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Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (2008)
the course of HP Lovecraft's life was altered by an unfortunate madness
in April of 1893, his father a commercial traveler from the vicinity of Boston was on business in Chicago it was there that Winfield Scott Lovecraft experienced the general paralysis of the insane Winfield's violent hallucinations were soon placed him in Butler Hospital his troubled wife, Susan Phillips Lovecraft was forced to return home to her family in Providence, Rhode Island with Susie was her two-year-old son, Howard Phillips Lovecraft today, the man readers of weirdfiction known as HP Lovecraft is ranked alongside America's best writers He defined the themes and obsessions of 20th century horror and as we chug on into the 21st century, he doesn't seem to be going away he let drop away all the trappings of what is called "horror" and he moved into some narrative peculiar to himself, invented his own genre really Lovecraft tells you about the scale of man in the cosmos and also he is really the most articulate about saying, there isn't any indifference from the ancient gods to man Lovecraft takes that optical empty to the cosmos If you could think of a kind of supernatural horror fiction it's almost certain that at some point in his career Lovecraft applied himself to it and when he got it right that he often did, nobody could beat him these are the unspeakable names of the Old Ones the very heart of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos a loosely connected canon, which has gone on to became one of literature's most influential creations I don't know that Lovecraft ever set down initially and went: "I'm going to grow a grand mythos" I think that, yes it begins and then everything else sort of fits in it it's a very complex sort of inbreeding of mythologies and what essentially the pitch would be what, things much older than mankind things much older than earth are gazing upon on us with indifference and cruelty those Old Ones were gone now hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway these kind of being are you know that demons coming from hell there are these wired tentacle creatures coming from other worlds into ours and that they have been banished and that they will return someday and regain what was once theirs the Old Ones of the universe, the Old ones of the Cosmos so that's force beyond us that we are incapable of controlling and that force there is the universe that is vaster than we could ever comprehend prior to Lovecraft, if you read horror, if you read ghost stories you'll always have a vision of a world which is fundamentally hospitable: "god is looking after you"god is looking after the good people" good people will probably survive horror stories or ghost stories or whatever Lovecraft redefined things He took it away from the ghost story away, from the gothic and into this vision of a malign world, this place surrounded by evil mad horrible monstrous things always trying to get in who frankly don't really care about us But what lied in an old world xenophobic gentleman to write these tales of unknown abominations and cosmic gods where bay and tranquil river blend and leafy hillsides rise the spires of Providence ascend against the ancient skies and in the narrow winding ways that climb o'er slope and crest the magic of forgotten days may still be found to rest I AM PROVIDENCE the Phillips' house at 454 Angell Street was a vast-stage of old American values Lovecraft's family was very well to do and I believe they consider themselves to be of the Providence aristocracy the Phillips line goes back very far in Providence history all the way as early as the late 17th century the Lovecraft side originates in England, and you could trace that all the way back to about the 15th century there were Lovecrafts or Lovecrofts in Devon he was a truly, almost a "Mayflower"specimen preserved in the formaldehyde of New England you know and he was an Anglophile that definitely did not get laid much you know and the guy that was an alien amongst us, in the sense that he was not a very masculine child after Winfield's death from syphilis on July 19th 1898 young Howard was all Suzie Lovecraft had left she mothered her child incessantly so much so, that she was known to make friends stoop when walking hand-in-hand with her son for fear his arm would be pull from its socket despite her over attention Suzie Lovecraft's near puritanical views restrained any physical affections toward her son Lovecraft would later admit to his only wife that this form of mothering was a devastating to him his grandfather Whipple Phillips, was a very impressive industrialist Lovecraft remembers Whipple telling him oral ghost stories at the age of 4 or 5 he tutored him in a number of other ways, trying to take an interest into his education in the attic was an immense library presumably collected by his grandfather and Lovecraft went up there as a boy with a candle secretly and started reading these old books and fell in love with the 18th century Lovecraft is more than a product of his time he is a product of a couple of centuries earlier, so he was born out of time one of the important things for the 18th century was the code of a gentleman to live as a gentleman with dignity and honesty and integrity he read the literature of the 18th century and the early 19th century and said "I want to be like those people I want to be like Alexander Pope" who wrote poetry just for the love of it" I've always had this subconscious feeling that, everything since the 18th century is unreal or illusory a sort of grotesque nightmare or a caricature" Lovecraft learned a lot in his grandfather's house in fact that all the learning that he had I think came from there his schooling was intermittent at best apparently he had various of nervous melody that had kept him out of school this was a time before education was mandatory you didn't have to send your child to school if you didn't want to at the age of 8 he would became filled with burning love of chemistry shortly there after that he discovered astronomy, which I think was an even more important influence he says it was through astronomy that he gained a sense of the boundlessness of the universe and the insignificance of humanity within the cosmos there's a phrase that generally I only encountered it when talking when reading or talking with people like paleontologist or geologist the kinds of "Deep Time" which is pretty alien to most people, most people tend to think of history and terms ofyears "Deep Time" is that time before, before the comprehension of man the geological time is a way of thinking about it where you are working on a time scale where you talk about things like mountains are pushed up in row, continent shift spices evolve and became extinct but it is not something you could process humanity was limited to earth which made humanity itself small and threatened and fragile, so because he was a frightened and fragile being himself he populated that emptiness with monsters frequent visits to the attic gave Susie the impression that her son was trying to hide from the world and others that he was a vulnerable child and comfortable with himself the relationship of Susie Lovecraft with her son was problematical at best clearly she loved him but I think because of what had happened to her husband, Lovecraft's father who had died of syphilis I think she developed some weird love-hate relationship with Lovecraft called him hideous, said to a neighbor that he had hideous face and that's why he wouldn't go outdoors much Susie repeated these opinions enough times that her son actually grew to believe them insecurity mixed with classical tendencies segregated young Lovecraft from others his age but this solitary childhood, only kindled his imagination I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare in which a monstrous race of entities, called by me 'Night-Gaunts' usedtosnatch me up by the stomach, they carried me up through infinite leagues of black air over the towers of dead and horrible cities with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrousperversions of geometrical laws feeding his taste for the macabre was the recent discovery of tales by Edgar Allan Poe Lovecraft is the most significant descendant of Poe and you can see that heritage most clearly in those early stories that evoke affects such as those in "The Tell-Tale Heart", say "The Tell-Tale Heart" could have been written by Lovecraft he may have wanted to be a little like Edgar Allan Poe but he went into a whole different direction with his imagination you know Poe talked about how short stories should be everything should be there to