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Bendigeidfran
Dec 17, 2013

Wait a minute...

End Of Worlds posted:

Any of y'all who like Lovecraft should read Algernon Blackwood's The Willows, if you haven't already. Lovecraft called it the finest weird horror story ever written, and its influence on him is obvious. It's awesome.

Blackwood and Lovecraft are fun to contrast. Blackwood was an outdoorsman, a firm optimistic, and an honest-to-god member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Lovecraft was a neurotic atheist shut-in. THat optimism bleeds heavily into his fiction - he flirts with Lovecraft's cosmic nihilism, but generally swerves shy of it.
I mentioned this a bit before, but I don't think Lovecraft really is a cosmic nihilist. Or at least he's not consistently a nihilist. I've been reading The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath lately and there's a lot of whimsical, genuinely nostalgic stuff there. The bits about Kuranes dreaming up an English seaside-town for himself reminded of Tolkien, even.

H.P's views on reality were pretty foul and hopeless, but his mythos has its bright spots full of meaning. Though with the Tolkien comparison I feel like Lovecraft's Polaris is worth mentioning. Because it reads a lot like something set in Middle-Earth: there's a shining city full of virtuous, tall people that's beset by a horde of monsters. Much of the story is lamenting that all the poetry and age-old elegance of the city Olathoë is going to disappear forever. But where Tolkien's destroying monsters are industrialism, the passage of time, Orcs, and the more ambiguous "Evil Men", Lovecraft's monsters are literally the Inuit peoples migrating from Asia.

I think that H.P.L was capable of finding worth in things; he was just really paranoid and felt that colored people, the poor, etc. were trying to tear down everything he loved. And even then I feel like the more horrific Mythos stories were exercises in perspective/mood more than something related to his over-arching worldview. If you're some random New Englander who's about to get eaten and losing control of their mind, of course you're going to feel like the universe is fundamentally malignant. But if you're like Randolph Carter and actually understand the cosmology and what Azathoth is and whatever, you'll pay them no mind and go on having adventures with forest fairies and cats. It's an interesting balancing act.

Bendigeidfran fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Jan 25, 2015

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Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

Bendigeidfran posted:

I mentioned this a bit before, but I don't think Lovecraft really is a cosmic nihilist. Or at least he's not consistently a nihilist. I've been reading The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath lately and there's a lot of whimsical, genuinely nostalgic stuff there. The bits about Kuranes dreaming up an English seaside-town for himself reminded of Tolkien, even.

H.P's views on reality were pretty foul and hopeless, but his mythos has its bright spots full of meaning. Though with the Tolkien comparison I feel like Lovecraft's Polaris is worth mentioning. Because it reads a lot like something set in Middle-Earth: there's a shining city full of virtuous, tall people that's beset by a horde of monsters. Much of the story is lamenting that all the poetry and age-old elegance of the city Olathoë is going to disappear forever. But where Tolkien's destroying monsters are industrialism, the passage of time, Orcs, and the more ambiguous "Evil Men", Lovecraft's monsters are literally the Inuit peoples migrating from Asia.

I think that H.P.L was capable of finding worth in things; he was just really paranoid and felt that colored people, the poor, etc. were trying to tear down everything he loved. And even then I feel like the more horrific Mythos stories were exercises in perspective/mood more than something related to his over-arching worldview. If you're some random New Englander who's about to get eaten and losing control of their mind, of course you're going to feel like the universe is fundamentally malignant. But if you're like Randolph Carter and actually understand the cosmology and what Azathoth is and whatever, you'll pay them no mind and go on having adventures with forest fairies and cats. It's an interesting balancing act.

Kadath and Polaris are all "Dunsany stories" from earlier in his career when he was mostly inspired by earlier fantasists. His own voice is very much leaning towards cosmic indifference and fatalism, which comes through mainly through his citations of quantum mechanics and relativity, which had destroyed and recreated the physical world in a stranger image, and "folklore", which refers to works like The Golden Bough and The Witch-Cult in Western Europe that had torn down conventional religion. Some of his last stuff seems to have moved to something more optimistic, but overall Lovecraft was concerned very much with the fact that things were falling apart, the center was not holding, and there isn't even a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

Volume 2: Literary Criticism

Okay, this is the real stuff. If you set aside essays on how to write verse and guidance to young writers, this volume has a lot of good material. It contains his long essay discussing weird fiction and the gothic, another on interplanetary fiction, a guide to writing horror stories. It includes summaries of favourite and typical plots devices and themes, break downs of popular horror stories and long critical overviews of Belknap Long and Dunsany. There is a guide to Roman literature and an attack on TS Eliot. There are handful of short discussions of amateur writers which you can skip. Some of the texts have appeared in recent collections. On balance, this is a very interesting and stimulating collection for anyone interested in classic horror fiction and HPL’s own writing.

