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H.P. Lovecraft

SFG75

SFG75

Well-Known Member
Any big fans of this guy out there? I've read a lot of philosophy stuff about him and his works, though I haven't read a lot of his material. One book that I do have was completed by another fellow after his death....always a kill joy thing, ruined the reading experience for me. At any rate, any good book suggestions?:cool:

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I got interested in him after seeing other material that was obviously inspired by him such as the film In The Mouth Of Madness. So the first story I read by him was At The Mountains of Madness. It was kind of weird but interesting. Also I wasn't used to his vocabulary at first.

A while after reading that I picked up a short story collection called The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales. Again sometimes I find some of his vocabulary strange to read so I'm slow to get through some of the stories but most of the time it's worth it. I did enjoy that story of Cthulhu and also Herber West: ReAnimator.

I guess one of the interesting things about reading his works is seeing how evident his influence has been on other writers or even film makers. I thought everything about the ancient monstrous demons in the movie Hellboy was very lovecraftian. Also reading Cthulhu related stories made me think of Stephen King's short story The Mist or his novel From A Buick 8.
 
I recently finished his story The Whisperer in Darkness. For a while I was getting worried that the main character was going to meet a predictable death. However that didn't happen. Instead I was pleased to get an ending that was really spooky. Also at the same time it didn't explain everything about his friend. I mean you have a small idea but you don't really know the whole truth of his horrific fate.
 
i really liked Lovecraft, though haven't reread anything in quite a while. His prose is often strained and heavy going, but he has great (and influential) ideas.

VIDEODROME said:
Also reading Cthulhu related stories made me think of Stephen King's short story The Mist or his novel From A Buick 8.
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There was a King novel, though I don't remember which, that features Nyarlathotep. So far as I can remember, there was only one direct reference, which was a piece of graffiti that said something like 'Nyarlathotep rules', and the main chracter imagined Nyarlathotep was probably a rastafarian. :D

It might have been Needful Things.
 
daryl? said:
i really liked Lovecraft, though haven't reread anything in quite a while. His prose is often strained and heavy going, but he has great (and influential) ideas.
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Amen. I love Lovecraft's whole mythos (obviously, see avatar), and a lot of his stories are really bone-chillingly scary sometimes... but if you read too many of them in one go, you may well find yourself getting bored with his rather formulaic way of writing. (See "The collected works of HP Lovecraft" at Book-A-Minute.) Also, his racist views do get a bit too icky at times.

daryl? said:
It might have been Needful Things.
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Yep, it was indeed. Though I'm pretty sure it said "Yog-Sothoth Rules!" King has never been ashamed to admit that he's influenced by Lovecraft - I guess the linage goes Poe-Lovecraft-Bloch-King.

As to the original question - I'd go with any reasonably professional-looking collection of his short stories as a primer, preferably one that focuses on the whole Cthulhu mythos.
 
I think Lovecraft is good. Imaginative at times, but since there's so much of his work out there, it gets rather badgering. The nice thing about Lovecraft is that the stories are told in a simple tone. The prose are excellent, yes. It's lofty, yes, but not overly verbose. Lovecraft is a good author on making things unbelievably believable.
Has anyone read any of Jack London's horror stories? They're much like Lovecraft's in the way that they feed upon fear.
 
I quite like lovecraft. His work has bags of atmopshere and scope. His mythos has been carried on by tons of writers, including ramsey campbell, august deraleath and brian lumley, so you might want to give them a try.
 
I really like to read Lovecraft because it scares the hell out of me. But I don't read it too much so that I don't become paranoid. I don't know the english titles for the novels that I have read but there was this one about some odd color that killed people in the farm and I was so scared that I had to close the book and breathe and then I continued reading again.
 
blurricus said:
I think Lovecraft is good. Imaginative at times, but since there's so much of his work out there, it gets rather badgering. The nice thing about Lovecraft is that the stories are told in a simple tone. The prose are excellent, yes. It's lofty, yes, but not overly verbose. Lovecraft is a good author on making things unbelievably believable.
Has anyone read any of Jack London's horror stories? They're much like Lovecraft's in the way that they feed upon fear.
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Jack London > Lovecraft

I did not find any of Lovecraft's story horrifying. On the contrary--it's the antithesis. Boring has hell.

Now Jack London, is the man. He can chill your bone with reality--grip you face frozen cold into the eyes of death.
 
Lovecraft is frustrating. He's not a particularly good writer, but his imagination was unique. I love his weird ideas about Dark Gods, strange dimensions, weird dreams, the Necronomicon, etc., but to get access to the juicy stuff I have to trudge through endless, boring, badly-written prose consisting of words that went out of fashion centuries ago. The fact that he was paid by the word surely didn't help to make his prose sparser.
 
H P Lovecraft

An extraordinarily rich imagination. If he hadn't died so early at only 46 he might have gone on to become the American Tolkien. So much of his work was published after his death - and that always makes me suspicious about how much is original and how much is down to an editor.
 
I just thought I'd mention the H.P. Lovecraft Commonplace Book Project 2007 Project here, which you can link to by clicking the icon below:

awww.illuminatedlantern.com_if_lovecraft_cpb.jpg​

It's centred around interactive fiction (Inform, TADS, etc.) but it's an interesting concept that's bound to turn over a good number of Lovecraftian pieces, in tone and/or inspiration.
 
Thanks for the link Stewart-very interesting.

As for Lovecraft-I've noticed that dreams play a big role in his writing. Many of the short stories that I've read feature them prominently, and others use them as a secondary tool of awareness. He also had an affinity with antiquity-TheTemple featured a U-boat captain having his sunken craft lodged in the middle of the lost city of Atlantis. I also can't say enough about how he just scares the living dayligths out of you. I just finished The Reanimator and hit the part where a decapitated man was revived and his head, in a trash bin of refuse and other waste, screamed out what he experienced during his last previously living moment before death.:eek:
 
Like most of the folk here, I like Lovecraft for his ideas more than his writing, though there are some genuine chills - I crapped myself when the guy goes down into the ancient tunnels in Australia; I think it's The Shadow Out of Time (or Space, maybe??). Every time I pass through some isolated wee village or town I think of cultists... Clark Ashton Smith was another pulp writer of the time - he can write, and his exotic locations are really creepy.
 
Lovecraft might be the worst writer I've ever read .

His prose is just terrible , and his stories are ten times longer than it should be. I admit that he had some brilliant ideas , but since when did great ideas alone make a great author ?
 
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