Love or Hate Craft?

[Tinsel]

This waiting and waiting for something to happen reminds me of Anne Rice's books about the witches, especially the old woman in the rocker. Nothing happened for three books!

With Lovecraft you can wait for something to happen if you are looking for answers, and that can only occur if he is dealing with subjects that have depth. Certainly he does this since he is describing a pagan cult and a God, that for all anyone knows is real, and for all anyone cares is real, since it relates back to his personal reflection on the dreams he was given.

 

[Nesacat]

Knivesout ... the horror is cosmic. It's not something you can wave garlic or silver at. So much of horror has been reduced to that in books and in the movies. It's not a mutated us. You can't just be a hero and fix it and live happily ever after.

We're not lords and masters of all we survey. We live and survive because we don't know. Great forces battled and they neither love or hate us. We just were in the way somehow. We're not the most important thing in the universe.

And in mattered in the big scheme of things that a boy lost a cat and a man needed to find the land of dreams. It's a call in your blood that so big and so strong you cannot fight it unless you kill yourself. I guess for me it made the universe a wonder again.

I'm not awfully good at explaining how I feel about this sort of writing. It feels sometimes as if I'm being asked to turn my insides out and show people how I tick so I hope this makes some sort of sense.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

No, I see what you mean. Thanks.

 

[j d worthington]

This waiting and waiting for something to happen reminds me of Anne Rice's books about the witches, especially the old woman in the rocker. Nothing happened for three books!

With Lovecraft you can wait for something to happen if you are looking for answers, and that can only occur if he is dealing with subjects that have depth. Certainly he does this since he is describing a pagan cult and a God, that for all anyone knows is real, and for all anyone cares is real, since it relates back to his personal reflection on the dreams he was given.

Not quite sure I follow you on some of this. Certainly, his dreams influenced his work; and occasionally he transferred portions of his dreams into his stories (only very rarely did he "dream a story" -- "The Statement of Randolph Carter" being the only full tale of that type)... but there are many other things going on with his writing, too; especially as late a tale as "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

At any rate, I'd like to hear more of what it is you are getting at here; it sounds interesting, but I'm not clear on some portions of it. Would you mind elaborating?

 

[Tinsel]

I have not been reading Lovecraft long enough to say very much on theories based on his stories, but certainly I see that he deals with paganism and physical transformation. I saw some similarity between the stories "The Lurking Fear" and "The Rats in the Walls". What I gather is that he tried to develop some of his ideas into a story but he used the same idea in more than one story. The later story was shorter but more effective and I thought that they dealt with the same idea in essence.

Yes, Dagon is a God and it is going to be interesting to read about him as Lovecraft wrote about him. Certainly Dagon could have had some influence through dreams. Well it is far to early for me to say very much at all here on this subject, but certainly there is something to understand in the future.

 

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I don't know if Paganism comes into it - Lovecraft was, as far as I know a rationalist and probably atheist. I think his whole approach to mysticism and magic in his stories seems to be ultimately reductionist - the dreaded gods are aliens, their powers are the attributes of lifeforms that are so advanced beyond our level that our notions of science seem laughable in comparison, and so on. The more credulous and 'degenerate' (in Lovecraft's terms) are drawn into the cults that surround these creatures, and ultimately they are merely minions, or even irrelevant to their plans.

However, his dreams were certainly very important to his creativity, and I agree that sometimes our dreams may tell us things that our conscious mind cannot.

 

[j d worthington]

On the subject of paganism... in his youth, Lovecraft had been a "genuine pagan", building altars to the gods of Graeco-Roman myth. While he left that sort of thing behind long before he became an adult, he always had a fair degree of emotional attachment to the classical sort of paganism; his feelings about other gods, however, are not recorded (so far as I can recall); and in all cases not dealing with the gods of classical mythology (save for the Dunsanian fantasies), Knivesout is quite correct: they are alien beings of one kind or another, not gods in any meaningful sense of the term. (Though W. H. Pugmire has argued quite eloquently that Yog-Sothoth in "The Dunwich Horror" may well be an exception to this rule.)

Nonetheless, your point about his using paganism and transformation as themes in his work is quite good, and well worth exploring....

 

[Tinsel]

The [...] Order of Dagon Hall is described by Newburyport residents as a semi-pagan religion, so I can see your point about alien heritage partially but not fully. There is hard core paganism in "Rats in the Walls" including sacrifice, but take "Shadow Over Innsmouth" where they used some symbolic object that they dropped into the water that called the frog/fish beings to the surface, which gives it an alien feel.

 

[Tinsel]

On the subject of paganism... in his youth, Lovecraft had been a "genuine pagan", building altars to the gods of Graeco-Roman myth. While he left that sort of thing behind long before he became an adult, he always had a fair degree of emotional attachment to the classical sort of paganism; his feelings about other gods, however, are not recorded (so far as I can recall); and in all cases not dealing with the gods of classical mythology (save for the Dunsanian fantasies), Knivesout is quite correct: they are alien beings of one kind or another, not gods in any meaningful sense of the term. (Though W. H. Pugmire has argued quite eloquently that Yog-Sothoth in "The Dunwich Horror" may well be an exception to this rule.)

Nonetheless, your point about his using paganism and transformation as themes in his work is quite good, and well worth exploring....

That is quite something. I read in his biography that he was influenced by "The Arabian Nights". If he was building alters, than he was practicing paganism to some degree or other. Well, I'm glad that he did, because it must have helped him to come up with a systemic rational which would be difficult to achieve given the subject matter. It reminds me of Indiana Jones, but only much better because there is more seriousness and depth in Lovecraft.

 

[J-WO]

Overall, the guy never rested on his laurels, always pushing his act forwards in some way or other. At present, I've a hankering to read his more SF tales-- Shadow Out of Time, The Colour out of Space etc, not forgetting The Walls of Eryx, though that was a collaboration of course. Forgive me if I'm wrong but they were all later tales weren't they? They seem to point to where HPL was going. In an alternate universe he lived to be the Guest of Honour at the first Worldcon.