create one particular affect whereas Lovecraft I think goes for much moresort of a bigger canvas somehow than Poe did in his teenage years, Lovecraft would attempt quiet a few of stories in the Poe style most however, were destroyed by Lovecraft I think too many writers are too hard on themselves had to be said that, you know Lovecraft epitomized this trend and I actually thinks that there's one positive thing to be bought from that, he was a great writer I think you know, any writer who feels down about their own work should read Lovecraft's comments about his own work he almost never has a good thing to say about his own work this may be a kind of version of what he perceived as "good manners" because there's no doubt that he would have thought it's very ill-mannered to praise his own work I think that Lovecraft was full of insecurities at that time, he really didn't know what to pursue in terms of a career maybe he didn't feel that he needed a career at least in terms of the money because he felt that the money would always be there but shortly there after he discovered that the money wasn't gonna be there in 1904, Whipple Phillips was already suffering from poor investments in a failed dam project the stress of it all no doubt tribute to his death on March 28th, 1908 the house on Angell Street was sold the library that schooled Lovecraft for 12 years went with it he loved that place, it was there he knew the only security he ever had even though with only 3 blocks away, the new home Susie had picked for her son was an unknown country though high-school would offer some enjoyment Lovecraft was vexed by the subjects that escaped him Lovecraft said he had a full scale nervous break-down we don't really know what that means I personally believed that it was the result of his discovery that his lack of knowledge or lack of proficient in mathematics prevented him from pursuing a career as astronomer in the summer of 1908, he simply left school and never returned Lovecraft's reclusion would last from 1908 until 1917 judging from his letters, this break-down had all the remarks of a deep depression I shall know human society that had givenmyself too much but a failure in life to be seen socially by those who had known me as a youth they foolishly expected great things of me Lovecraft himself was a pretty crazy person, he was kind of nuts, wondering around I don't, I don't mean, I think "eccentric" is a better word even for his time, he must have been not only a recluse but an oddity he would go out occasionally apparently, and people saw him walking down the street in a raincoat with the flapps up to his collar and and looking straight ahead not try to make eye contact with anybody one activity that endured through this period was his reading this exposed Lovecraft to the amateur pulp magazines that would one day be the ablert of his own work I think amateur journalism saved Lovecraft both as a writer and as a human being there was Lovecraft in 1913, 1914 basically rotting away, he clearly didn't know what to do with himself and then all of a sudden here was this small world of amateur journalism where there are other people like him trying to be writers but not writing for money and I think for that moment, that was important to Lovecraft because amateur journalism was a kind of school for writers Lovecraft went on to publish his own amateur magazine "The Conservative" in its pages he exhibited a strong passion for the beliefs he formed during his isolation including a pronouncedxenophobia the most alarming tendency observable in this age is a growing disregard for the established forces of law and order weather or not stimulated by the noxious example of the almost subhuman Russian rabble the less intelligent element throughout the world seems animated by a singular viciousness every artist with every work of art is a product of his or her time and he reflected that a lot of very American feelings the feelings he had intellectually with beliefs in racism and so on are reprehensible they were then as they are now, and yet in a sense you can't expect the guy to leap out of his skin at modernsensibilities he has this really, this really archaicbudging idea that for society to be stable then it had to be homogeneous he just didn't like to see the culture he knew go down to drain which he felt would happen just by erosion as more and more immigrants came sort of a "Pat Buchanan" kind of a thing this absolutely genuinely worry of the evils of breeding, of mixed breeding and breeding in general I suppose you know the evils of taking purity with an almost Aryan sense of pride regardless, "The Conservative" attracted fellow amateurs both sympathetic and contrary they were attracted by Lovecraft's erudite mind and as a result Lovecraft developed very close ties to a number of these amateur journalists, and these became life-long friends of his they exchange many many letters even after they had left the amateur journalism movement and he kind of found his home in a magazine like that or another magazine, fan magazines that he wrote for and he found a lot of like-minded souls out there would read his stuff and really love them and he developed followers, I mean it's almost like a cult to them and himself he wrote so many letters in such white heat and such intensity and such length that it's easy to suppose that he sacrifice stories to his correspondence I believe he had token like over 120000 letters written and these letters are in short pieces too, I mean they are copious, and pages and pages of details and notes or suggestions on how to improve their own writing as the web of his correspondents grew it also allowed Lovecraft to test early stories on respected readers in 1919, an armaturejournal called the "The Vagrant" took notice "Dagon" was the first of Lovecraft's stories to be printed a captured sailor escapes German sea-raiders only to come aground on a stretch of sea bottom forced up , by a volcanic upheaval the region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish and of other less describable things, which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain it's got this awful sense of atmosphere that this poor guy is out in the middle of nowhere surely doomed with a black sun scouring on, what an image as the sailor explores the riff, he discovers a cyclopean monolith whose carved surface depicts a race of an ancient fish-man they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet shockingly wide and flabby lips,glassy, bulging eyes and other features less pleasant to recall Suddenly all hell breaks loose with this huge "Charlie Tuna"character coming out and embracing this monolith and then at the end what happens is that narrator just demented he is now on the other side of the world but afraid old Charlie's following him and he is: "Oh my God! That thing in the window!" well, has this creature followed him, or is he just plain nuts, we don't know but either way it's a great little story but you know, you have it there, you've got the creature from the cyclopean creatures from the sea is virtual Cthulhu in miniature "Dagon" and other stories from this period would set the Lovcraftianmodel scholarly people discovering violations of natural law and being driven towards madness or death it's also exhibited Lovecraft's use of baroque description and subjective adjectives one of the clich notions of Lovecraft propounded by people don't very like his work, usually you know is that he only has one style that consisted mostly or partly on the adjectives like, um, "Over the eldritch town of Daleech" the gibbous moon hung illuminating the squamous and batrachians inhabitants" what he is saying that is just that, um, you know the moon was nearly full over the weird town of Daleech, and everybody who lived there were bloody peculiar frogs what Lovecraft is, a baroque writer as that he goes in and carefully modulates these over ripe incredibly complicated physiologies and sentences and style but it's all his own if you meet Lovecraft for the first time as an adult you do kind of have to learn how to read him it's not a modern style it's not a strip-down style it's not a very efficient style and there are many many things about it that is erasable He will pick a few words and over use them appallingly "Eldritch", "Gibbous" a lot of his stories are ??? nothing happens especially nothing happens to the narrator they are just people who start terrified and they end up terrified And there are other things you can make fun of him for: the tendency to write in the first person, and to keep writing the ultimate parodic Lovecraftian phrase is somebody going mad while writing and something's coming up: "I can hear them now coming up the steps their hellish