Lovecraftian Horror

Come forth, beautiful reader, to the land of fish people, impossible geometry and homicidal cults - where madness is always just around the corner: New England!

But in seriousness, this isn't a thread about HP Lovecraft - or to be more precise, this isn't a thread just about him.

Obviously you're free to discuss stories like The Dunwich Horror, The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth if you so wish, but this thread is also about The Ballad of Black Tom, The Road to Providence, Lovecraft Country (the book, not the trope) - in other words, Lovecraftian fiction written by people other than Lovecraft.

So come forth, have fun, share your favorite works, and for the love of God, don't fuck the fish!

Trust me, the smell stays with you for life.

Edited by HailMuffins on Nov 18th 2019 at 11:42:27 AM

I've read a few of his short stories (or rather, had them read to me via the Wayne June audiobooks) and I do like their style, even if they seem to be too heavy on exposition at times.

BTW, good ol' ~Charles Phipps wrote in his blog his Top 15 Cthulhu and Lovecraft inspired stories.

Well, the ones not written by Stephen King.

If the universe and genre intrigues you but for whatever reason you can't stand the prose of Lovecraft, check it out, maybe something there catches your interest.

One of the few thing nobody tell you about lovecraft story is how much the man itself apear in the works.

Like, there is one were there is a character called howard who talked about he wanted to revolutionize horror, in others the character mention reading lovecraft and how awsome he is, damn bloch make a story were loveacraft itself(by name) is in the story and die by a star vampire.....

And the lovecraft answer that by making a sequel were the main chararter is bloch finding what killed lovecraft....and ending with him being having a fatal encounter with nyarlothep itself.

It fucking hilarious.

I read Dagon today. I'm surprised how it's a lot more comprehensible than I expected from his reputation.

Most of the help in Lovecraft is in show (or, if anything, lack of show) don't tell. We're left to our own imagination to think about how horrific everything is.

My big takeaway after reading a whole bunch of Lovecraft's stories is that I think people are in love with the idea of Lovecraft's writing more than what he actually wrote a lot of the time. His stories often contain these weird moments that undercut the existential horror of what he's going for.

Like, having a spawn of Yog-Sagoth be defeated first by a university librarian telling it to go away, then by a dog. Or having Nyarlathotep running away from the cops. Or having the military blow up Innsmouth.

For the record I find all these moments genuinely hilarious.

Edited by GNinja on Nov 22nd 2019 at 1:44:42 PM

How all the monsters are defeated by stupidly mundane means? Yeah.

Even if in SOI the military didn't completely destroy the Deep One city beneath Innsmouth, the fact that they can be so badly mauled by stuff like that kind of diminishes the threat level.

Well, at least we know that the most effective method of dealing with cosmic horros is by running them over with a boat.

Nyarlathotep running away from the cops at the end of Dreams in the Witch House is still my favourite. Purely because of Lovecraft's choice of words.

He could've just described the "dark man" as not being found at the scene when the police arrived. All you need is to imply that he vanished through some unknowable teleportation. The whole story is about portals and transportation to other realms anyway. It wouldn't have been out of place to have a character vanish into thin air.

But no, he's seen fleeing the area.

I recommend these books if you like Cthulhu Mythos fiction written by modern authors.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2019/08/neo-cthulhu-mythos-book-recommendations.html

I just finished a Delta Green one shot, playing as US Marines in a raid on Innsmouth not long after the events of The Shadow Over Innsmouth - that was a ride and a half

I remember reading this Dark Osprey book that talks about the US and having a secret war against the Mythos all over the world.

I'm on a bit of a Cosmic Horror Story kick lately. I can only assume it's from a signal compelling me to get use to the ideas so they can widen out my brain and use it as a portal to invade our dimension. Shame a lot of them have pretty miss.

