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They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia . . . poor Lake, poor Gedney . . . and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn — whatever they had been, they were men!That was first published about a year before HPL's death.
I sometimes wonder about the man he could've become if he'd lived longer.
Though, it may have also been something like Jefferson's respect for Indians - you can see some folks as noble savages, but still be deeply racist towards others. (Though, at least Lovecraft didn't want to make the elder things put on Western clothing, get educations, and join the middle class.)
In practical terms, if you want to mark a character as unremittedly and irredeemably evil, all you need to do is give him a monocle and a Mensur scar (despite the rather pointed irony that, historically, those were associated with the generation before the Nazis).Heh, what does it ay that the character I most associate with that (which is sorta weird as he doesn't have the scar) is Colonel Klink?
It says that the writers of Hogan's Heroes were geniuses who knew exactly what buttons (tropes) to press.
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I read his Wikipedia entry the other day, sounds like he had some deep psychological issues, to say nothing of his b+@*&*$ crazy family.
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I have never read so much as two paragraphs of his works, so yeah I did:-D
To be honest, the little I've read I don't care for so no thanks.
Actually I will check it out, if anything to see why so many people like it despite his open racism.
Are there any particular stories I should check out first:-)
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Actually I will check it out, if anything to see why so many people like it despite his open racism.
It's very imaginative and well written.
Are there any particular stories I should check out first:-)
I'd recommend
1. The Call of Cthulhu
2. The Shadow over Innsmouth
3. The Thing on the Doorstep
4. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
5. The Dunwich Horror
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The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.
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Are there any particular stories I should check out first:-)At the Mountains of Madness.
I agree that's a good one, but I've often seen it suggested that one should read it later, because it incorporates a lot of themes from other work, and you get more out of it if you've read (e.g.) "Cthulhu" first.
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Actually I will check it out, if anything to see why so many people like it despite his open racism.
Are there any particular stories I should check out first:-)
To be fair now...the racism is (IMHO) really bad in only a very few stories, and most of those stories are largely considered to represent his lesser works.
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At the Mountains of Madness is a good choice for "later" reading, as is the Dreams in the Witch House or the Shadow Out of Time. There's a lot of stuff going on those stories that will mean less if you aren't already familiar with the mythos (though they do work as stand-alones).
Lovecraft's writing style can be pretty odd/dry, so I can understand not really caring for it.
But the influence he's had on American horror literature is staggering.
Frankly, what he successfully inspired is far more important than his own works.
(Another way to put it - writers like Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron can write circles around HPL, but HPL's stamp on their work is unmistakable.)
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I find him comparable to Tolkien in some ways. His plotting and pacing can be slow, even dull at times, but his setting and world-building are unparalleled.
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Other than The Two Towers I don't really care for Tolkien either.
Part of that tho might've been Tolkien fatigue as literally every campaign my brothers ran was based on his writing.
I was way more into Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein, also R.A. Salvatore's earlier stuff and of course Dragonlance Chronicles (which IMO went downhill after book 1, but then Sturm and Flint were my favorite characters so..) and especially Azure Bonds and The Wyvern's Spur (Olive Ruskettle, best literary Hobbit/Halfling ever!)
Edit: also Dragonbait is literally the only Paladin I've seen that doesn't a complete douche bag about it:-D
Edit 2: and thanks! I'll have a look for those this weekend, I know B&N has a "complete collection" of his writing so I'll see how much that is.
Edit 3: for smurfiness
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Edit 2: and thanks! I'll have a look for those this weekend, I know B&N has a "complete collection" of his writing so I'll see how much that is.
Oh, goodness. Save yourself a trip. Unless the copyright laws in your country are very odd, you can download them very easily.
I live in Wisconsin :-)
However I do love actual books and living in a college town I have so many bookstores I can shop around at.
Also the majority of my posts are done via phone as my wife and kids have control of the computer.
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I feel a slightly tangential ramble coming on.
Earlier we talked about the sense of "otherness" provoking fear - but what about a cosmic horror story that came from not how different the evil was to us, but how similar?