tentacles are scrumming at the door ah, Shub-Niggrath, the beast with a thousand youngfhtagn fhtagn" and it's done, dot dot dot you disappear in a burst of ellipsis of italics it's a style that incredibly anal retentive and you know this guy went over it and over it and over it until he made the combination that to his taste which maybe gaudy to some it wasn't a perfectbalance one thing that influenced this purple style was Lovecraft's current fascination with the writing of Lord Dunsany Dunsany wrote these magical little tales of dreamlands and gods and he has this amazing prose style influenced by the King James bible and apparently nothing else Lovecraft was very taken by Dunsany's creation of a mythical pantheon of gods and Lovecraft eventually admitted that, that's how he come to write the stories of the of the Cthulhu mythos he took those Dunsanian gods which are setting in a fantasy world and put them into the real world, and that's how he came up with his own cosmic mythology though Lovecraft was now a published author pursuing payment for what was only to be a personal pleasure was far from his idea of a gentleman: an existence that enjoy "being " rather than "doing" his fellow amateurs urged Lovecraft to go against his anti-commercialism and higher out his skills as a "ghostwriter" as an invisible author, Lovecraft would be published many times between 1919 and 1920 with no practical experience in commerce however, Lovecraft charge rates much lower than the standard of the time barely clearing a minimum goal of 15 dollars a week despitemeager returns, this was a prolific time for Lovecraft 1921 17 by 1921 he had written close to 17 stories unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books" the glory of the "The Outsider" is that it is the story of the thing beyond arcane briefly coming into the file light into that circle and then fleeing back into the darkness, A lone narrator emerges from his crumbling castle after a long seclusion he comes on to the surface of the earth to find people fleeing in terror from a monstrous thing that the narrator can plainly see before him I love the twisted ending so to speak and the you're reading the story, in the very last line of the story it scares you I was proud of this guy as he escaped from his catacombs and the moment that the real people saw him and screamed and he saw his reflection and in horror he stenches out his hand and touches the mirror Boom! That's the end of the story "oh my gosh, he is a ghoul, he is a creature from the darkness, now we must go off with him" and I went back and reread it just to see how he done that At his best, Lovecraft is as much as an existentialist as Albert Camus would be I know always that I am an outsider a stranger in this century and among those who are still men this is as a strong as a statement about how I felt it in my teenage years as anything his writing wasn't may very possibly be disguised autobiography He does seemed to be somebody who had an unhappy childhood and who felt he was physically repulsive But did he feel that because of that he was an object of horror, that everybody shunned him Certainly in termshis physical appearance he was sort of embarrassed about a number of things he felt he had this ingrown facial hairs and that he felt that it's a disfiguring factor so in a way, he's kind of using himself as a jumping-off point but I think he would come off much more as the weirdo that Colin Wilson makes him if he really were like these characters in the stories ultimately I don't think he was when Lovecraft emerged from his own isolation, the consensusof the Providence was that the house on Angell street was one to be avoided and that Lovecraft and his mother were eccentrics thought this view could be argued in the case of Lovecraft Susie was indeed cause for concern her home life was one of hypertension, where Susie was known to cause major dramas over the slightest thing on March 13th, 1919 around the same time her son was emerging as a writer Susie Lovecraft had been admitted to the same institution that claimed to her husband years before Susie Lovecraft passed away on May 24th, 1921, not from nerves but from a botchedgallbladderoperation Susie's death was hard on Lovecraft both emotionally and financially she left her son a meager estate which was already meager when she inherited it from her father that inheritance plus an equally paltry income from ghost writing barely met Lovecraft's expenses he made little enough money himself and used to survive by hideous cans of beans but I have to wonder about Lovecraft whether or not he would have taken any odd job, just to be able to make money and I don't think he would he had a certain set of standards and again being, you know, he had a love of old pride that he was a gentleman, he's an author and he was not just gonna take any odd job Lovecraft moved in with his aunts, Lilian Clark and Annie Gamwell, But aunts were no substitute for a mother his fiction writing waned relieve came from Lovecraft's fellow journalists, "Herber West, Reanimator" actually is a very funny story and Lovecraft intended it, I think, to be funny it was commissioned for a humor magazine for which Lovecraft received all of 5 dollars per installment keep in mind it was a humor magazine called "Home Brew" founded and edited by one of his armature friends, George Julian Houtain Houtain said: "You can't make them too horrible!" so clearly Lovecraft is encouraged to write just the most outlandish flamboyant horror that he could think of Lovecraft chafed on to the reflections of the episodic writing still the series debuted on January 1922 under the banner "Grewsome Tales" later to be titled "Herbert West, Reanimator" Herbert West who was my friend in college and in after life can speak only with extreme terror Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process and that the so-called "soul"is a myth my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues I love this sense of atmosphere on the "Herbert West" stories the sense of flays evidently were not in the movies but the sense of history it gives you, a sense of place and context, that is extremely strong now a lot of people feel that the influenceof Frankenstein" is heavy on that story I disagree, because remember what Victor Frankenstein was doing was creating an artificial man from different parts of human bodies what Herbert West is trying to do is reanimated an entire living body after it has theoretically dead a very different conception, I think West's adventures in reviving corpses were not among Lovecraft's favorite works nor his most profitable nevertheless, it was a small milestone in his career as a professional writer during this time, Lovecraft also developed two fascinations incongruent with his xenophobicpersonality: Travel and a woman Lovecraft had been lured away from Providence for a gathering of amateurjournalists in Boston the prospect of intellectual discourse with his compatriots was too rich to refuse rare trip soon became a habit even if Lovecraft preferred to stay within the northeast where familiar traditions prevailed on one such visit in 1921, H P Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene of New York born on 16th, March1883 Sonia was far more experienced in the ways of the world, having being married once before he met this woman who was a Jewish one of the things that I found reading the letters, Lovecraft's letters was how anti-Semitic he was and the idea he ended up marring a Jewish woman I think is pretty extraordinary and she must have looked at him with the side she wanted him he wasn't the worst catch in the world I supposed he had a certain dignity he was kind of tall and thin and bonny she is just the opposite of him, she was very out-going and very social, and she sounded like she was fun and you know she was the one ofas I understand, introduced him to sex it was the shared passion for the literary however that attracted them most during one of many moonlit walks together, Lovecraft and Sonia encountered a weird gruntingnoise in the night it was an obvious inspiration for one of his stories but Lovecraft encouraged Sonia to write it instead this encouragement earned Lovecraft a kiss, his first since childhood and that, a rare sign of physical affection from his mother Sonia's story became "The Horror at Martin's Beach", and was published in 1923 by that time she had convinced Lovecraft to test the waters of New York city with a prolonged visit she knew that Lovecraft had to be taken out of Providence, that if he was really gonna had a life that he had to go out into the world, and she knew how talented he was and she felt if he went to New York, where the magazines were actually published and could