Getting into Lovecraft

I can recommend the B&N Complete Fiction if lack of illustrations doesn't bother you. If you get it, though, make absolutely sure that it's a copy with silver-lined pages, not gold, because the gold-lined edition has more typos than My Immortal. Also before each story there's a blurb from S.T. Joshi giving some background on the story's publication history (though some of said blurbs spoil the endings). It also includes a few very early stories and the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. However, it lacks all but two of H.P.'s collaborations and all his poetry - no Fungi from Yuggoth unfortunately.

Can you give a link to the silver lined pages edition in some store? Maybe Amazon? (I will be buying some Pathfinder RPG stuff in the close future, so I might as well get H.P Lovecraft's collection at the same time.)

Here's the link on Amazon, though I can't tell which version of it you'd get through there as it has pictures of both versions. Here's the Barnes & Noble page, but it only has pictures of the gold version, so again no idea what version you'd get ordering it through them. When I actually go in the store, though, I've only seen the silver version for several months.

Don't overlook Lovecraft's contributions to fantasy literature, as opposed to just horror. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the related Silver Key stories are set in a fantasy world formed by dreams and imagination. It's a lot different from his Mythos fiction, although it is tangentially connected.

It was written during the Pulp Era, when Howard's Conan and various Clark Ashton Smith Atlantean stories were the mainstay of fantasy fiction, long before Tolkien arrived on the scene like a mythopoeic god. Yes, Conan the Barbarian is contemporary with Cthulhu, several decades before the Lord of the Rings hit the mainstream.

What made Lovecraft's 'Dreamlands' unique was its connection to the normal world; it was a place we as ordinary people could visit every night in dreams, especially with lucid dreams (which are a real thing). He himself apparently suffered frequent vivid and intense dreams, including nightmares. He talks about the 'Night Gaunts' which are creatures he took from his dreams.

It's not a very rigorous or highly developed milieu, but that's normal for authors before the Great Age of Merchandising. There was never an attempt to build the kind of internal consistency that could easily be gamified; rather the aesthetic fantasy/horror authors of that time were going for, what they would give their literary eyeteeth to make the reader feel, was that sense of wonder, imagination, horror...

So putting stats on a creature like Yog-Sothoth and pretending a player character can kill it is antithetical to the whole Mythos; you cannot kill it, no more than you can give Hamlet hit points and a sword; it is a debasement of the original art and the emotional effect they intend.

Lovecraft explains the aesthetic effect he is going for quite clearly in his non-fiction essay about supernatural literature, which ought to be in any syllabus about fantastic literature and read by anyone deeply interested in this kind of writing. You can compare it with what Stephen King has to say in Danse Macabre, where King straight up admits if he can't horrify you, he tries to scare you, and if he can't scare you, he'll just gross you out. Lovecraftean horror is never about the gross-out, it is about cosmic horror: a 19th century worldview confronted with then-revolutionary 20th century physics and astronomy, the absolute shattering in the anthrocentric myth of a universe centered around Earth and our sun. Lovecraftean fantasy is all about the sense of child-like wonder of magic and fairy-tales like the Arabian Nights, which he loved.

Chaosium even released an RPG supplement set in Lovecraft's Dreamlands. It remains one of the more unique fantasy settings to be published, along with Tekel, as opposed to all the Tolkien clones funneled through D&D which permeate anime and videogames. Don't get me wrong, I'm not slagging Tolkien, he is a Titan of the field. But his influence is so overpowering people forget there was original fantasy before he arrived and they seem to think they are being original when they reject the tropes they inherited from that branch of fantasy although in truth they are not, they simply aren't widely read enough in the field to understand the whole tradition.

edited 11th Sep '12 10:48:43 AM by Kanomi

What you said about Cosmic Horror Story is the reason I completely flip out when I see people saying that Lovecraftian horror is all about grossing people out with slime and tentacles.

edited 13th Sep '12 1:51:22 PM by DoktorvonEurotrash

^^Could I have the name of Lovecraft's essay on supernatural fiction? It sounds like an interesting read.