Verdict: Largely engaging and informative; easy to read

Lovecraftian appeal: 4/5 :cthulhu: :cthulhu: :cthulhu: :cthulhu:

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

Volume 3: Science

This should be renamed “Astronomy” because it is essentially all about astronomy. HPL was a keen astronomer and wanted to go into that field, only his nervous breakdown and poor grades (can’t remember which came first) prevented him from taking up science as a career. HPL wrote astronomy columns for local newspapers and this volume collects most of them. They are well written and informative. He discusses coming celestial events, what to look for, history of astronomy and some of the myths behind the naming of celestial bodies. Obviously, some of this information is out of date (especially about the planets) but the essentials remain. If you have even a passing interest and knowledge of astronomy, this is a good read, though most of the pieces are only 2 pages long (some with HPL’s rough star charts). The best parts are the longer guides to astronomy that were serialised in the press. These are very approachable. HPL would have made a good populariser of astronomy (think Neil Degrasse Tyson’s exact opposite physically, but with a parallel gift for communication).

There are short pieces on interplanetary travel, the discovery of new planets, life on other planets but be warned – these are very short. There are also 10 pages of so on a spat with an astrologer. HPL hated astrology and poured scorn on the practice. There is a summary of arguments to be made in book chapters he was due to write for Houdini. He was going to demolish superstition, astrology, religion and so forth but Houdini died before HPL could start writing it up, so it never progressed beyond note form. Overall, these asides amount to about 30 pages out of 350.

Rating this is difficult, because while it is informative and readable (unlike vol. 1) it is – like vol. 1 – not really relevant to HPL’s fiction, though stars and space travel do feature tangentially in HPL’s fiction. If you engage with this subject you’ll enjoy this but if you are looking for Lovecraftian sources then there is little here for you.

Verdict: Engaging pieces about astronomy but not essential HPL.

Lovecraftian appeal: 1/5 :cthulhu:

rvm
May 6, 2013
So, I've just read In The Walls Of Eryx and it was really, really awful. It's badly written and preachy in the most annoying way. As amusing as it is to think that Lovecraft decided to awkwardly tackle prejudice, intolerance and colonialism at the end of his road, I'm willing to bet it was actually written almost completely by his 16 year old co-author and only touched up by HPL.

Ornamented Death
Jan 25, 2006

Pew pew!

As there was some discussion on Lovecraft's attitude towards women in the recent past, I figure now's as good a time as any to post this.

Dark Regions Press has started an IndieGoGo campaign for Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. DRP anthologies have always been top-notch (in terms of both contents and construction) in my experience, so I expect this will be a great read.

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

Volume 4: Travel

This had the potential to be one of the more interesting collections but it is quite frustrating. There are two big drawbacks with HPL’s travel writing. First, HPL refuses to notice almost anything after 1776. So he will describe colonial architecture and history for a place then largely omit anything barbarously modern. This gives a weird impression of HPL as a tour guide who only read the first chapters of a local history book. He largely fails to describe how the cities were then (1930-6). We get no idea of the reality of the places he is visiting, which would have been fascinating. Instead we get HPL as antiquarian and before you say “that’s what he did best”, consider how much of HPL’s special feeling comes from the modern overlaying a deep stratum of history and below that an ancient pre-history. In these pieces we never encounter a railroad, telephone, telegraph, soda bar or motor car. We never encounter any people except as race markers – noble patricians of ancient lineage or despicable Jews and stupid negroes. Never a single conversation with a local is recorded.