meet some people and he could become a success but in a growing metropolis teeming with immigrants, an acute xenophobic like Lovecraft would soon experience problems for the moment though, Lovecraft had every reason to be hopeful: Sonia had entered his life, and in March 1923, "Weird Tales" magazine was born as much as science fiction and fantasy might be marginalized today it was certainly a lot more marginalized in the 1920s and 30s "Weird Tales" was very influential as it happened it was the best of all the "pulp" magazines, devoted to weird fiction to horror stories and a certain kind of sci-fi tales of the fantastic had been increasing in popularity publisher JC Henneberger saw potential and dedicating an entire journal to the genre there was a market there, as little paying as the market might have been, as marginalized as the magazine might have been, even though it's being printed on horror paper, it doesn't matter, there is a market there, there are readers and there was a place for you to start at the best it was virtually a roll-call of the great pulp fantasy writers and much better than "pulp" implies many masters of the imaginative fiction got there start in the pages of "Weir Tales" H.P.Lovecraft was no different Lovecraft regarded "Weird Tales" as his single market base it was one magazine he was, well relatively proud to write for even though it has to be said that he believed that the average Weir Tale stories possibly below average Weir Tale stories was not that great it took a great deal of convincing from Sonia and other friends but Lovecraft finally relented and sent in a selection of stories "Weird Tales" bought all 5 submissions, thus began a lifelong relationship on March 3rd, 1924, Lovecraft embarked on another relationship: after an aggressive campaign from Sonia Lovecraft finally asked for her hand in marriage 41 33 the bride was nearly 41, the groom was 33 his aunts were outraged by this you know, they thought the girl that he married was completely beneath him at huge risk to a sense of security Lovecraft would leave Providence to live with his new wife in New York for a virgin reclusivepuritan moral standard marriage promised to be an interesting experience sometimes I feel like that she just must have been something just short of a sane because what she married, was a guy who refused to work, except on the stories this is the one area which I think that Lovecraft really failed as a human being I think she acknowledged in her own memiors at some point that she felt like she could change him she couldn't change him between 1922 and 1924, Lovecraft's narrative aplord was on another upswing this included the creation of three reoccurring elements of Lovecraft's gestating mythology Miskatonic University the dark town of Arkham and literature's most dreadedgrimoire written by an alter ego from Lovecraft's childhood one inspired by his reading of the "Arabian Nights" the mad Abdul Alhazared the Necronomicon has become this strange sort of combination of urban legend and bad joke first of all it existed in the mind of Lovecraft, and then other people used it it was one of the easiest things"The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazared" "Yes, this is the book of all of the forbidden things" the Necronomicon was a book that collected all manner of summoning spells spells that would cause the return of the ancient creatures from unknown worlds and dimensions well the Necronomicon is yet another of those Lovecraftian concepts with, you know never meant to be fully bodied force it's a series of references that began imply this much larger tome with more terrible secrets and Lovecraft couldn't even hint at so then other people would use it, you got Fritz Leiber, you got Bloch you got Manly Wade Wellman, and August Derleth all these other writers putting it into their stuff so now it feels a little truer, like maybe it ought to exist another story from this period that can be seen as one of Lovecraft's early best," The Rats in The Walls" "Rats in The Walls was one of two stories that I read when I was a kid my father bought me a book called "Great Tales of Terror And the Supernatural" and it had all sorts of stories, two from Lovecraft: "Rats In The Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror" and he read them aloud to me when I was a kid, it was mind boiling a gentleman of the De La Poer family returns to his ancestralestate in England there he and his black cat, Nigger-man are disturbed by verminousslitheringbehind the walls Lovecraft was great at depicting the moment of this convey by sound or by a fleeting shadow and it really put you there and made you almost empathically experience the moment where you heard the noise behind the woodwork more than a lot of his stories literally embodies that sense of "Deep Time " in the sense of as De La Poer is trying to investigate the source of the of the phenomenon in the house begins to go through this sub-basement down into this vast subterranean caverns beneath the house that exploration into the depth of the castle is simultaneously an exploration into the depth of the past and the horrors that comes out of the history I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff aflock of fungous,flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike it's one of the stories where Lovecraft is playing with the classical gothic tropes you know you have the family with the hidden things you have all of this sort of early 18th century gothic elements to the story all of these strange stuff about the "Exhume Priory" and this lost world under the cliff there and these squealingwhite flabby beasts and the people are - the characters in the stories being descendants from different lines of the bad guys, that bred these things and the things having evolved, what a brilliant brilliant work it's really creepy stuff, it gets under your skin but I think it's kindda obvious if you turned down the walls ofof any kind of civilized person behind there something is really abominable works "Rats" was snatched up by "Weird Tales" in 1924 the first year and a half of Lovecraft's marriage was like a tonic it was grand, it was a new adventure for him umhe also made lots of friends there too Frank Long, for example being one of his best friends works however, even Lovecraft's drive to find it, was limited I think A: he didn't want a job and B: He knew that any employment he could find in the city of New York or elsewhere would be really bruising for him the longer Lovecraft stayed in New York, the worse his xenophobia became almost as a retaliation against the immigrant outsiders flourishing around him the unrevealingof the grog, so to speak, happened you know because of financial reasons Sonia lost her hat shop and eventually had to look for work in Cleveland a job offer was agreed with an enthusiasm by Sonia and lothing from Lovecraft there was too far from Providence Brooklyn was unbearable, but at least it was just a train right away by the end of 1924 Sonia had no choice but to leave for the mid-west alone Sonia would be back and forth to support her husband but her influence over Lovecraft's mood was waning his ridicule of the melting pot that was the New York city reach manic even racist levels I certainly hope to see promiscuous immigration permanently curtailed soon heaven knows, enough harm has already been done by the admission of limitless hordes of the ignorant superstitious and biologically injurious scum of southernEurope and western Asia for the most part, Lovecraft kept these views to himself knowing full well that his friends and correspondents did not share his views it wasn't long before his fiction give voice to these demons Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky Policemen despair of order or reform and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion I don't think you can ever curlywhat people think or believe with what they write or at least I don't think you can do it on the one to one basis so beloved of literary scholarsacademics and amateurpsychologists for modern standards there is plenty of racism in Mark Twain there is plenty of racism in Edgar Rice Burroughs, there is plenty of sexism in Edgar Rice Burroughs you could thought those works were belongings to that time what I believe that, it's essentially a fossil record of what a gentleman of New England would think at the time it's very very easy to look at Lovecraft and go, ok well you know "Cthulhu" means the female genitalia or all of these outsiders were really Jews or blacks or you know, this is what the batrachian thing is all about, it's a cunningly disguised racism he did however made a overly racist statement toward some groups and, that certainly no surprise back