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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Call of Cthulhu: I'd be real hesitant about classing Rats in the Walls under 'not too much racism', unless you want to make the argument that it's about the exceptionally racist protagonist getting his worldview overturned by his own ultra-white family's history of savagery. The Outsider, The Music of Erich Zann, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (if you fancy something longer) are much better options if you want compelling, atmospheric Lovecraft works that are relatively light on the racism (the first two have none at all that I remember). The Color Out of Space is superb, though, the absolute gold standard in Lovecraft. Definitely read that.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:15
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Darth Walrus posted:I'd be real hesitant about classing Rats in the Walls under 'not too much racism', unless you want to make the argument that it's about the exceptionally racist protagonist getting his worldview overturned by his own ultra-white family's history of savagery. Fair enough. I haven't heard it in a while.
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Oct 26, 2016 15:07
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Ornamented Death posted:I think I'm going to order this for my nephew. i am also ordering this for my nephew
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Oct 26, 2016 22:45
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Fair enough. I haven't heard it in a while. Not to keep ragging on you here, but I'm amazed that so many people put forward The Rats In The Walls as one of Lovecraft's less objectionable stories and forget about the cat. Not to mention that there's a far less charitable read of the story than the one I offered - that it was written in a moment of panic after Lovecraft realised that he had inadequately Teutonic Welsh ancestry.
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Oct 27, 2016 09:32
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Turtlicious posted:I've got 4 days to put together a Tabletop RPG in this setting, I have never read a lovecraft book, (scared off for reasons not related to horror.) I want to get well versed enough to capture the feel of it for 4 or 5 hours. Does anyone have a great place to start? Audiobooks / Radio Plays are preferred to almost anything else. Even more so, are compendiums that quickly help me get to that point. Yeah, get on some Dennis Detweiller and his Delta Green books and games. Honestly, racism isn't as central to Lovecraft as paranoia, and Detweiler does a good job of recreating that.
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Oct 27, 2016 11:57
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So I just got a new book of Lovecraftian stories called Cthulhu's Daughters, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. The gimmick here is that all the stories are written by women, which I find endlessly interesting because the only female authors I've seen take a run at Lovecraft previously are Caitlin R. Kiernan and Zealia Bishop. None of the stories are very long, some of them are very, very good, and there are even illustrations which is a rarity in this particular genre. Of particular interest is 'Lavinia's Woods' which is, of course, a story about the neglected Lavinia Whately, and the positively dread-inducing 'Violet is the Colour of your Energy' which is a modern take on 'The Colour out of Space'.
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Nov 26, 2016 15:15
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/\ /\ /\ /\ /\ /\ Has anyone read anything by HPL's wife? She was a professional writer/amateur journalist. I doubt anything is in print now (or perhaps print on demand?) but I'd be surprised if pieces haven't been reprinted at some stage.
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Nov 27, 2016 09:06
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She cowrote "The Horror at Martins' Beach" with him, and it has a sensibility to it you don't really see elsewhere in Lovecraft. Definitely one of his better collaborations.
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Nov 27, 2016 09:55
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The letters from HPL to Robert E Howard are republished this week after being unavailable and ridiculously expensive secondhand ($80-100). Has anyone read them? Are they worth getting?
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Jan 27, 2017 13:15
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I've had one of the collected books of his letters for awhile, so it's been a minute since I read them, but from what I remember they were honestly not worth it. Granted I did drop like $50 on that volume, but eh. We all know he's horribly racist and xenophobic, the letters confirm it, I'd say skip em 
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Jan 27, 2017 15:49
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i read a lof of lovecraft's letters in the course of undergrad research. there's a very short list of human beings whose letters are interesting enough to merit non-scholarly perusal. h. p. lovecraft is not on that list.
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Jan 27, 2017 18:47
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I got Children of Lovecraft a while ago. It's an anthology of writers trying to evoke Lovecraft's feel but in their own way. So far it's been touch and go with the stories. The first story is literally what if "The Color Out Of Space" was written by John Steinbeck. There's one about an exterminator that doesn't crib from any of Lovecraft's trappings but does the best at evoking the sense of a normal person seeing some hosed up poo poo and being unable to parse it yet at the same time become captivated by its sight. "Oblivion Mode" by Barron is in the collection as well but I've yet to read it or any of his stuff. There's one story that's so on the nose with its Lovecraft references that it hurts.
