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    HP Lovecraft

    I've been meaning to have a go at Lovecraft.

    So simple question, where's a good place to start?

    #2
    I started with At The Mountains Of Madness. Worked for me, but I have always been fascinated with the South Pole anyway.

    Comment


      #3
      First, be aware that his racism is blatant and up front in a lot of his work, and he also extends it to poor white people. Second, be aware that he was a bad writer in lots of ways - don't go looking for characterisation or plausibility. Or female characters, for that matter - there are about three in his entire body of work, and one of them is a host body for a centuries-old wizard. That said...

      The difference between Lovecraft and other racist writers of the era is that his work transmutes his fear of the other into cosmic, infinite horror, and at its best does so very effectively. He's at his best when he steps into the total perspective vortex and freaks out about humanity's cosmic insignificance.

      My advice would be to find a short story compilation that contains all of the following:-

      1. At The Mountains Of Madness - longest thing he wrote, it's about a scientific expedition to the Antarctic. Builds and builds and builds, combining appalling scientific discoveries with appallingly unscientific discoveries. He hated the cold, so the atmosphere is sustained really well.
      2. The Colour Out Of Space - very, very uncanny story which I've seen argued predicts the effects of a nuclear winter. A strange THING lands on the land of a yokel family and spreads blight. My favourite.
      3. Dreams In The Witch House - student takes lodgings in haunted room with weird angles, has progressively more hideous dreams that merge into life. Female character! Who is a horrendous ghost witch. Also contains his most well-rounded and charismatic character, Brown Jenkin.
      4. The Call Of Cthulhu - the famous one that the role-playing game is named after. It is nicely plotted, with the protagonist piecing together shreds of evidence to reveal the truth that drives him insane. Large doses of racism in this one, I'm afraid, but it's too good not to tip.

      Otherwise, his work veers from deeply Poe-ish horror ('The Rats In The Walls') to phantasmagoric whimsy ('Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath' and many others). Some is good in parts, some less so. Of particular note is 'The Dunwich Horror', an enjoyable but utterly ludicrous piece starring comedy yokels and an astounding string of coincidences that somehow don't tip anyone - not even the very wise and knowledgeable Professor - off that Bad Things Are Going Down until the plot decrees it's time.

      He is heavily influenced by Poe, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. I can strongly recommend Blackwood's 'The Willows' and Machen's 'Great God Pan'.

      This Vintage volume contains everything I've mentioned bar 'The Colour Out Of Space'.
      Last edited by delicatemoth; 26-07-2017, 19:43.

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by delicatemoth View Post
        First, be aware that his racism is blatant and up front in a lot of his work, and he also extends it to poor white people. Second, be aware that he was a bad writer in lots of ways - don't go looking for characterisation or plausibility. Or female characters, for that matter - there are about three in his entire body of work, and one of them is a host body for a centuries-old wizard. That said...

        The difference between Lovecraft and other racist writers of the era is that his work transmutes his fear of the other into cosmic, infinite horror, and at its best does so very effectively. He's at his best when he steps into the total perspective vortex and freaks out about humanity's cosmic insignificance.

        My advice would be to find a short story compilation that contains all of the following:-

        1. At The Mountains Of Madness - longest thing he wrote, it's about a scientific expedition to the Antarctic. Builds and builds and builds, combining appalling scientific discoveries with appallingly unscientific discoveries. He hated the cold, so the atmosphere is sustained really well.
        2. The Colour Out Of Space - very, very uncanny story which I've seen argued predicts the effects of a nuclear winter. A strange THING lands on the land of a yokel family and spreads blight. My favourite.
        3. Dreams In The Witch House - student takes lodgings in haunted room with weird angles, has progressively more hideous dreams that merge into life. Female character! Who is a horrendous ghost witch. Also contains his most well-rounded and charismatic character, Brown Jenkin.
        4. The Call Of Cthulhu - the famous one that the role-playing game is named after. It is nicely plotted, with the protagonist piecing together shreds of evidence to reveal the truth that drives him insane. Large doses of racism in this one, I'm afraid, but it's too good not to tip.

        Otherwise, his work veers from deeply Poe-ish horror ('The Rats In The Walls') to phantasmagoric whimsy ('Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath' and many others). Some is good in parts, some less so. Of particular note is 'The Dunwich Horror', an enjoyable but utterly ludicrous piece starring comedy yokels and an astounding string of coincidences that somehow don't tip anyone - not even the very wise and knowledgeable Professor - off that Bad Things Are Going Down until the plot decrees it's time.

        He is heavily influenced by Poe, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. I can strongly recommend Blackwood's 'The Willows' and Machen's 'Great God Pan'.

        This Vintage volume contains everything I've mentioned bar 'The Colour Out Of Space'.
        I also need to get around to this and appreciate the advice. Thanks

        Comment


          #5
          I second everything dm has said above with the proviso that 90% of his writing is bad. Some stories either transcend the writing or are well written but the majority are badly written even before you get to the racism, anti-semitism etc. He was a horrible man who couldn't write.

          The mythos he spawned however has inspired some good writers though, so there is that.

          Oh, one of my favourite pieces of lit crit is H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq. Here is an excerpt, my edition had the essay and The Call of Cthulhu.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by Levin View Post
            The mythos he spawned however has inspired some good writers though, so there is that.
            And the best role-playing game ever. Sadly, if you're out of university you'll probably find it a bit tricky to locate a good Call Of Cthulhu gaming group.

            90% of his writing is bad.

            Yeah, I should have mentioned that he's really turgid. But there is a certain eldritch, blasphemous vitality there, shrieking into the void...

            Comment


              #7
              Have never got around to Lovecraft, probably (I now realise distinctly) for the reasons laid out just above.