in the 20s and 30s, and it's too bad, I mean that doesn't make it right, but I just don't think you can take it seriously it will be funny if we were not so objection, and to a certain understand it still is funny what it is even though it is completelyobjectionable the sheltered character who took a long long time to grow or you can say never grow up, that isn't true and so is that reacting in adolescence fashion to the streams of people who flooded the street in Brooklyn in "Red Hook" Brooklyn and I think when he refer to himself as an unassimilatedalien I think he understood that when he was in New York on some level he understood despite all these detestations that New York worked you know, despite his perceptionof it, its horrid chaotic sass pool, it were something that worked he didn't work it became clear to his friends that Lovecraft's exile in New York was leading to a breakdown some even feared a suicide attempt help came from Lovecraft's aunts, Lilian and Annie who found a small home for their nephew back in the safety of Providence Sonia offered to buy the house for him, but this was not New York in Providence propriety wouldreign if Lovecraft could not support his wife, he would distance himself instead in April of 1926, Lovecraft returned to his beloved city He was released from Brooklyn and he went back to his immense to his almost unimaginably immense relief to Providence that summer of 1926 was the start of Lovecraft's riches period it started with an idea he had outlined during those fearful days in New York an idea which became the most notable addition to Lovecraft's fictional universe the story of Lovecraft, the first one I read was "The Call of Cthulhu", like most everyone, I would imagine and it just struck me because it was an combination of cosmology and anthropology and horror that was all melded into one George Gammel Angell, professor emeritus ofSemtic languages at Brown University is mysteriously murdered on the streets of Providence sometime earlier, Angell had come into possession of a troubling clay sculpture it represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers a scaly, rubbery-looking body,prodigious claws on hind and fore feet,and long, narrow wings behind the description of the monster is probably better seen on paper than it would be visualized there's a thing about Lovecraft, all his creatures are really interesting when you read them because your imagination starts to work on it and you keep it amorphous and disgusting with the seafood variety that H P Lovecraft describes I mean that he must have something about fish really bothered him, you know squid and octopus and stuff like that Angell's investigations of the graven image are taken up by his grand nephew here is this guy, whose always, his eccentric uncle died and he was looking through all his papers and as I did when Lin Carter died it made it kind of a chore but you never know what kind of good issue you gonna find and he sees all these crazy things: What the hell is he into? when you read it's sort of an incredibly clumsy story here is a lump of this and here is some newspaper reports and here is a it's sort of a part journalism and it's almost anecdote like, and it doesn't really have a plot it's assembled in fragments, in a very interesting way and also a modernist way what that technique does, is to suggest an aura of mystery in itself and before long his intuitive and before long his expecting the secret agents of Cthulhu to come and get him and why is he even writing these things since he doesn't want anybody else to know about it it's about that reoccurring thing in Lovecraft that fear of science or just human knowledge going where it doesn't necessarily go ofaccidentally recovering things that either it was not much point knowing them or knowing them could lead to our destruction the nephew endeavors to connect the reports of vivid dreams across the world dark practices in the bayous of New Orleans and the discovery of a corpse city by a band of innocent sailors there lay great Cthulhu and his hordes hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,?after cycles incalculable the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive "Cthulhu" is almost like the Paul Revere of all these deities, you know, [Paul Revere ] or the King Arthur waiting to come back, you know and take over he's just a general evil that existed in another place but it's like Christianity in the sense in sense of our creators he's our destroyer he's kind of another version of the devil I suppose, except thatslimier as elaborate as this story was the spelling and the pronunciation of the ancient names was even more so Cthulhu of course, the association of the name this is my fourth language Poppy Z Brite makes fun of the way our pronounce "Cthulhu", but I don't know another way look at the way Lovecraft tries to pronounce it I can't pronounce it many of his colleagues apparently didn't know how to pronounce it, or pronounced it wrongly and, so finally in a letter in 1934, he tells a colleague, well, it's really meant to be two syllables you are supposed to put your tongue at the roof of your mouth and cough it out like "Clu-lu" but he says, you know the name is entirely alien name not design to be pronounced by human vocal course the word is only a symbol for something that is entirely beyond the ability for humans to make the sounds so there is no incorrect way to pronounce it, because there is no correct way to pronounce it despite Lovecraft's effort to wave a rich narrative "The Call of Cthulhu" was initially rejected by "Weird Tales" this was common practice of the anthologist editor Farnsworth Wright especially when presented with a story as original as Lovecraft's creation one of Lovecraft's tricks of course was, was to take the rejected story sit on it for a little while sent it back to Wright saying I've made the changes you asked for, having not done a single thing with it and more often but not apparently, Wright would fall for this trick "The Call Of Cthulhu" was eventually printed in February 1928's issue of "Weird Tales" Lovecraft's fee for such a seminal work of fiction, 165 dollars as Lovecraft's writing began to blossom, so did the man I vastly regret the absence of traditional accomplishments fencing, horsemanship, military service caused by my early ill health and lack of appreciation of the quality of the well-roundedness Lovecraft began to entertain his friends once more including them on long walks through Providence and other New England excursions Lovecraft was even beginning to evolve a form of tolerance toward the outsiders around him especially the many cultures now living in Providence in February of 1927, it was time for his writing to expand as well "Charles Dexter Ward" is the novel in which he applies all these sense of structure to that long walk and the effect is tremendous The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists Dr Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920 this is certainly borne by Ward's altered habits especially by his continual search through certain grave dug in 1771 the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen" Joseph Curwen was an obscure individual who flight from Salem to Providence around 1761 now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow much older than he had been on his arrival at length, when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's advent and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his face and physique the people began to whisper more darkly alchemy and the black arts proved to be Curwen's secret I think one of the flaws in that story, and maybe only a flaw to me, is that he uses this kind of pseudoscience that is actually a little bit beneath Lovecraft's acumen, it's a it explains the mysterious and horrifying events by reference to certain essential Saltes and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour" and that's a little third grade, it's like bad science fiction a band of raiders confront the doom man and his unhallowed wizardry that night was never remarked on again until Charles Ward learned of his descent from Curwen, in 1918 and continued his ancestor's experiments connecting the past with the present, summoning the unspeakable to life it's almost like a detective story, you know Dr Willet is really discovering what happened to Charles Dexter Ward discovering about Curwen, about the unfortunate accidents from the efforts to basically bring demons down from the stars and when they didn't have all the pieces, when they didn't have all the remains, you know terrible awfulness would be brungup and they'd had to be put somewhere, of course I wasn't quite sure why they just didn't destroy them, but maybe