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Feb 1, 2017 02:05
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/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Good hurting?
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Feb 4, 2017 22:56
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ imagine, for example, someone wrote about meeting Randolph Carter. But instead of directly saying so and doing anything really meaningful with that character they go, 'so I met this odd fellow. Carter, he said his name was. Can't seem to recall his first name, though it was something like Rudolph? Anyways I work with him and now this story is Pickman's Model.
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Feb 27, 2017 01:25
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Interesting article on the history of Arkham House, the publishers who kept HPL's work alive after his death: https://www.lwcurrey.com/arkham-house-archive.php
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May 28, 2017 14:53
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Josef K. Sourdust posted:Interesting article on the history of Arkham House, the publishers who kept HPL's work alive after his death: Awesome, thank you. I wonder if I can find $415,000 in my sofa cushions.
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May 28, 2017 15:49
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Xotl posted:I wonder if I can find $415,000 in my sofa cushions. Dunno. Have you had Lowtax to stay over recently?
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May 29, 2017 11:14
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Lovecraft has the ability to create and use some good adjectives.
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Jun 1, 2017 06:58
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Applesnots posted:Lovecraft has the ability to create and use some good adjectives. He doesn't create them. They're just very obscure and archaic. 'Squamous', for example, means 'scaly', and 'rugose' means 'wrinkly'.
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Jun 3, 2017 08:57
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Darth Walrus posted:He doesn't create them. They're just very obscure and archaic. 'Squamous', for example, means 'scaly', and 'rugose' means 'wrinkly'. So squamous AND rugose is like a ball-sack with a skin condition, for next time you're reading through.
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Jun 4, 2017 07:54
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I've been reading "dreams of terror and death" and it's just a bunch of little 2-10 page stories. It's like watching a lovecraft skit show.
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Jun 4, 2017 23:28
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Baronjutter posted:I've been reading "dreams of terror and death" and it's just a bunch of little 2-10 page stories. It's like watching a lovecraft skit show. That was my introduction to him. I love The Quest of Iranon
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Jun 4, 2017 23:39
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That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world 
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Jun 5, 2017 03:06
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Found this decent doc on HP's life and legacy (though really awkward when not Mark Madden goes on some Islam rant) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg9VCf5einY A lot of people salty at Neil Gaiman's opinions on Lovecraft's prose
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Jul 12, 2017 02:38
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Have any latter-day weird fiction types tried to retell At the Mountains of Madness from the point of view of the Old Ones? Those guys truly did have the worst day of all time, even by HPL's standards, so much so that even his narrator feels for them. Even if it wasn't a literal retelling but just a group of human scientists waking up from cryostasis or whatever to find future entities dissecting them, not realizing that millions of years have passed, trying frantically to pick through the ruins of their civilization before ultimately getting slaughtered by their artificial slaves run amok -- seems like a great premise.
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Sep 29, 2017 22:02
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I'd be OK with it, but Mountains of Madness is my favourite Mythos tale and has been since I first read it. Arthur C Clarke did a short satirical piece on it in which the Elder Things are very nice, well-brought-up people who are mostly worried about asking the human explorers to bring them some tea when they come back, but I don't' recall the title of the story.