It's called Supernatural Horror in Literature.

It can be read online here.

^ and ^^: Thank you!

I love Supernatural Horror In Literature. Wonderful essay.

Turns out I was correct and this was not the thread for this question. Moved.

To stay on topic, my favorite Lovecraft stories are "The Color Out Of Space" (because of reasons I mention below) and "The Music of Erich Zann", which appear to be everyone else's favorites as well.

And to the person asking about dialogue, it gets worse. He writes in dialect, so much so that every single vowel change is written out. Try reading the spaniards' dialogue in "Cool Air".

edited 17th Sep '12 3:33:59 PM by KhittyHawk

Kinda sounds like a colour out of space to me.

Yeah, I might have aped the Color a bit too much; it's one of my favorite stories, and it includes some of my personal fears: decay and dementia. I don't know if my monster is a color though; both their means and effect are the same, but while the color just terrorized a single home, this monster could consume all of earth, and its shape is much different.

You should probably talk about this in the World Building forum; Literature is really focused on talking about other people's works rather than one's own.

So, like the first post I knew about Cthulu through pop culture. Well, I admit I have a mild macabre/morbid streak and I have always wanted to read the mythos. Actually read The Call of Cthulu and all those things. I remember spending an hour or more just reading what I could find on The Other Wiki. And well, at Barnes and Nobles I found... A book that has all his works for like 30 or 40 bucks with tax. I snapped it up (it also has a wicked hard cover). I've just been reading in.. I suppose chronological order from times of writing.

I have just finished Polaris. I rather liked it.

"Polaris" is nice. I like the fact that there really isn't a stereotypical horror ending to it but it still has this uneasy, dreamy feeling throughout.

Really? I got mine in '08 for about $13.

The Complete Fiction? It's $20 here. Where they heck are they selling it for twice that???

Whatever you do, do not pick up Cthulhu's Reign. It's pretty much the most gawdawful piece of so-called 'Lovecraftian' fanfiction I've ever read. You have a woman tentacle raped by a Mini-Cthulhu (Yes really.), a Psychic Authistic Kid (Again, yes really.), and an intergalactic resistance of space elves (YES FREAKING REALLY.) who fight against the 'eeeevil' Elder Things and their Shoggoths (Who, by the way, overthrew the Great Old Ones after the Strange Aeon).

I know I'm sounding a little harsh, but c'mon. Even Derleth wouldn't write that crap.

That actually sounds So Bad, It's Good. And although this will probably get me stoned I actually like Derleth's work better than Lovecraft. I prefer my fiction escapist.

Stone the heretic.

That's an odd position to take, but it intrigues me. How do you feel about Clark Ashton Smith?

(I personally prefer Machen and Ligotti to Lovecraft as short story writers; they are both stronger prose stylists, and I find their story structures more interesting.)

I actually do own that book, though I've only actually read the first story (the one with Minithulu tentacle rape). To this day, I am unsure if that was meant to be taken seriously or not.

I wrote a post-apocalypse Cthulhu Mythos novel called Cthulhu Armageddon and for research, I read a lot of books.

The best Lovecraft ones are:

• The Colour from Out of Space
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Dunwich Horror
• At the Mountains of Madness
• The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• The Shadow over Innsmouth

The ones I enjoyed most which weren't Lovecraft are:

• Brian Lumley's Titus Crow series
• Peter Cline's 13 and The Fold
• The Litany of the Earth
• Cthulhu Attacks! by Sean Hoade

Haven't read enough Clarke Ashton Smith to judge. The reason I prefer Derleth is that Lovecraft's whiny hopelessness annoys me. I get enough of that from myself. So Lovecraft Lite, which Lovecraft himself wrote some of is my beverage of choice.

You forgot Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath. Along with "Mountains of Madness" and "Dreams in the Witch House" it's definitely my favorite work by him