it was for sport, who knows it's one of those case where his detractors say what he's writing about "unspeakable horrors" and simply telling as that, they are unspeakable in fact that's only get out at the moment when Dr Willet looks down the well and see something that Lovecraft actually certainly found a metaphor for it that's "tremendously" more than just the "unspeakable": that's the cosmic in bodily form though completed, the lengthy tale of Charles Dexter Ward was never typed or submitted he just left it in a drawer, he didn't think it was worth a bothering with it was the first draft amazingly I believe "The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath" was also how he didn't see the meridian in this stuff, it's just amazing I don't think he was built to write longer narratives He went as far as he could that way and it did press the envelope some of the those letters are really rather long but they are also "inert" in the certain way that a novel can not afford to be there was another tale written during this time on which Lovecraft held an entirely different opinion "The Colour Out Of Space" is just a great science fiction movie um, story, it should be a movie although I don't know how you'll do the colour, it's unlike anything we seen, I don't know what that is There is a type of story where you go to the minimal setting: a household or a farm a far field, and you unleash upon them a cosmic melody, you know, a cosmic curse it all began in 1882, with a meteorite and by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place they had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance the colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum was almost impossible to describe and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all and "The Colour Out Of Space" it is as the story has it just a colour out of space, it's literally indescribable in prose terms it's something that almost impossible to even detect it's something that so incredibly insidious, there is no escaping from it except by geographically removing yourself as far as you can from the place by the next harvest, flora and fauna are found deformed and the Gardner family is infected with unexplained madness 6 it happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe in her raving there was not a single specific noun she was being drained of something something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be it wasn't just the meteorite, it was something that inside the meteorite That begins to spread and poison the landscape and mutate the landscape and the people it's one of those stories that Lovecraft moves into physical gruesomeness the effects on the unlucky family that in the farm house but it passes beyond that into absolute awesomeness, a kind of real transcendental quality of terror the best Lovecraft had achieved though "The Call Of Cthulhu" looked to the stars "The Colour Out Of Space" was clearly set in the realm of science fiction for this very reason, Lovecraft submitted his tale to the new journal "Amazing Stories" though they would eagerly publish this story in September of 1927 their lack of payment convinced Lovecraft that he should never stray far from the known quantity of "Weird Tales" they would be the only magazine he formally submitted to for the rest of his life during a 1928's excursion to Massachusetts, Lovecraft happened on a ring of stones oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers along with talk of witch blood, the eerie cries of the whippoorwills and the ever present Old Ones, Lovecraft shaped "The Dunwich Horror" it was in the township of Dunwich, that Wilbur Whateley was born on the 2nd of February 1913 Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child there is an inbreeding between, you know, gods and man, and they produced you know, whatever you produced, you got this half-god half-man thing Wilbur Whateley's grandfather is old wizard Whateley he's an eccentric New England hick, what's his motivation is he trying to end the world because he is some kind of sadie and nihilist, no, he just needs a few extra bucks - And Yog-Sothoth agrees to give him a pirate blossom fee to pimps out his daughter to him At the age of 10 Wilbur Whateley attained an unnatural size, that of a fully grown man his facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair and oddly elongated ears what troubled the residents of Dunwich even more was a number of cattle purchased by Old Whateley without ever increasing the size of his stock and the dreaded something being kept in the upper part of the Whateley farm house they are twins when they were born to Lavinia and that, you know one is a normal, mostly normal looking, you know, 8 foot tall goat-ish looking man and a half thing, you know, an invisible half brother which is much more like his father soon, a mysterious thunder was heard in the woods livestock and eventually entire family's disappeared and Wilbur Whateley was discovered breaking into Miskatonic library in search of a complete "Necronomicon", one that contains the rites for the Old Ones' return Yog-Sothoth knows the gateYog-Sothoth is the gate Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth "The Dunwich Horror" earned Lovecraft his biggest pay day from "Weird Tales": 240 dollars but again, Lovecraft failed to capitalize on his success, and would not write for more than a year this time Lovecraft's reticent was due to a desire for artistic growth There are my Poe pieces and my Dunsany pieces, but alas, where are my Lovecraft pieces Lovecraft's writing on the surface appears to be imitations of other writers if you see the early stories, there is a much more constrain sense of scope and towards the end of his life he was gaining as a writer I think, and gaining as an artist and as a human being and his view of the world became more ample and I think when Lovecraft shed the influence of Dunsany and started writing like Lovecraft that's when things take off he was writing much better fiction, he was witting much more contemporary fiction in many senses, I mean in the sense that the language was more contemporary and the settings were more contemporary you can even see how some of his descriptions has started becoming more specific, you know they go from being "unnamable of seen things" to being described as a cucumber body with thrones or tentacles with proboscis you know he really started relishing that and he started to give a sense of dignity and history to these creatures that I think is unique with Providence as a life line, Lovecraft was emboldened to venture further and further in art and in life hHis correspondence engaged in healthy discussions on race, man and civilization the more Lovecraft exposes himself to other opinions and places the more his views and phobias began to soften this self improvement did not extent to his marriage, however since his return to Providence, Sonia has seen very little of her husband while she remained in New York for the sake of a career, Lovecraft favored his cherished city on March 25th 1929, after constant pleads from Sonia, the Lovecrafts filed for a divorce Sonia went on to Europe, a place Lovecraft had always long to visit but never did later she moved to California where she remarried and led a full life until 1972 in 1930, Lovecraft had begun work on a new tale by the time it was published in August of 1931, the changes in Lovecraft could be glimpsed on the page well you need to celebrate "The Whisperer In Darkness" because the astronomers now have taken the planetary status away from Pluto which is to say, you know, Yuggoth, Black Yuggoth on the rim and in fact, "The Whisperer In Darkness" this was Lovecraft's reaction to the discovery of a new planet after a rash of unprecedented floods in Vermont misshaped cadavers washed up along the river banks they were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs Albert N Wilmarth, of the Miskatonic University begins to investigate the origins of these alien things the blasphemies that appeared on earth, came from the dark planet Yuggoth but this was itself merely the populous outpostof a frightful interstellar race whose ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum it's actually one of Lovecraft's most restrained stories, there are very few that runs of agitates most of it is done as a sense of letters, um, something I imagine he probably learned, there's some example there from the novel Dracula, which he greatly admired through the first hand contact with his colleague Henry Akeley, Wilmarth learns of the dark intention behind the buzzing creatures what Akeley deems are deadly danger, however turns out to be something else entirely in the last stage of Lovecraft's career, when