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Sep 29, 2017 22:49
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There's a couple of unforcedly clunky touches in Mountains, such as seemingly every named character in this geology expedition being familiar with elder myths, or protagonists being able to discern the types of sounds made by the Old Ones by studying wall art. On top of that, there's a bit too much repetition -- it's an artifact of the serialization probably, but I don't need to be told that many times that the mountains looked like a Roerich painting. That aside, it's quintessential cosmic horror story for me. What works best about it is the element of scientific awe that drives everything. Neither of the protagonists has any immediate need to follow up on Lake's findings after he is confirmed dead, explore the city after they have discovered it, or seek the abyss after they learn of its existence -- if someone were to have written this as a script for a modern horror movie, it's impossible to imagine that they wouldn't be stuck there by plane crash or what have you. Because otherwise, why would you want to be there, especially after people have died? But the whole essence of the story is that they DIDN'T have to be there, that they could have walked away at any time (and in the end, do) -- they didn't even have to be in Antarctica. They came there because they just wanted to KNOW, and no matter how bad the situation gets they still want to know, right up until they are forced to run for their lives. And the story reinforces this by pointing out that that was how it was with the Old Ones too -- they had their own "mountains of madness", a yet higher range in the distance that they didn't dare cross and that no human can even see the image of without going mad, and they too, upon witnessing the utter ruin of their civilization and the probable annihilation of everyone they ever knew, took the attitude: "Let's get to the bottom of this." It's really rad and crystallizes the way in which Lovecraft's objects of horror are always objects of wonder as well.
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Sep 29, 2017 23:23
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achillesforever6 posted:Found this decent doc on HP's life and legacy (though really awkward when not Mark Madden goes on some Islam rant) I thought it was Robert M. Price that went off on that rant, did two dudes do that?
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Sep 30, 2017 00:34
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Mad Hamish posted:So I just got a new book of Lovecraftian stories called Cthulhu's Daughters, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. The gimmick here is that all the stories are written by women, which I find endlessly interesting because the only female authors I've seen take a run at Lovecraft previously are Caitlin R. Kiernan and Zealia Bishop. I got it when it first came out and it really is a great anthology. It does annoy me that they changed the title from She Walks in Shadows, though. Way too on the nose.
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Nov 24, 2017 21:29
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Sure but there's a huge contingent of nerds who will buy anything with Cthulhu in the title
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Nov 24, 2017 23:29
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skasion posted:Have any latter-day weird fiction types tried to retell At the Mountains of Madness from the point of view of the Old Ones? Those guys truly did have the worst day of all time, even by HPL's standards, so much so that even his narrator feels for them. Even if it wasn't a literal retelling but just a group of human scientists waking up from cryostasis or whatever to find future entities dissecting them, not realizing that millions of years have passed, trying frantically to pick through the ruins of their civilization before ultimately getting slaughtered by their artificial slaves run amok -- seems like a great premise. Mind you, you’d probably want to address that they’re the kind of exploitative, imperialist asshats who only a particular kind of person could truly love, and that to modern eyes, much of what happens to them is a kind of dark cosmic karma. Now, if you really wanna go next-level with this poo poo, how about a look into the glorious shoggoth revolution? Workers of the cosmos, unite, you have nothing to lose but your forms!
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Nov 25, 2017 02:17
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Darth Walrus posted:Now, if you really wanna go next-level with this poo poo, how about a look into the glorious shoggoth revolution? Workers of the cosmos, unite, you have nothing to lose but your forms! Mountains is one of my tops too, and it made me kind of want to write a short story of the Elder Things, how they even managed to become an empire and survive Pangaea facing what was there at the time (a shitload of peak-Mythos empires and colonies). The reveal being it's found they used to have a powerful dream presence in eras past, before their greater sicence, and the birth of the shoggoths corresponded entirely from one legendary figure learning the old ways and undertaking the Dream Quest to reach Kadath, succeeding, and coming back with the raw material needed to A single, solitary cell of Azathoth's corporeal manifestation.
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Jan 17, 2018 09:41
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Black August posted:Mountains is one of my tops too, and it made me kind of want to write a short story of the Elder Things, how they even managed to become an empire and survive Pangaea facing what was there at the time (a shitload of peak-Mythos empires and colonies). The reveal being it's found they used to have a powerful dream presence in eras past, before their greater sicence, and the birth of the shoggoths corresponded entirely from one legendary figure learning the old ways and undertaking the Dream Quest to reach Kadath, succeeding, and coming back with the raw material needed to I would read the hell out of this.
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Jan 20, 2018 20:39
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I am interested. Love new takes on the Cthulhu mythos
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Jan 21, 2018 14:19
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