pc any one playd it.
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It's really rather good, unfortunately the company were cursed by the Great Old Ones for their delving into things that man should not know and went out of business.

Very atmospheric with parts that are genuinely panicked.
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I've just got through an excellent section of the game that's clearly based on the escape from the hotel scene in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It took me loads of attempts to get through it without being killed.

I know what you mean about being genuinely panicked. During that escape segment I eventually had to turn the sound off during my myriad attempts, because I was getting too wound up and anxious from all the adrenalin-pumping effects.
 
of all the ULs ive read about, please let this one be true!

thatll teach those puny humans.... DOH!
 
zarathustraspake said:
I've just got through an excellent section of the game that's clearly based on the escape from the hotel scene in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. It took me loads of attempts to get through it without being killed.
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But if I read THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH correctly, the escaping narrator was in no danger whatsoever of being killed. His pursuers meant him no harm (by their lights) - they RECOGNIZED him as being of Innsmouth blood and were his "Welcome Home" committee. That's WHY the chief fish-man was dressed in an ill-fitting (and probably long in mothballs) frock coat and a top hat!

If this is NOT the case, the story's ending, where the narrator RECOGNIZES his heritage and VOLUNTARILY RETURNS to Innsmouth, makes no sense at all.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
But if I read THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH correctly, the escaping narrator was in no danger whatsoever of being killed. His pursuers meant him no harm (by their lights) - they RECOGNIZED him as being of Innsmouth blood and were his "Welcome Home" committee. That's WHY the chief fish-man was dressed in an ill-fitting (and probably long in mothballs) frock coat and a top hat!

If this is NOT the case, the story's ending, where the narrator RECOGNIZES his heritage and VOLUNTARILY RETURNS to Innsmouth, makes no sense at all.
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But the investigator in COC (the game) isn't the narrator from Shadow, the episode is similar, but presumably if the rumours that Zadok mentions of disappearing strangers is correct this sort of thing probably happened a lot.
 
Thanks for the correction.

By the way, let me recommend the radio show version of THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH produced by the Atlanta Radio Theater. It is the best media adaptation of Lovecraft I've ever encountered
 
OldTimeRadio said:
Thanks for the correction.

By the way, let me recommend the radio show version of THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH produced by the Atlanta Radio Theater. It is the best media adaptation of Lovecraft I've ever encountered
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Is it on the t'interweb anywhere do you know?
 
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