he began to write the best stories, in spite there being what I called "inert" earlier, you can see him taking a different angle of vision And masters of the heart what is known as "The Mythos" "The Whisperer In Darkness", probably the first story in which one begins to see this shifting attitude They are still frightening, and and when their voices are recorded on tape ,they are intensely scary beings but they may not be completely inimical to the human race in fact the fungi from "Yuggoth" wish to expand man's senses to enable his exploration of the cosmos and its secrets this process however, involves removing the brain and placing it in a cylinder for the journey all in the spirit of discovery, but hardly harmless it's all a scam it's like people today that say, oh there is no problem with these lamofascism where is the problem, these people are merely misunderstood now you are wrong, and you better hope you don't pay with your life for this stupidity and Wilmarth getting sucked into this thing and it isn't even Akeley anymore His brain's in a can somewhere and he's being a "led off the path" by the buzzing lobsters and all that so that you being set up, if you think that's the case still, "The Whisperer In Darkness" could be seen as a sign of tolerance to come during the last years of his life Lovecraft's travels continued to expand his first hand knowledge of changing world around him he was making up for last time but this long differed semi-introduction to the world, did not take as thoroughly as it might have done, had I being chronologically anger Lovecraft's fans could not keep up with his thirst for growth ghost writing continued, but it's anonymity was becoming unattractive all the more so in early 1931 Lovecraft began work on another original story: A tale of ancient Antarctic horror it is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarcticwith its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains ofmadness some of the descriptive passages in "At The Mountains Of Madness" seemed to me to rank with the great geographical fantasies of literature actually I just think it's a paintly quality in that novel you probably don't find so much in his other work it is one of those places where all of the different influences come together the idea of you are trekking across the ice, it's quite horrible, it's Antarctic and it is science fiction and you know it's about an incursion by aliens in the foot hills of this towering cliffs an expedition discovered the fossil remains of a pre-Cambrian race found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature in furrows between ridges are curious growths combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth especially fabled Elder Things inNecronomicon supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake one of the most horrific ideas was that the things that descent us were astounding starting almost dissecting them you know, that is, that is a revelation of intelligence and curiosity the sense of curiosity these things have leaving little trails around the equipment down so forth that was what was so scary to me Something terribly and horrifying chased these men out you know, something that was supposed to be a fossil record is after them after the mysterious and utterly violation of the advance team the survivors of the unfortunate expedition discovered a cyclopean city hidden among the peaks there, they learn the tragic history of the star-headed Elder Things their shaping of life on earth surviving war with other races of cosmic infinity and falling prey to their slave race of Shoggoths, protoplasmic masses, capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of forms you know in the 60s there's an idea that aliens had come here and had kind of created the human race but that idea really was old, compared to what Lovecraft had trimmed up: which is the idea of these battling alien forces, you know on earth, and that man ended somehow inheriting this thing almost by default, because these two major presences had sort of wiped each other out the Old Ones in "At The Mountains of Madness, are scientists they were artists, they were architects yes, they are tentacled cucumbers with wings but they are sentiment and intelligent beings and that sense of intelligence make the evil at work in Lovecraft's story much more intense "At The Mountains of Madness" also displayed two new reactions to the fictional "unknowns" fellowship and empathy the real imaginative achievement for him to have seen these threatening beings in a warmer light, eventually He kind of fell in love with them he's been in love with them all along, actually the Old Ones they may have been crinoid pickle shaped barrels with wings and starfishes for head in a bad sense of humor, but they were man but why is that because now, they got the rebelled slaves the Shoggoths to worry about so as Lovecraft seen a different group as same as him because all people are equal or he sympathized with them as slave owners who are now on the run from a even weirder race, so I don't know what that means really, you know, they are not so bad there's lead a sly guy aim against the opody bad guys I think there is a huge Lovecraftian influence, a huge "At The Mountains of Madness" Influence on the first Ridley Scott "Alien" the idea of a ship that essentially lands on a planet and they find out there lived city sized ship and dead ancients in it and something that is very much alive and waiting and then takes over the humans, that's essentially you could say very much At The Mountains of Madness it has influence the story that The Thing was based on, which was another rip-off of At The Mountains of Madness so, I think its repercussions are very cinematic this was the crowning jewel of the "Cthulhu Mythos" it clearly came out as the crushing blow when Farnswoth Wright editor of "Weird Tales", rejected it by then sadly, Lovecraft had really decided that you know he no longer had any ability to express and convey the kind of thing he wanted to convey he was to write very little prose fiction for the last few years of his life thought more stories were attempted over the next few years most, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", were problematic for Lovecraft Lovecraft himself seemed almost embarrassed by "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and I think probably he understood, he undoubtedly understood that it was in a sense, kind of a reversion, a hearkening back to the same sort of xenophobic prejudices that he had embraced in his youth and why is everybody so down on Innsmouth some of the stories would make you laugh about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut and their skin ain't quite right these things are creatures that are born looking normal and the older they get, the stranger they become until eventually their transformation will be complete and they'll slither off into the sea where they will live forever it's definitely a sort of biological horror story where you have the break down of the, not just the human society but of the human body but I think the over writing concern is actually about culture, you have the culture of the "Deep Ones"coming up and over the decades eating away the culture of Innsmouth and so that finally Innsmouth will vanish there is to be sure a kind of racist or xenophobic under current to that story but I think it's very subtle and very indirectly expressed I'm now begin to think it must be one of Lovecraft's one or two best stories and he does something that you don't see a whole lot of Lovecraft doing: writing action scenes I still think the escape from the Gilman Hotel is a marvelous action scene and running across and running into the parade of horrific frog-fish things it's it's just wonderful and not the sort of thing that he did a lot Lovecraft never formally submitted "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for publication partially, Lovecraft marginalized himself cause he was never become merry of his own work but I think readers and critics neglected to see the imagination worked behind what he wrote it would be a few more years before modern tastes turned in his favor at the end of 1935, New York agent Julius Schwartz was able to sound the previously rejected "At The Mountains Of Madness"; thanks to the efforts of Donald Wandrei, "The Shadow Out Of Time", sold soon after, giving Lovecraft his highest combined payday a total of 595 dollars by the end of 1936, just as success seemed a possibility Lovecraft's health began to diminish in many ways I think if Lovecraft had preserved his health he would have become a well-known writer in the 40s and 50s, if he had lived that long I think Lovecraft really dead at the pinnacle