Second, the prose is imitation 18th century – so we get “majestick”, “shewn”, “number’d” and so on. It is well done but it gets tiring and it is really out of place when (rarely) discusses anything modern – usually an account of a historical building being destroyed or altered. HPL rarely wrote stories entirely in the old style, saving it for extracts of ancient accounts and discovered manuscripts within longer pieces, so we didn’t have to read – as we do here – 300 pages in this style, often in long descriptive paragraphs (1-2 pages).

So what does he write about? Most of the book is taken up by descriptions of Charleston, VA and Quebec city, with brief pieces on VT, VA, ML, MA, NY (Albany not NYC). It includes HPL’s maps, plans and drawings of buildings. Lots of the pieces are historical and relate to the history of the architecture and military events. Overall, the descriptions are readable, though you don’t get much idea of the present day (1930) reality of the places but the historical passages are pretty dense. You do get a feeling for some of the places that inspired stories. If you want HPL travel writing in a slightly more lively style (and shorter) then you would do better to read the letters.

Summary: Often interesting but slow reading. Nothing essential.

Lovecraftian appeal: 2/5 :cthulhu: :cthulhu:

Josef K. Sourdust fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Jan 30, 2015

Peztopiary
Mar 16, 2009

by exmarx
The Library of Congress has a bunch of first edition illustrated (these old woodcut style prints, Deep Ones look really neat.) Lovecraft. Most of them are in the rare books room, but if you have a reader card you can go in and well read them. You can't take pictures and there are some other restrictions, but it's worth doing if you're in DC.

hopterque
Mar 9, 2007

     sup

End Of Worlds posted:

Any of y'all who like Lovecraft should read Algernon Blackwood's The Willows, if you haven't already. Lovecraft called it the finest weird horror story ever written, and its influence on him is obvious. It's awesome.

Blackwood and Lovecraft are fun to contrast. Blackwood was an outdoorsman, a firm optimistic, and an honest-to-god member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Lovecraft was a neurotic atheist shut-in. THat optimism bleeds heavily into his fiction - he flirts with Lovecraft's cosmic nihilism, but generally swerves shy of it.

The Willows is just about my favorite piece of weird fiction. It really stuck with me. What's cool is you can look up the area where it takes place and look at pictures and stuff, because it's a wildlife preserve or something. He really describes it incredibly well.

Baka-nin
Jan 25, 2015

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

:words: Racism chat: hmmm... I think this is something that really depends on where and when you look. It's pretty incontrovertible that HPL held some views that were racist (even in his own time) and this coloured his outlook on society, politics and literature. But we also have to consider HPL's racism as essentially fearful conservativism of a semi-recluse who was deeply wedded to an Anglo-Saxon colonial period and concerned about the loss of that history and privilege to immigrants and non-whites. His racism was essentially hostility towards social change.

In my opinion that's a fair analysis, The Street (written in 1920 or thereabouts) seems to back it up pretty heavily. Its Lovecraft's views on the Russian Revolution and his fears of it coming to America. It starts off praising the first white settlers of New England and what they've left behind culturally. Then details the history of America (The American Revolution, Civil war etc.) and the changes its gone through, represented by the changes in the architecture of the street.

Then the calamity falls upon this street in the form of cheap housing, which attracts coarser sorts, then attracts immigrants. Then war and revolution bring immigrants from the East, whom work clandestinely to destroy America.

"Great excitement once came to The Street. War and revolution were raging across the seas; a dynasty had collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with dubious intent to the Western Land. Many of these took lodgings in the battered houses that had once known the songs of birds and the scent of roses."

"Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come."

The story is a tract against the "Reds" and the foreign outside agitator as the cause of social unrest. Nearly every centre of conspiracy on the street is given a Russian sounding name. He also listed things like Cafe's and modern schools as suspect without giving them an obvious Slavic connection. A sort of warning against Bolsheviks and young liberal urban types. Though it is interesting to note that the rot sets in before the Reds move in which shows a race neutral elitism and distrust of the impoverished masses even if they're of good Anglo stock. The ending is interesting symbolically, though it could just be HP working out his frustration.

MeatwadIsGod
Sep 30, 2004

Foretold by Gyromancy

hopterque posted:

The Willows is just about my favorite piece of weird fiction. It really stuck with me. What's cool is you can look up the area where it takes place and look at pictures and stuff, because it's a wildlife preserve or something. He really describes it incredibly well.

