Getting into Lovecraft

You're right, I did. The Dream Cycle is awesome and not nearly as depressing as Lovecraft usually is.

I also think Derleth gets a bad reputation as his books aren't exactly shiny-happy fun either. THE TRAIL OF CTHULHU has R'lyeh nuked but not only doesn't it work but the Cult of Cthulhu starts tracking down the survivors to murder.

Still, they manage to DELAY armageddon and that's worth it.

It's been a very, very long time since I read it but I thought that delaying it was the whole point of the nuking, that they knew Cthulhu couldn't be destroyed just, hopefully, that his rising could be put off for their lifetimes.

Everyone but the POV thinks Cthulhu is dead but he knows it's not true because he turns out to be a Deep One hybrid.

But still, Bittersweet Ending at its core.

First off... Someone should amend the title so that it's clear that this is the general thread for discussing the Cthulhu Mythos; for example, "Cthulhu Mythos general discussion".

Second, the question that I sought out this thread for: Is there any remotely official guideline for how to pronounce the "ch" in the name of Atlach-Nacha, the Great Old One created by Clark Ashton Smith?

I think the Call of Cthulhu RPG had it as "AWT-lock-NA-cha". Although as per tradition, anything goes.

edited 1st Aug '17 1:40:51 AM by TerminusEst

For anyone interested, here is a set of articles regarding Lovecraft, his successors, and some context of what's going on in the real world at the time.

I here, I want to start reading lovecraft, is there any book I should start?

There isn't any order to Lovecraft's stories - they are all pretty self-contained. You could start with The Call of Cthulhu itself to get a "typical" story. Some of my favorites are The Colour Out of Space (which I believe Lovecraft said was his own favorite) and The Rats in the Walls (sort of an Edgar Alan Poe pastiche, but quite good). I also rather like The Doom that Came to Sarnath which is probably Lovecraft's best "Dunsanian" story.

edited 25th Sep '17 12:14:13 PM by Bense

I wouldn't start with the "Dunsanian" stories. Some are good, but they're a very mixed bag, and Lovecraft wouldn't be famous if they'd been all he wrote. Any of the famous Cthulhu stories or novellas are pretty good—and luckily, those are exactly what the most popular Lovecraft books consist of, for the most part!

I'll second "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour out of Space"; Some other good choices would be At the Mountains of Madness, "The Dunwich Horror," and the underrated "The Haunter in the Dark."

The Colour Out of Space, definitely. It's short, fairly legible, and sums up Lovecraft's philosophy- that the universe is vast, and indifferent to mankind, and we are surrounded by dangers that we don't comprehend. As a bonus, there's no racism or excessively purple prose. My second favorite is The Shunned House. It's a good example of Lovecraft's magic stories, as opposed to Colour's aliens.

The Shunned House also has an example of one of the weirder vampires in fiction.

My own favorites would be "Beyond the Mountains of Madness", "Dreams in the Witch House" and Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.

I agree that The Colour Out Of Space is one of his best. It feels like hard speculative fiction, and less like fantasy with a pseudoscientific cover, like most of his stories. The one flaw in it is that the third-person narration detaches the reader from fully feeling the horror.

Call of Cthulhu was mediocre at the time and has become worse with age as every facet has become a cliché, but it's still interesting to see where the clichés started. And it's fairly short.

However I also love two very short (less than 3 pages) stories from his early days that are less cosmic horror than surrealism: Nyarlathotep and Celephais. His purple prose works best here as he describes a dream world, bewildering and menacing in the first, beautiful and glorious in the second. They are also among the least influential in what we now call lovecraftian fiction.

That's a problem with a lot of his third-person narratives. Lovecraft said he was trying to present it as a dispassionate report on the known facts of the matter (or something like that), which is why he strives for scientific accuracy (except when he doesn't). But I find it can suck a lot of tension from the book. My favorite Lovecraft adaptations, by INJ Culbard give the exposition to other characters. So when Charles Dexter Ward is discussing his ancestor's sinister history, we get the facts of the matter, and a taste of who Charles is.