of his talent Lovecraft had been suffering from a small collection of ailments, including digestive trouble by the time he submitted to a doctor's diagnosis, the cancer has spread through his small intestine H.P.Lovecraft died on the morning of March 15th, 1937 he was 46 and a half years old although he knew himself celebrated in a small circle he never broke through to the public in any sense at all, and therefore when he died he would have been justified and thinking himself as a failure or as a very very obscure writer if it weren't for Lovecraft's disciples he would have been forgotten it was people like Derleth and Robert Block and so forth that kept Lovecraft alive and they went out and actually got his books published in 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei two of Lovecraft's most earnest supporters achieved what known had been able to do in Lovecraft's life time: they founded "Arkham House" and released a selections of stories entitled "The Outsider And Others" by HP Lovecraft well "Arkham House" came into being virtually out of Lovecraft's death, I mean almost immediately on the news of Lovecraft's death reaching August Derleth it existed initially to publish Lovecraft and then continued with an astonishing record as a small press falling down a bit and decided to do more Lovecraft and then indeed to do and more of the other great writers form Weird Tales Fritz Leiber for instance And Donald Wandrei himself you know the "Arkham House" books became, for the most part incredibly valuable incredibly quickly that was sought after by book collectors not because they were rare, but because they were good for certainly over a decade or more there was no publisher other than the Arkham House specialized in mainly supernatural horror and very small snatch in science fiction it was a cheap, disposable literature and "Arkham House" was one of the very first places to actually say some of these stuff needs to come out, respectably since the success of "Arkham House" many writer have continued to expand "The Cthulhu Mythos" in fact this was a practice Lovecraft encouraged when he was alive it's part of the Lovecraft game: it's you know, it's like, you get it, and you want to add to it and passed it on and it's been part of the Lovecraft's game from the very beginning that Firtz Lieber's, the Bloch's, umall of these people and August Derleth they took a little of this, took the story added to it, passed it on and so then we started doing it the problem when I was a teenager was, you know I read Lovecraft, I thought, this is how you'll do it but unfortunately what I meant by this to myself was, you know, this is how you limited it and were still, I'm the one never been more than twenty miles away from Liverpool, in England I've set these stories in Massachusetts,you know, in Arkham and places like that, in Kingsport and it was painfully obvious that I've never been very far from Liverpool particularly when the, the rustics opened their mouth if you read story like "The Mist", King's novel, that's pure Lovecraft it's about these tentacle things breaking through from some other dimension and terrorizing grocery store guests in Maine that's pure Lovecraft, I am sure I did this story called "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" in which I have two Loveraftian spices complaining about Lovecraft as a writer but the truth is, that we only parody things that have life there is no point in parodying something dead, there is no point in parodying something in which one has no interest and there is no point parodying or making fun of something that doesn't matter and almost 100 years after his death, Lovecraft still matters and it is a passion that continued to this day even in the face of criticism well, there's always gonna be a kind of snobbery about supernatural horror fiction I think you know, I mean the writer needs to be dead for maybe 100 years before he is fully taken and associated every creator that dwells in the genre, must assume his work will not be appreciated as if he was doing straight stuff it's been ghettoized it's really not the proper the proper occupation of a serious writer I mean look at what happened with Stephen King with that war with him years ago people, I mean they started to put him down, cause he wasn't writing serious stuff it's very easy for us now to forget in a world in which you know, as a fantasy horror science fiction whatever the hell I am, author my books are gonna come out in the hum back just like anybody else is and they gonna be on shelves like anybody else is, that didn't used to be the case but I think probably at the moment we saw Lovecraft in the Penguin Modern Classics I think there is no question whatsoever that is fully established and about time too he is being translate into something like 25 languages around the world, from Czech to Polish to Japanese, Korean there's a Bengali edition a lot of people had kind of being introduced to Lovecraft without even knowing it was Lovecraft, you know, you've got things like you know, "Hellboy", which is you know which is borrowing very heavily you know from the Lovecraft mythos and even things like "Pirates Of The Caribbean", Davy Jones looking like you know, he had just crawl out of Lovecraft's you know, looks like "Cthulhu" you look around these days and you got the plush Cthulhu phenomenon you get Cthulhu slippers, you get funny Cthulhu hats one of the things I think is so amazing is, I've met a group of people who were into playing these Lovecraft "The Call Of Cthulhu" games and so forth and they know all of the Lovecraft creatures but they had never ever read Lovecraft and they don't know what his other stories were his images are so utray and ghastly and macabre and colorful that they influenced all kinds of rock n' roll bands I think he also, literally appeals to the outsider and the person who is not well-accepted in society, who is a little bit of a loner I think one of the reasons of Lovecraft is so popular today is that his view which is a very dark one, you know that man is lucky to be ignorant I think it's what he used to say Because if he knew the truth he could either go crazy or he would kill himself, it's one that everyone can relate to these days Every election, you'll see the bumper sticker saying: "Vote for Cthulhu! Why settle for the lesser evil!" such is Lovecraft's fame, that some occultists insist that the Cthulhu mythos is no myth I know every religion begins as the delusion of one or two people and once enough people sign on, it's become the world view and as if you can inhabit in it and live everyday life and no longer seemed sane and when you are one of the very few who have believed in it there is a kind of intensity that results in unbalanced character and that sort of what I'm afraid of with cultists that actually believed there are Old Ones I think that every time somebody comes out with a world that's fully flashed on as Lovecraft creates you are bound to find people that will start to speak in Klingon or dressing like a "hobbit" to go to the supermarket or believed they could really channel in a couple of Old Ones into their living room You know and I believe that somebody have actually even died trying to evoke some of the Ancient Gods I knew people that handled "Star Wars" this way they were so absorbed in it, one of them wished it were true, you could tell and another believed it was all true in a parallel world and you know you began to go off to the deep den so ,you know, I would defiantly not advised to put too much money or effort into invoking that"Shoggoth" into the kitchen but, it's up to you The oldest and strongest emotion of man kind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown we live in a world in which even if you don't know who "Cthulhu"is,even if you've never read any Lovecraft you can kind of get the jokes and well certainly far too many people not limits me imitating him too closely he also had a profound influence on people divers as Fritz Leiber, as Poppy Z Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, T.E.D Klein you name it for me what the brilliance of Lovecraft, what so important about Lovecraft is, um Is simply his imagination it's incredible, to think that this guy who was this recluse living in this you know little house In Providence, Rhode Island ends up spawning you know essentially modern-day horror it's the duality of Lovecraft: it's the fact that people can take the ideas almost as the basis of a religion People can take the ideas from a serious academic point of view or for a writing point of view and then you can Then if you are just drawing great big monsters Lovecraft has waiting for you to |
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