Blackwood does something in it (and to a lesser extent in "The Wendigo") where the narrator character is sort of a neophyte in terms of being out in the wilderness, and the character places all his faith in a stalwart, rugged, and more experienced traveling companion. Then, gradually, that stalwart character does or says things to erode that confidence by degrees. Sometimes it's an offhand comment, sometimes it's a gesture, but it all adds up to undercut this misplaced feeling of security that the narrator character has. I love "The Willows" and "The Wendigo" so much.

thehomemaster
Jul 16, 2014

by Ralp
Finally got this one!



From the quick look through it seems like it will satisfy my need to delve into Lovecraft's worlds more, given I have already read all his major works.

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

thehomemaster posted:

Finally got this one!



From the quick look through it seems like it will satisfy my need to delve into Lovecraft's worlds more, given I have already read all his major works.

Looking good! Let us know how it is.

Update: I've just finished vol. 4 (travel) and gently caress me, that was boring! I am downgrading that to a single :cthulhu: Seriously - gently caress that book. Unless you personally know the cities he's discussing or are actually there and using his texts as guides, there is nothing here for you.

You'll have to wait for vol. 5 report as I have 1,500 pages on western philosophy and 500 pages of contemporary European literature to read before I can get back to this.

If I haven't resurfaced by the end of this month, send a shoggoth to fetch me.

Josef K. Sourdust fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Feb 19, 2015

thotsky
Jun 7, 2005

hot to trot

Bendigeidfran posted:

I mentioned this a bit before, but I don't think Lovecraft really is a cosmic nihilist. Or at least he's not consistently a nihilist. I've been reading The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath lately and there's a lot of whimsical, genuinely nostalgic stuff there. The bits about Kuranes dreaming up an English seaside-town for himself reminded of Tolkien, even.

H.P's views on reality were pretty foul and hopeless, but his mythos has its bright spots full of meaning. Though with the Tolkien comparison I feel like Lovecraft's Polaris is worth mentioning. Because it reads a lot like something set in Middle-Earth: there's a shining city full of virtuous, tall people that's beset by a horde of monsters. Much of the story is lamenting that all the poetry and age-old elegance of the city Olathoë is going to disappear forever. But where Tolkien's destroying monsters are industrialism, the passage of time, Orcs, and the more ambiguous "Evil Men", Lovecraft's monsters are literally the Inuit peoples migrating from Asia.

I think that H.P.L was capable of finding worth in things; he was just really paranoid and felt that colored people, the poor, etc. were trying to tear down everything he loved. And even then I feel like the more horrific Mythos stories were exercises in perspective/mood more than something related to his over-arching worldview. If you're some random New Englander who's about to get eaten and losing control of their mind, of course you're going to feel like the universe is fundamentally malignant. But if you're like Randolph Carter and actually understand the cosmology and what Azathoth is and whatever, you'll pay them no mind and go on having adventures with forest fairies and cats. It's an interesting balancing act.

Some would say that The Dreamlands/Dream Cycle are not of the same canon as that of the Cthulhu Mythos. It's clearly much more whimsical and fantastic, and comparisons to Lewis Caroll/Tolkien are apt (the actual inspiration for these stories were Lord Dunsany though). Brian Lumley later wrote a bunch of stuff for the same mythos, and attempts have been made by him and other authors to merge the two, but in my opinion these attempts make little sense, and usually rely on "the power of the mind/dreams" to somehow filter the horrible truth of the universe, which allows us to interact with (and fight back against) the creates of the Cthulhu Mythos.

So yeah, I don't think it's necessarily very useful to attribute the worldview espoused in his works as being representative for Lovecrafts own worldview as it clearly changes from book to book.

GrrrlSweatshirt
Jun 2, 2012
he was a racist- good.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

fanged wang
Nov 1, 2014

by Ralp
i heard loveraft was a rapist. please confirm/deny

GrrrlSweatshirt
Jun 2, 2012

fanged wang posted:

i heard loveraft was a rapist. please confirm/deny

racially motivated rapist

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose
dude was ludicrously racist but considering how he was terrified of practically everything including fish it's not very surprising and its the reason his work is effective horror poo poo when you're scared of every goddamn thing on above or under the earth you get good at writing about fear and terror I guess

a shiny rock
Nov 13, 2009

i think his racism was ok because it was a long time ago

Hieronymous Alloy
Jan 30, 2009


Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!




