HP Lovecraft

Lovecraft is a variable author. I am not keen on his more fantasy writing. His brooding stories where he writes of himself as being locked in a room feeling scared are the best such as the Haunter of the Dark. He excels in that. I think he also hated his mother. Read the Thing on the Doorstep for that.
 
Crikey, how come I haevn't replied to a thread about HP Lovecraft? :eek:

Read all his work when I was about 18. Some of his horror was very memorable - "The Color Out of Space" still ranks to me as the defining moment of horror literature for myself.

Some of his short-stories were also very accomplished - I can't remember a lot of titles - such as a great one set on a U-Boat discovering R'lyeh (where dread Cthulhu dwells) was one. "Quest of Iranon" was a great piece of melancholic short fantasy writing.

Some of the story titles mentioned already are certainly very good - I'll add "The Dunwich Horror" to the list, and "Shadow over Innsmouth".

HP Lovecraft was an astonishingly under-rated author for his time. I've read a lot about him, though not an actual biolgraphy. At one point I actually sought out his influences - Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen are names I remember reading (although only Poe was of any real note from what I read).

Yes, HP Lovecraft :)

Always thought about writing a novel in his mythos. It would have to be set in the 1920's, though, and I don't know enough of the period to actually write about it.
 
I'm reading the third book with a lot of the stories mentioned in. This is great and easier to read than Poe. Do many people know about him? I only know a few.
 
Poe was very much the more experiemental and technically gifted of the two writers. Bierce had a very sharp wit and was killed during the Mexican Revolution. Lovecraft lived an oppressed life and communicated it perfectly.
 
I used to RPG with Call of Cthulhu. I tried reading some of Lovecraft but he wasn't very consistent. There were some good stories on the Cthulhu Mythos but there weren't always common. The story Call of Cthulhu wasn't all that great either. I recognise some titles above which has got to be a good thing meaning good stories I liked. Innsmouth, yeah. *smiles*
 
Lots of good stuff from Lovecraft.Among my favs are
The Rats in the Walls
The Call of Cuthulu
The whisperer in darkness
The Terrible Old Man
and Pickmans Model
and does anyone names their horrors better .Cuthulu,Yog-Sothoth,NyarlothotepThe THING from the catacombs of Nephren -Ka and that most hideous book-The Necronomicon.I think that Lovecraft along with Poe and Ray Bradbury is among the 3 best horror writers ever.
 
Ah, another HP Lovecraft fan!
biggrin.gif


There's a more recent HPL discussion around here you may want to jump into, here: http://www.chronicles-network.net/forum/showthread.php?t=1022
 
China Mieville on HPL:


I'm currently very interested in Lovecraft, the pope of horror pulp: by all reasonable standards his prose style is terrible. But you can't put it down. There's something compelling about it. This neurotic fascination with language and what I like in fiction -- in any form -- is fiction that is conscious of its own use of language. Some pulp, and some non-pulp, uses language basically just to pass on information, which is a bit boring. What Lovecraft ironically shares with the Modernists like Joyce is the absolute physical awareness of the shape of the language itself. They do it in very different ways.
Click to expand...
From here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html
 
Hi I, Voyager - and welcome to the chronicles-network! :)

Especially as you have an interest in both HP Lovecraft - and apparently Trans Global Underground , too. :)

A friend of knivesout, perchance?
 
Horror and gothic too off topic....have you been to a playgoup recently?

One of my daughters 6 year old playmates informed me he likes drinking blood and is waiting for the return of the 'Great Old Ones'.....

What the hell happened to Winnie the Pooh.

ok....lets try and have a less predictable response than 'Cthulhu ate him'

:D
 
Tsujigiri said:
Horror and gothic too off topic....have you been to a playgoup recently?

One of my daughters 6 year old playmates informed me he likes drinking blood and is waiting for the return of the 'Great Old Ones'.....

What the hell happened to Winnie the Pooh.

ok....lets try and have a less predictable response than 'Cthulhu ate him'

:D
Click to expand...

Lol!!

And welcome to the chronicles network, Tsujigiri. :)
 
Hi everyone!

I try not to do this too often but I thought you may want to know I have just posted a short biography albeit over 2 posts on Howard Phillips Lovecraft in my Classic Fantasy Pre 1980s thread under the Books & Literature forum.

I'd normally wait for people to come across this thread but I felt that seeing this is the Lovecraft section of the forum you in particular may be interested in checking it out.

It's by no means a defintive piece, just an overview that will hopefully spark further interest in this author for those members who have not yet read or maybe even heard of HP Lovecraft and maybe even something new for the Lovecraft scholars amongst you.

All the best.:D
 
Lovecraft had a complicated life-he also seems to have had a morbid dread of sea-food!
HPL was a respected amateur astronomer, and was well educated, though self-taught, in scientific matters.
He was married for a time, and lived in New York, though he seperated from his wife and returned to Providence for the rest of his short life(HPL died of colon cancer at 47, so he was never an old man of Providence)
I think his greatest achievement was the Mythos itself-which was a combined effort by a group of pulp fiction writers, inspired by Lovecraft.
Howard, Smith, Leiber, and many more used the Mythos in their own stories, which added to the spookiness, as the concepts and references tended to come at you from several sources.
When Lovecraft was in eclipse, in the late '50's and into the sixties, I discovered the mythos, and thought it was a real supernatural belief system, from some obscure occult tradition.
Considering the occult underground of the days when HPL wrote-Crowley, Summers, Regardie, Seabrook,Waite and Mathers were all active during Lovecraft's lifetime, as was Charles Fort-there was no dearth of material.
Lovecraft added an aspect of science, since his creations were really extraterrestial creatures, with science so advanced as to embrace what we might call Magic.
As a brew, it worked quite well-I love it, and have been writing stories in the Mythos tradition for some time, just for my own satisfaction.
Influences that might be mentioned with Bierce and Machen(there's a revival, read them quick!) could include the generally execrable Robert W. Chambers(of all his screeds, the Yellow Sign is an effective tale, worth reading, the rest tend to be of the sighing, fainting on a chaise variety), William Hope Hodgeson and the neglected F.M. Crawford, among others.
For the fellow who wrote that he didn't know enough about the '20's to write a Mythos tale, well, the Mythos flourishes in that time, it's true, but there are Mythos stories set in every time period, including today.
The sixties, with the hippie occult revival and some very unrestrained experimentation along supernatural lines, might well yield a fine yarn indeed.
As for Cthulhu eating anyone, I can't remember any story where it ate anything at all-though if you wish to propitiate this mighty being, I've been told its preferred confection is a jelly candy called Grape Old Ones, but that's just a rumor.
 
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