Ever been on the road and cut off by a terrible driver, and screamed "F!#& YOU A!+*@%&, I'LL F*+%ING KILL YOU!" Obviously you wouldn't.
But somewhere out there, there's a sociopath who would.
Maybe a slightly different mix of chemicals in utero, or a quirk of cognitive development, a bad early childhood experience, something like that is all that could've kept any one of us from developing into the next Jack the Ripper. For all any of us know, the guy posting above or below us went out last night and murdered a homeless person just to watch him die.
Maybe it's not "stranger danger" that's the scariest thing of all.
Maybe it's easy for all of us to go, oh, serial killers are monstrous, horrible creatures that are nothing like me and you. It's easy to think of Chaotic Evil as some kind of Saturday-morning cartoon villain or B-movie monster and not just an ordinary person but for one tiny factor - an aberration of neurochemistry, a late-onset psychological condition (that we may not even be aware of until it's too late!) or just one, single, REALLY bad day. The Joker is an inhuman monster, Rodion Raskolnikov was a guy who made a bad choice and fell headlong down a dark path.
Or, perhaps most troubling of all: what if we've already set these events in motion, that will, necessarily, lead us to one of these situations - a single rash action in a moment of anger, one little tipping point that changes everything forever? And there's nothing we can do about it? And you, personally, are going to be the last one to know?
That, is horror.
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I'm not a riverboat pilot -- I don't even like boats -- but I love Mark Twain (even Life on the Mississippi).
I like to think that I'm not an alcoholic, but I still love Dashiell Hammett's fiction (even The Thin Man).
I like to think that I'm not a racist, but I still love Lovecraft's stories (even "Arthur Jermyn").
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I live in Wisconsin :-)
However I do love actual books and living in a college town I have so many bookstores I can shop around at.
Also the majority of my posts are done via phone as my wife and kids have control of the computer.
You can probably lay your hands on a used copy at Frugal Muse, then.
That's the plan :-)
Public libraries are not a thing anymore?
They are, but i think i have fines, also its not easy for me to get to them, and to be honest i'm not a fan of the people that work at the library by us.
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Lovecraft's writing style can be pretty odd/dry, so I can understand not really caring for it.
But the influence he's had on American horror literature is staggering.
Frankly, what he successfully inspired is far more important than his own works.
(Another way to put it - writers like Thomas Ligotti and Laird Barron can write circles around HPL, but HPL's stamp on their work is unmistakable.)
Yeah...it's pretty difficult to find a horror author that hasn't used themes that Lovecraft popularized. It's not exaggeration to say he is probably the most influential horror author in the last century. And that is just focusing on themes. Everyone from Robert Bloch to Stephen King have written outright Mythos stories.
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I feel a slightly tangential ramble coming on.
Earlier we talked about the sense of "otherness" provoking fear - but what about a cosmic horror story that came from not how different the evil was to us, but how similar?
While effective, those stories by their very definition are not cosmic.
Not sure who to point to as the biggest inspiration for that style of horror, Although I think Robert Bloch (author of Psycho) may have been the major writer to establish that theme in horror literature.
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I feel a slightly tangential ramble coming on.
Earlier we talked about the sense of "otherness" provoking fear - but what about a cosmic horror story that came from not how different the evil was to us, but how similar?
Actually, that was my point earlier. Do a find for "uncanny valley" and you'll see my thoughts on the point.
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If we took that one step farther, though, and made the "universal consciousness" Crowley wrote about, or a very dark take on Buddhist dharma - then the idea that madness wasn't the great other, but it was us all along, that terrifies me.
Cosmic? Maybe, maybe not. You'd need to be a better writer than me to pin that down. But that's one of the things I think is way scarier than any giant spider or evil race of squid-aliens. The idea that you already might be insane, but not even know it. That at any moment, your intuition might become full on voices in your head, that don't go away. Those nagging doubts in the back of your mind become a mocking, leering demon who haunts your nightmares. The little moments of forgetfulness where you can't seem to remember where you put your keys metastatize until you're utterly disconnected with reality, and you go to your grave never fully realizing it.