Morbid Hound
New posters in this thread, head's up in case you didn't see the last page: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3690058&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post440540279

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Yeah, that's why I said what I said. Lovecraft's overwhelming sense of dread about practically everything is why he was not only an amazing horror writer but an absurdly racist individual.

The Insect Court
Nov 22, 2012

by FactsAreUseless

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Yeah, that's why I said what I said. Lovecraft's overwhelming sense of dread about practically everything is why he was not only an amazing horror writer but an absurdly racist individual.

You've got it backwards. Lovecraft's revulsion at the idea of racial impurity and pollution is what causes those themes to emerge in his writings. Think of the various ways miscegenation is used in his stories, there's a horror at the idea of a pure race being mixed with a loathsome and subhuman one.

So in conclusion, the Flying Polyps represent blacks, the Elder Things are Jews, and the Deep Ones are hispanics. Not sure what the Mi-Go are, however. Arabs?

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

I think All Pro Sexman has it right. HPL was deeply conservative and introverted (especially when young) and was opposed to progressive. He thought American independence was a big mistake. Naturally, he was going to oppose essentially all social change - women's rights, extension of the voting franchise, changes in social habits, immigration. If you have that mind set then virtually everything seems hostile and disturbing. The racism arises from that. HPL was explicitly racist and that led to a lot of the themes (and sub-texts) of his fiction but the essential cause wasn't responding to scientific theory about racial inferiority but conservative resistance to social/political change. So you are both right.

Ahhhh, South Park, what you have taught us! The truth IS somewhere in the middle.

:glomp:

Safety Biscuits
Oct 21, 2010

Yeah - not to defend Lovecraft but his racism was just one manifestation of his fear of just about everything, and I think he's much more irrational than most people think. He's not writing racist stories because he's read some pamphlet - it's much more obsessive and Freudian, with his weird upbringing and mental issues only half-covered by his scientism.

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

And finally.....

Volume 5: Philosophy, Autobiography & Miscellany

This contains HPL's political essays (Communism and the New Deal), comments on philosophy (Nietzsche, Christianity, cosmology) and social questions. He writes compares cats to dogs (HPL was a cat man). He discusses his philosophy of fiction and defends his stories. It contains his 1925 New York diary - but don't get excited. It is all "Woke late - paid rent - saw KS - lunch at Tiffany - wrote late - retired 3 a.m.". What was he writing? Don't know. What did he eat? Don't know. What did he talk about? Don't know. You'll have to go to the letters for that info.

The most interesting pieces are notes/research for some of his long stories, unwritten stories and short summaries of unwritten stories and incidents. These were later mined by his writer friends but if you fancy using them for the basis of your own stories - here they are!

The autobiographic sketches are very short and nothing you don't already know. There is his literary will (the only thing he wrote in 1937, except for diary - which only mentions medical treatments and the pain he was in :( ).

Then there are lists: of his fiction; reading lists; addresses; publications; titles of poems; chronologies. It also contains an index for all 5 volumes.

Summary: Fascinating but bitty

Verdict: :cthulhu: :cthulhu: :cthulhu: (because there is no way to give it three and a half :cthulhu: )

Overall: Consider reading vol. 2 and 4, vol. 3 is kind of informative about astronomy and vols. 1 and 4 are to be avoided.

chernobyl kinsman
Mar 18, 2007

a friend of the friendly atom

Soiled Meat
My biggest regret about Lovecraft is that he didn't live long enough to become a highly esteemed moderator on Reddit and active in the Gamergate movement

Josef K. Sourdust
Jul 16, 2014

"To be quite frank, Platinum sucks at making games. Vanquish was terrible and Metal Gear Rising: Revengance was so boring it put me to sleep."

For any of you interested in HPL's notes for potential stories, the text (which is Essay vol. 5) is online here:

http://www.wired.com/2011/07/h-p-lovecrafts-commonplace-book/

chernobyl kinsman
Mar 18, 2007

a friend of the friendly atom

Soiled Meat
I've adapted an H. P. Lovecraft drinking game I found online to be a little bit more comprehensive. I suggest playing it with something with a low ABV.