I have the Necronomicon collection at home and I've read online most of the stories not featured in it. I really like Lovecraftian cosmic horror, especially if the stories are set prior to the mid-20th century. That's mainly for aesthetic reasons, because overall I like media set in the past and I prefer to see the human protagonists dressed in period clothing. That's why I am honestly a bit biased against adaptations set in modern times nd would want to see more Lovecraft-films set in the earlier parts of the 20th century, or maybe even during earlier centuries. That's why I love the HPLHS' work and have tried my hand a few times at making my own short-films.

If all of Lovecraft's various horrors, I'd say that the Flying Polyps are the ones that creep me out the most. Even though they never actually appear in the one story where they are mentioned.

I guess part of it is the game Callof Cthulhu Dark Corners Of The Earth where the entire game turns out to be a complicated scheme of the Great Race of Yith to stop a pair of Flying Polyps whose seal is weakening from wrecking havoc.

There is also the aspect of medical paranoia with the Polyps. They are more or less a cancerous growth, waiting to kill the world from the inside.

The name "polyp" is a bit on the nose, but it works.

Something I've thought about is the pronunciation of various Mythos-entities' names and such. I know the names aren't meant to be pronounced by human vocal-chords, but people will still try to form their own idea of how the names might sound. I imagine that a reader's own language will affect how they imagine these names to sound when spoken. I'm not an English-speaker, but a Swedish-speaking Finn with an older, harsher-sounding dialect than those living in Sweden. So all the Lovecraftian names I read sound in my head the way vowels and consonants sound in my environment, especially as Finnish is almost always written the way it is pronounced.

For instance, to me Cthulhu would sound like a "Koo-tool-hoo", with each "u" sounding similar to how they say "Khazad-Dum" in Lord of the Rings. Same with Shub-Niggurath, which has never sounded anywhere close to n***er-ath to me, because I imagine all the vowels and consonants being harshly enunciated. More like "Shoob-Nigg-oo-Raath".

Edited by Mara999 on Oct 29th 2020 at 9:26:27 PM

I know that I have a "pet pronunciation" for "Cthulhu". It doesn't well fit into text, but it's more or less a back-of-the-mouth, slightly throaty, slightly "wet", slightly slurred-together reading of the word; in particular, the "cth" becomes a sort of soft "klh"-sound.

To me it has always sounded very strange how it is pronounced "cloo-loo" by some. Even though the common "coo-foo-loo" makes more sense, I naturally want a harsher t-sound in the pronunciation. Hence it becomes closer to "koo-tool-hoo" to me.

Khlûl'-hloo was Lovecraft's pronunciation. But as mentioned above, the name was invented by beings that didn't have human vocal organs, so it can never be properly uttered by humans anyway. Even Lovecraft's pronunciation is only supposed to be a crude approximation.

So given that, we might as well pronounce such names however we want. It's not like pronouncing Cthulhu's name correctly will make him any less likely to drive us all mad when the stars are right and he awakens from R'lyeh.

True. One reason I started thinking about this, is that I've seen let's-plays and other videos where people are hesitant to say Shub-Niggurath's name out loud. I understand that to English-speakers it sounds very close to n***er, but I think of it more like a faux-Mesopotamian name, with harsher vowels. Something like "Shoob-ni-goo-raath".

Probably doesn't help that Lovecraft was a massive bigot himself, so maybe the offensive pronunciation was entirely deliberate.

But hey, since none of these names are supposed to be ones humans can say correctly, why not use a pronunciation that doesn't resemble a racial epithet?

Edited by M84 on Oct 31st 2020 at 10:20:25 PM

I think it was intentional in the way that "niggurath" is possibly a corruption of the Latin word for "black", which fits with the epithet "Black Goat of the Woods" and is thus kinda clever. As for whether it intentionally is connected with the slur against black people, I don't know. Maybe? That too is a corruption of niger, as Spanish- and Portuguese-speakers were at one point the main deliverers of Africans slaves. Because of the Latin connection I imagine the "i" to sound different than in most English words, closer to "ee".