I kinda like The Colour Out of Space precisely because it's so dispassionate. For one, I like the nigh science fiction angle - it's basically like a more horrifying version of the Zone from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. And it kinda shows the more clinical reaction of an objective observer, rather than the typically already unhinged protagonists of Lovecraft's works. More to the point though, it perfectly encapsulates Lovecraft's Cosmicism - the view that things, even as horrifying as this, just happen, with no rhyme or reason we can relate to. The Colour is not some malicious curse or an evil invader. It could be a random piece of space junk. There's no point to it... which is the point of it.

For that matter, I find a lot of Lovecraftian horror to depend predominantly on the perspective of the protagonist. From my experience, the flanderization that everyone goes insane and/or dies is patently untrue. Same goes for the idea that the more a person knows of the things out there, the more insane they get. By far, the people who best endure meetings with the various eldritch abominations are the ones most learned, such as Prof. Armitage of The Dunwich Horror or Dyer from At the Mountains of Madness.

And in turn, the people whose sanity shatters are the ones affected personally by the encounter, such as the protagonist of The Rats in the Walls, who learns dark and horrible things about himself, rather than the cosmos. Similarly, the guy from Dagon seems to have gone insane out of the sheer paranoia that people would think him insane should he ever reveal what he saw. This mirrors Lovecraft's own fears about his genealogy and family mental history, but has little bearing on how horrifying the encountered creatures themselves are.

All in all, I'm still trying to figure out just which ideas and to what extent are present in the original works, and which are just exaggerations from later sources, particularly the Call of Cthulhu game.

edited 25th Nov '17 12:19:42 PM by indiana404

Well, I just read call of cthulhu, I have to admit I was surprise of it, it feel more like essay and worldbulding than a proper story, it was fairly entretaing in general, I can see why it started the whole thing.

The first Lovecraft story I ever read (well, listened to, since it was an audiobook) was The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which I think is one of the most quintessential Lovecraft stories.

I'm not sure if this is the place to ask, but is Cthulhu evil or Blue-and-Orange? I'm not overly familiar with the mythos, but when I've researched the topic I usually come across mention that Cthulhu is technically not evil, but I'm having trouble finding anything elaborating the exact mechanics of what makes Cthulhu non-evil.

He's an alien evangelist preaching a faith that humans are not physically equipped to practice. It's a perspective-flipped colonial narrative from a guy who was broadly OK with colonialism - what if we (wealthy white people) are the inferior savages who wither in the light of superior civilisation?

I think my personal favourite story of Lovecraft's is The Thing on the Doorstep.

Because it's a rare Lovecraft story where I really liked the characters, not just the situation they were involved in. I felt bad for the primary character (not the narrator himself, but his friend who he's mainly talking about for the whole story) and I wanted him to gain some measure of control over what was happening to him. That's not normally how it goes with Lovecraft for me. Normally I'm sitting there eagerly anticipating whatever horrific event is going to befall the characters next.

My favourite Lovecraft story is Call of Cthulhu, mainly because of Cthulhu and the Sydney Alert part of the story that made it seem like an actual journal

The Colour Out of Space. There's just something truly horrible about being compelled to stay and have the life drained out of you, and knowing you are being compelled to stay, yet not being able to do anything about it. The colour itself is also a very good villain in its sheer alienness.

Hi, I've read Colour out of Space a few times but now reading what you've put, I'm wondering about the whole context of the story.

If anyone is interested in non-Lovecraft Cthulhu novels, I just made a list of 15 recommended pastiches. https://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2019/08/neo-cthulhu-mythos-book-recommendations.html

Are the Old Ones really the white people though? I always thought that Innsmouth was a race war equivalent where less civilized and degenerate heathens would overrun civilization if allowed to breed too much.