Take a sip of your drink whenever –
Ruins are stumbled across that are ‘cyclopean’, ‘non-euclidean’, or just plain wrong
The moon, sky or anything else is ‘gibbous’
The Necronimicon is mentioned, or another ancient, old dusty tome is consulted or referenced
Someone says ‘Iä’!
Something is either eldritch, ancient, unthinkable, hideous, blasphemous, loathsome, unimaginable, daemoniac or nameless
A phrase is written in italics – down your drink if it’s the payoff twist for the whole story! (you’ll need the alcohol, trust us)
Arkham or Miskatonic is mentioned or visited (you may have to abandon this rule if you're reading a story set in Arkham)
A protagonist has a dream or believes they are having a dream; two sips if the dream is prophetic
A cat appears
Someone or something is ‘evil-looking’ or 'evil-smelling'
A place is ‘accursed’, 'antiquarian,' 'antediluvian,' or has ‘thin’ reality
Old Ones of any kind appear in the text
Anything ululates
Any of these objects appear anywhere in the story – Bas Reliefs, Pentragrams, Obelisks, Tentacles, Pictographs
A cultist appears (bonus sips if said cultist is ‘insane, ‘degenerate’ or both)
An archaic or UK spelling of a word is employed for no particular reason (e.g. daemon, shew, colour)
Weird piping noises make an appearance
A word appears in the text that no two people would pronounce the same (I’m looking at you, R’yleh!)

Down your drink whenever –
A protagonist goes is driven insane/ devoured by a Thing Man Was Not Meant To Know
A protagonist faints
The text becomes uncomfortably rascist
A word crops up that you have never heard of before and need to find a dictionary

Adapted from here

long-ass nips Diane
Dec 13, 2010

Breathe.

thehomemaster posted:

Finally got this one!



From the quick look through it seems like it will satisfy my need to delve into Lovecraft's worlds more, given I have already read all his major works.

I checked this out from the library, and I kinda hate most of the annotations. A lot of them are asides that lend absolutely nothing to any sort of analysis of the work, they're just historical trivia or background that don't really give any better understanding of anything.

To give a particularly silly example, at one point in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator says that the moon is "not much past full," and there's an annotation that says "This is in accord with the records of the US Naval Observatory, which show that the full moon occurred on July 14th, 1927." Cool, thanks.

It does have a lot of nice illustrations and pictures in it, though. Again in Shadow Over Innsmouth, they have like three different maps of the town, including one drawn by Lovecraft for his notes. I just wish the annotations were all of that quality.

Dr. Gene Dango MD
May 20, 2010

Fuck them other cats I'm running with my own wolfpack

Keep fronting like youse a thug and get ya dome pushed back
I just finished The Shadow out of Time and it was fantastic from start to finish.

Immortan
Jun 6, 2015

by Shine
At the Mountains of Madness was genuinely unnerving the first time I read it.

spandexcajun
Feb 28, 2005

Suck the head for a little extra cajun flavor
Fallen Rib
A part of Pluto is now going to be called "Cthulhu"

Of course true fans know it should have been Yuggoth http://fusion.net/story/168000/a-section-of-pluto-is-now-named-cthulhu-heres-why-it-should-have-been-yuggoth/

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

spandexcajun posted:

A part of Pluto is now going to be called "Cthulhu"

Of course true fans know it should have been Yuggoth http://fusion.net/story/168000/a-section-of-pluto-is-now-named-cthulhu-heres-why-it-should-have-been-yuggoth/

I read the story thanks to this article. I had some issues this the story, more so than the others I've read. The characters seems dumber than usual, not piecing together very obvious puzzles. The narrator overhears specifically that the plutonians want to learn as much as they can from humans so that they can wear a wax mask and a hood and fool and mock humans. Dude's friend's writing style abuptly changes and asks for all evidence to be delivered to him and the idiot comes?? Then he notices his friend sounds like buzzing, looks waxy, is wearing a hood, and isn't moving his mouth when he speaks and sounds mocking and boastful? Then at the very end of the book the shocker is that his friend was a wax disguise??