              Something perhaps worth taking a look at though Stumpy, which also fed into old HP's worldview and cosmology, is the truly weird Victorian-era peculiarity that is The King In Yellow by Robert Chambers. It's an 1895 collection of about 10 short stories, only the first five or six of which have anything to do with its internal 'Carcosa Mythos', as it was later christened – most of which anyway has been spun into something from merely a handful of cryptic references gleaned from Chambers' text, and from retroactive association with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos due to his (and his later acolytes') co-opting some of Chambers' names and concepts such as Hastur into his own mythology.

              The stories themselves though are worth a read, despite – or, rather, because – the nature of the horror element is so nebulous and vaguely sketched, it's enabled readers and other writers over the subsequent century to apply almost whatever explanations they wish to it. As I say, the latter stories drift off somewhere else altogether, although one ('The Street of the First Shell') is a rather powerful evocation of a besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. I've got the nice Wordsworth Editions volume, which was very cheap, although there's also a bunch of slightly more pricey editions out there now (not least since the mythos got woven recently into the storylines of True Detective), and for that matter the out-of-copyright text is available for free online at e.g. Project Gutenberg.

              The eponymous King appears to be some sort of almighty eldritch entity – yet barely appears even in the 'related' stories, most of the relevant bits instead concerning a play also named The King In Yellow that allegedly drives anyone who sees it or reads its script into a sort of insanity that renders them susceptible to his machinations, perhaps via the awful summons of the Yellow Sign, leading to a particular breed of madness bleeding through from one level of fiction to the next within the stories.

              I should say that the play itself is also virtually entirely apocryphal, from the point of view of the actual reader, with only a very few fragments rendered in the text – and none at all from its second act, for all that we know that "The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect."
              As the opening story's protagonist Hildred Castaigne has it, however, this is probably just as well:
              "No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.
              "'If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing from the hearth and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet. This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa, where black stars hang in the heavens, where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the the twin suns sink into the Lake of Hali, and my mind will bear forever the memory of the Pallid Mask."
              That story, 'The Repairer of Reputations', is probably the most essential as it contains the greatest amount of twisted and startling revelations – at least, if we can trust the POV of a potential madman – including being set in a then-future 1920s New York dystopia featuring the likes of walk-in 'suicide booths' on the streets to help keep the populace calm.

              I'm not sure I'm doing the whole thing justice here, but like I say it's such a peculiar hotch-potch of ideas it's hard to convey in brief. Chambers himself was an artistic type who was influenced by his time in fin de siècle Paris and who was mostly successful as a pulp romance novelist – and barely returned to 'weird fiction' thereafter let alone to this specific 'Carcosa' universe he'd apparently dredged up wholesale from some dark dimension but never felt the need to elucidate further. Take a peek at the fan-site/wiki The Yellow Site for a bit more of an insight, perhaps.
              Last edited by Various Artist; 27-07-2017, 01:04.

              Comment


                #8
                His chain of shops was a rum old do, and no mistake.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by delicatemoth View Post
                  First, be aware that his racism is blatant and up front in a lot of his work, and he also extends it to poor white people. Second, be aware that he was a bad writer in lots of ways - don't go looking for characterisation or plausibility. Or female characters, for that matter - there are about three in his entire body of work, and one of them is a host body for a centuries-old wizard. That said...

                  The difference between Lovecraft and other racist writers of the era is that his work transmutes his fear of the other into cosmic, infinite horror, and at its best does so very effectively. He's at his best when he steps into the total perspective vortex and freaks out about humanity's cosmic insignificance.

                  My advice would be to find a short story compilation that contains all of the following:-

                  1. At The Mountains Of Madness - longest thing he wrote, it's about a scientific expedition to the Antarctic. Builds and builds and builds, combining appalling scientific discoveries with appallingly unscientific discoveries. He hated the cold, so the atmosphere is sustained really well.
                  2. The Colour Out Of Space - very, very uncanny story which I've seen argued predicts the effects of a nuclear winter. A strange THING lands on the land of a yokel family and spreads blight. My favourite.
                  3. Dreams In The Witch House - student takes lodgings in haunted room with weird angles, has progressively more hideous dreams that merge into life. Female character! Who is a horrendous ghost witch. Also contains his most well-rounded and charismatic character, Brown Jenkin.
                  4. The Call Of Cthulhu - the famous one that the role-playing game is named after. It is nicely plotted, with the protagonist piecing together shreds of evidence to reveal the truth that drives him insane. Large doses of racism in this one, I'm afraid, but it's too good not to tip.

                  Otherwise, his work veers from deeply Poe-ish horror ('The Rats In The Walls') to phantasmagoric whimsy ('Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath' and many others). Some is good in parts, some less so. Of particular note is 'The Dunwich Horror', an enjoyable but utterly ludicrous piece starring comedy yokels and an astounding string of coincidences that somehow don't tip anyone - not even the very wise and knowledgeable Professor - off that Bad Things Are Going Down until the plot decrees it's time.

                  He is heavily influenced by Poe, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. I can strongly recommend Blackwood's 'The Willows' and Machen's 'Great God Pan'.

                  This Vintage volume contains everything I've mentioned bar 'The Colour Out Of Space'.
                  I've nothing to add, just wanted to say this is an excellent summary. I quite liked "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "The Haunter of the Dark" as well, with all their overblown, portentous drama. It sometimes feels like any word cloud of Lovecraft would basically be BLASPHEMOUS and NECROTIC and very little else.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    I read a free short story I downloaded on my Kindle. Can't remember what it was called. It was effectively creepy. Perhaps see what you can find for free out there.

                    Comment

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