Uncanny Valley comes close (that's probably why Markiplier hates mannequins). Bret Easton Ellis did a great look into the mind of the Caligula-style sociopath, but as for Stepford-meets-Silent-Hill, I don't think that story's been written yet.
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I live in Wisconsin :-)
However I do love actual books and living in a college town I have so many bookstores I can shop around at.
Also the majority of my posts are done via phone as my wife and kids have control of the computer.
I have the Penguin collection The Call of Cthulhu and other Weird Stories which has notes by Lovecraft scholar SJ Yoshi that includes most of the well-known ones, excluding Lovecraft's two novellas. Also has a nice cover design with Cthulhu got up like a Victorian gentleman with a mustache and monocle.
The Del Rey editions are probably easy to find too, but I understand Joshi's rely on Lovecraft's preferred text. Also you're less likely to get odd looks in public since there's no naked, dismembered torsos hanging around. Lovecraft's rarely about gore so much as his personal seafood and racial phobias and the occasional extremity that isn't where it ought to be.
Contributor
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The visual design is rather... subpar, but there's always this.
I honestly can't read books online.
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I feel a slightly tangential ramble coming on.
Earlier we talked about the sense of "otherness" provoking fear - but what about a cosmic horror story that came from not how different the evil was to us, but how similar?
Ever been on the road and cut off by a terrible driver, and screamed "F&~@ YOU A#&#@#%, I'LL F~~&ING KILL YOU!" Obviously you wouldn't.
But somewhere out there, there's a sociopath who would.Maybe a slightly different mix of chemicals in utero, or a quirk of cognitive development, a bad early childhood experience, something like that is all that could've kept any one of us from developing into the next Jack the Ripper. For all any of us know, the guy posting above or below us went out last night and murdered a homeless person just to watch him die.
Maybe it's not "stranger danger" that's the scariest thing of all.
Maybe it's easy for all of us to go, oh, serial killers are monstrous, horrible creatures that are nothing like me and you. It's easy to think of Chaotic Evil as some kind of Saturday-morning cartoon villain or B-movie monster and not just an ordinary person but for one tiny factor - an aberration of neurochemistry, a late-onset psychological condition (that we may not even be aware of until it's too late!) or just one, single, REALLY bad day. The Joker is an inhuman monster, Rodion Raskolnikov was a guy who made a bad choice and fell headlong down a dark path.Or, perhaps most troubling of all: what if we've already set these events in motion, that will, necessarily, lead us to one of these situations - a single rash action in a moment of anger, one little tipping point that changes everything forever? And there's nothing we can do about it? And you, personally, are going to be the last one to know?
That, is horror.
Your description reminds me of Poe, to be honest. He's very much about getting into the mind of a person, making them seem normal or at least reasonable, and yet showing that they're just f*%~ed up enough to murder someone and deviously hide the body. This is kind of ironic, because Poe was one of Lovecraft's inspirations. Lovecraft was driven to strike out for the new territory of cosmic horror, much as you're saying it'd be interesting to move "on" from cosmic horror into that of the mundane.
Kalindlara, this site may be a better alternative. And yeah, this stuff is well into the public domain at this point.
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I'm actually of the opinion that this supports my point. You have no idea how many people I've met that object to the cultural prejudice inherent in the "All Germans are Nazis" stereotype. In practical terms, if you want to mark a character as unremittedly and irredeemably evil, all you need to do is give him a monocle and a Mensur scar (despite the rather pointed irony that, historically, those were associated with the generation before the Nazis). The "All Russians are Soviet Communists" is less commonly cited but equally powerful.
The point is that anything different can -- and will -- be personalized by someone as a deliberate attack on them. In a world where everyone is their own critic, any bad guy is a stereotype to someone. And in Lovecraftian fiction, being a bad guy is genetic.
I'm a living conglomeration of the pre-christian germanic cultural continuum itself, I'm sure I'm covered on the "don't invoke the all germans are nazis trope" front. Which I as a Polish person with holocaust survivor ancestors find to be a one-dimensional and frankly insulting way to portray wwii. For the love of the gods, there were victims who were both jewish and german.