I'm fine with crazed intellectuals not exactly being street smart, or driven to do stupid things out of their thirst for knowledge, but I had a hard time with this one. Hell I had a hard time with this guy refusing to move out of his house even though he was getting into shootouts with aliens every single night. "It's mah ancestral home!!!". Lovecraft characters can be extremely dumb at times but I can believe it given the context of the story, but the two central characters in this one felt contrived. They were just extremely suicidally stupid and couldn't piece a very basic puzzle together when the plot demanded it but were otherwise brilliant and thirsted to solve mysteries.

Still enjoyed it though.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Baronjutter posted:

Hell I had a hard time with this guy refusing to move out of his house even though he was getting into shootouts with aliens every single night. "It's mah ancestral home!!!".

I live in semi-rural Texas and I work in EMS out here, so I deal with a lot of crazy old people and let me tell you something: you will get them out of their family home when you carry their cold dead corpse out the door and not one single minute earlier and they don't give a good goddamn why you think they should move. Insect infestations, black mold, the inability to get yourself out of bed and use the toilet by yourself, fungi from Yuggoth, rising floodwaters, gently caress all that and gently caress you. They were born in that house and by god they will die in it.

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

Khizan posted:

I live in semi-rural Texas and I work in EMS out here, so I deal with a lot of crazy old people and let me tell you something: you will get them out of their family home when you carry their cold dead corpse out the door and not one single minute earlier and they don't give a good goddamn why you think they should move. Insect infestations, black mold, the inability to get yourself out of bed and use the toilet by yourself, fungi from Yuggoth, rising floodwaters, gently caress all that and gently caress you. They were born in that house and by god they will die in it.

Fully concur. Maybe it's more an American thing than other places, but given the option to choose between shooting slavering aliens and nosy governmental officials who threaten their home, most Americans would give the G-men an exchange of lead and serve the Mi-go tea.

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

I guess in this sense I thought the character was shown as educated and logical and even said if things got bad he'd got live with his son in California. He wasn't some old "rustic" as Lovecraft would say. Things got really bad and he kept having chances to leave but he never did. I don't know anyone who actually owns a home, let alone some ancient family home, we all rent and move around as needed so I guess I can't totally relate to the mindset.

But mostly that the narrator was too stupid to figure out he was talking to a wax mask after being told it was a thing they specifically planned on doing, that what drove me nuts. How obvious the whole thing was a set up. How obvious the driver was the voice on the recording, a voice he had listened to over and over again for months.

Also, any ya'll play The Last Door? It's a sort of lovecraftian point and click adventure game, pretty good times.

Fog Tripper
Mar 3, 2008

by Smythe

End Of Worlds posted:

Any of y'all who like Lovecraft should read Algernon Blackwood's The Willows, if you haven't already. Lovecraft called it the finest weird horror story ever written, and its influence on him is obvious. It's awesome.

Blackwood and Lovecraft are fun to contrast. Blackwood was an outdoorsman, a firm optimistic, and an honest-to-god member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Lovecraft was a neurotic atheist shut-in. THat optimism bleeds heavily into his fiction - he flirts with Lovecraft's cosmic nihilism, but generally swerves shy of it.

Kindled this for .99c. On my every growing list.

Khizan
Jul 30, 2013


Baronjutter posted:

I guess in this sense I thought the character was shown as educated and logical and even said if things got bad he'd got live with his son in California.

They always say this, but "bad" is a moving goalpost; however bad the situation is, it always has to be just a little bit worse for them to be okay with leaving.

Crashbee
May 15, 2007

Stupid people are great at winning arguments, because they're too stupid to realize they've lost.

Fog Tripper posted:

Kindled this for .99c. On my every growing list.

Too late for you, but if anyone else wants The Willows it's out of copyright so free to download from Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11438

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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Khizan posted:

They always say this, but "bad" is a moving goalpost; however bad the situation is, it always has to be just a little bit worse for them to be okay with leaving.

I'm going to say the plutonians weird form of communication actually drives people slightly mad or makes them open to suggestion which is why the two primary characters seemed to become so idiotic the state really should have assigned them full time caretakers or at least a nurse that visited a couple times a week to help them with their lives.

Also, man, Lovecraft's bio. He was such a god drat goon. He always said he seemed born in the wrong time, he was half right. He would have fit right in on the internet today. He'd have been a regular e/n poster.

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