Lovecraftian Horror

Ditto. I believe most people have from time to time felt misplaced in their contemporary surroundings, putting much of their essence into dreaming of either the future or the past. I can relate to that, as there is much about past time-periods that I'd want to experience, but preferably without all the drawbacks that go along with them. Lovecraft and Howard use very evocative language in telling their stories, which shows how they are trying to dream themselves into these places and time-periods.

That is just cherry picking the past. You gotta take the bad along with the good, if only so you can learn not to repeat the bad.

Besides, Lovecraft's writing doesn't so much evoke nostalgia as it does gut wrenching fear of the unknown.

That is the main reason it's so timeless despite everything. Because we as a species will never really stop being afraid of the unknown. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, since it's one of the driving forces to make the unknown known - so we can stop being afraid.

Edited by M84 on Mar 8th 2021 at 8:51:00 PM

Yeah, it is cherry-picking, but I know I would regret going to the past if it were possible. As much as I might enjoy 1930's pop-culture and fashion, I don't wish to personally experience the problems of that era. Romanticism and escapism depends on a lot of compartmentalizing and mental gymnastics, which I think is harmless as long as one will acknowledge that reality was seldom as glamorous. I think that the type of escapism can be seen with Lovecraft and Howard as well, even though it is much more evident with the latter.

Besides all the cosmic horror, HPL is also writing a love-letter to American Colonial architecture in most stories. You can see that he loved things connected to New England's past, alternately writing about how gorgeous he thinks the old houses are and despairing whenever these places are allowed to decay. While he did also have a strong affinity for Ancient Egypt and England, you can tell that there is a more book-ish and distant fascination expressed in the descriptions. He did express regret about never visiting the UK to personally experience it, but his Anglophilia is evident in many stories even when they aren't set there.

That's why we have stuff like medieval re-enactments. All the "good" bits of that time, and (hopefully) no cholera.

Exactly! I've seen photos of Howard and his friends doing some mock-battles for fun, so I think he might have been happy doing historical reenactment if he'd lived long enough. HPL seems like he might have joined an 18th-century LARP, wearing a powdered wig at a fancy villa.

So long as only white people were at the LARP of course. HPL would have thrown a fit at seeing a non-WASP LAR Ping it up.

Yeah, robert was always drawn to toward the barbarian, I think the best novel about this is almeric or as I call it "when robert write and isekai" were a man goes into a alien planet and have aventures there, is VERY much robert doing robert things there but the intro were the cientist talk about the chararter talk about how he feel temporally displace of his surrundings as whole, it is very intersting in that regard.

and with lovecraft.....one book I have said that lovecraft problem is that he mine his well of creative process early and he didnt do anything after that, it also said lovecraft reject some offer to better his life like becoming a editor of weird tales, in some regard lovecraft seen to devopt a sort of social agoraphobia.

Lovecraft notably wasn't a shut in. In Rhode Island, he loved jogging and tennis as well as was quite social.

Lovecraft basically hated anything that wasn't his hometown.

That is kinda like saying people are social for having a lot of facebook friends, lovecraft di dhave trouble with people in general.

What is intersting is reading the necronomicon files(a book dealing with the necronomicon myth and it said this:

"The mid-1930s seemed to observers to be the high point of Lovecraft’s career. He sold many stories to Weird Tales and other science fiction magazines, and was gaining a large number of fans. For most of his life, he had remained in Providence, but now he made a number of travels by bus and train as far away as Florida and New Orleans. He had dozens of correspondents from all over the country, and a young fan published his first book, The Shadow over Innsmouth. All outward signs indicated that Lovecraft was well on his way to a better life."

It seen lovecraft could have a btter life and maybe diferent outlook of it, I guess that is the thing with howy, isnt?: he is as tragic as it despicable a times.

I always get the guy who wrote Conan and the guy who wrote Tarzan and the guy who wrote John Carter confused.

The same guy wrote the latter two.

I just remember reading multiple biographies of the man and they all sort of agree, "Lovecraft wasn't a weird shut in. He was a racist bigot and Anglophile but had a normal active life in Providence. He attended the equivalent of literature cons and had many friends in normal life even if he wrote letters all day as his habit. He was not a weird shut in, he wrote about weird shut ins."

The key words are "in Providence".

He basically hated everything outside of his hometown. He especially hated living in New York, mostly because it had immigrants.

yeah but that was because he was a bigot and his wife's attempts to bring him out of his shell just pissed him off.

Among Lovecraft's stories The Terrible Old Man is an odd one, but I really enjoy it for the implications it offers about the titular Old Man's backstory. The story offers much room for expansion, with the antagonist being an unnaturally long-lived necromancer and former pirate-captain. I'm pretty sure that the Old Man was dealing with Joseph Curwen in his youth, supplying the wizard with ingredients for his sorcery.

The Terrible Old Man is one of the few Lovecraft stories that doesn't involve eldritch horrors.

Not obvious ones, at least. It's more like a prototype for Charles Dexter Ward, because the few hints we get imply that the Old Man works mostly like Curwen.

I think that I've found the real-life inspiration Lovecraft got when making the designs of the "Elder Things" from "At the Mountains of Madness"

Potatoes.

They are, appearance-wise, based on potatoes.

How do I know?

Because last tuesday, I found one... with a five-pointed star-arranged growth coming from its end, in the potato-shelf in the local grocery-store I'm visiting on a regular basis.

The similarity to the head of an "Elder Thing" was so uncanny that a light-bulb shone up in my head and my mind almost got blown apart from the revelation.

"Elder Things" = Potatoes.

Some kind of produce at any rate. There's a reason the text described them with the word "vegetable".

Knowing Lovecraft he would have seen eldritch horror in broccoli.

Edited by M84 on Nov 18th 2021 at 11:19:02 PM

At least Garth Marenghi did so.

Edited by Mara999 on Nov 29th 2021 at 5:54:34 PM

Crossposting from the Atop The Fourth Wall thread (due to his recent video on the At The Mountains Of Madness manga):

I'm reading "At the Mountains of Madness", and I'm amused that the Old Ones seem to prefer using animals for labour instead of machines, to the point of Flintstones technology, using Pterodactyls to lift stones instead of cranes.

I wonder how that part is going to come back in the manga. Seems like a lot of exposition for a visual medium.

Do we have a Lovecraft thread? I can't find it with the ever broken search engine.

I also noticed the manga seems to make some odd little changes - at least as Linkara reviews it. There were no human bones at all in that cave, and the man and dog who were dissected were done so rather inexpertly, and hardly to the extent depicted in the manga. The standing skeleton seems especially silly to me.

He seems to have a curious dislike of penguins too, if Mountains of Madness is any indication.

Edited by Redmess on Nov 29th 2021 at 4:59:14 PM

Potato flowers? You mean like these? I can't say I see the resemblance there. There are a lot of five-lobed flowers in nature, mind you, as well as five sided organizations in organism structures, like sea stars (It's called pentamerism for five-sided radial symmetry).

I rather more imagined a ridged sea cucumber for the body, octopi for the arms, and for the head we don't need to look much further than the common garden variety mole with its star shaped nose.

Is Underwater the first big screen depiction of Cthulhu? Because it would be disappointing if he first film appearance was in a movie so boring.

Posting since people do not seem to realize there is already a Lovecraft thread.