I'm really not much of a straight-up horror writer (I prefer to mix psychological horror elements into fiction that is not meant to be horror) so I don't think I'll ever actually pursue the goal of antifa cosmic horror (which may be built around the idea of the state, of capitalism, of the institution of white supremacy and colonization being the body of horror that envelopes us and assimilates us; a horror that people in real life actually live with every day so it could work really well). it's another one of my many half-baked on-the-spot ideas that never see fruition.
On the other hand, I do have a story developing on the side in which the rise of far right ideology amongst followers of the Norse gods is literally choking the gods to death with their spiritual pollution, so that a small number of people must serve as stewards to the gods and protect them until they can return to their former strength. Although it's actually a young adult urban fantasy story and isn't intended to be horror.
I'm a living conglomeration of the pre-christian germanic cultural continuum itself, I'm sure I'm covered on the "don't invoke the all germans are nazis trope" front. Which I as a Polish person with holocaust survivor ancestors find to be a one-dimensional and frankly insulting way to portray wwii. For the love of the gods, there were victims who were both jewish and german.I'm actually of the opinion that this supports my point. You have no idea how many people I've met that object to the cultural prejudice inherent in the "All Germans are Nazis" stereotype. In practical terms, if you want to mark a character as unremittedly and irredeemably evil, all you need to do is give him a monocle and a Mensur scar (despite the rather pointed irony that, historically, those were associated with the generation before the Nazis). The "All Russians are Soviet Communists" is less commonly cited but equally powerful.
The point is that anything different can -- and will -- be personalized by someone as a deliberate attack on them. In a world where everyone is their own critic, any bad guy is a stereotype to someone. And in Lovecraftian fiction, being a bad guy is genetic.
Interesting.
On the other hand, I do have a story developing on the side in which the rise of far right ideology amongst followers of the Norse gods is literally choking the gods to death with their spiritual pollution, so that a small number of people must serve as stewards to the gods and protect them until they can return to their former strength.
Very interesting.
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There's also a difference between things written by a jerk and works that actually contain bigotry. There's even a difference between works written by a bigot and works that actually contain bigotry.SKR was at times a massive jerk. I presume you will be selling off all your D&D and Pathfinder products?there's a difference between a jerk and an active bigot.
Case in point Richard Wagner. This is a little different because his works were appropriated by the Nazis 50 years after his death, though he is hardly responsible for that association. In any case, it is generally agreed that he was a vile person. I don't believe, however, that his operas feature any anti-Semitic content, though performing his work in Israel has still been controversial.
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I have to admit, the idea of the misinterpretation of the permutations of the author's bigotry makes for potentially fascinated tellings where people go in with the wrong idea, and that misinformation makes not only for a chance to show the human monstrosity and then have them end up a-hole victims whe n the thing they misinterpreted come along to eat them anyways.
Mind, that is from the perspective of a darkie who isn't self-loathing in general, only in very specific about things non-racial, and who would write a story about people mistaking black people for being the chosen of Shub-Niggurath who seek to choke out other ethnicities by out-breeding and corrupting their purportedly pure blood and all that other horse-hockey, coming up with increasingly cockamamie theories until the actual spawn get them, in spite of those they persecuted trying to help save them from themselves and whatnot.
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Case in point Richard Wagner. This is a little different because his works were appropriated by the Nazis 50 years after his death, though he is hardly responsible for that association. In any case, it is generally agreed that he was a vile person. I don't believe, however, that his operas feature any anti-Semitic content, though performing his work in Israel has still been controversial.There's also a difference between things written by a jerk and works that actually contain bigotry. There's even a difference between works written by a bigot and works that actually contain bigotry.SKR was at times a massive jerk. I presume you will be selling off all your D&D and Pathfinder products?there's a difference between a jerk and an active bigot.
Hmm. The comparison is apt. If one knows where to look, there are hints of anti-semitism and general pro-German overtones in some of Wagner's opera (and far more explicitly in his prose). Die Meistersinger Von Nurnburg is probably the most pronounced in that regard, but again it is not explicit. But it would be impossible to say his operas are specifically about anti-semitism, in much the same way that Lovecraft's racism isn't the subject of his fiction but occasionally rears its ugly head anyway.