H.P. Lovecraft: Worth my time?

Cafe Society
1

Seeing some jokes referencing Cthulhu, I’ve been reminded again that, besides being some really freakly looking dude with a squid for a head, I really don’t know much about him. Same goes for the rest of the Lovecraft oeuvre. Since it seems Cthulhu is a creature from some non-Euclidian plane of pure evil, the thought has occured to me I might find stories about him pretty entertaining.

Or pretty cheesey, it’s hard to know. I’m looking for something new to read, and heck, maybe The Call of Cthulhu is a ripping good yarn. Or not. Or maybe some other Lovecraft stories are better to start with?

What do y’all think? I guess I have to ask you not to reveal the end of the story, since I haven’t read it yet. But, y’know, don’t be afraid to throw a few spoilers around for kicks.

2

I read a book that contained several of his short stories including the one you mentioned and found them to be entertaining. It was written a long time ago so it is not exactly terrifying by today’s standards but I found most of the stories to be generally enthralling, and some actually were pretty scary. Just remember the time period it was written during, people don’t read Poe and expect freddie Krueger you know what I mean?
I would recommend just buying one of the numberous collections of short stories out there. Here are some good stories:
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Herbert West-Reanimator
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Lurking Fear
The Hound
Dagon
and many others

3

Just keep in mind that Lovecraft was a product of his time and it shows in his writing. Don’t expect much in the way of celebrating multi-culturalism especially when it comes to those of darker complexion. Still, he was a pretty good writer and had a signifigant influence on modern horror writers. Besides Lovecraft several other writers from the same era contributed to the whole Cthulhu mythos. Even in modern times I hear Stephen King made Randal Flagg out to be Nyarlathotep.

Marc

4

Lovecraft is amazing, and short story collections are the way to go. This is because Lovecraft’s best stuff is in the short story format (as opposed to his novellas), and because he can be hard to take in doses any larger than 30 pages or so. This is mostly because of his writing style, which is an uber-melodramatic, Victorian, and very, very florid.

But it’s great, great stuff. Understand that most of Lovecraft’s horror is on the cosmic, existential scale, instead of the personal scale - so instead of your protagonist being chased by a monster, he’s hounded by an ANCIENT GOD FROM BEYOND THIS REALITY and is DRIVEN MAD BY THE MERE CONTEMPLATION OF ITS EXISTENCE. And so on.

Go with any of the “greatest hits” style short story collections. I like “The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft,” which has neat footnotes that elucidate some of the more archaic language and terminology.

Favorite Lovecraft story - “Cold Air.”

5

You should also be aware that Lovecraft had two broad groupings of stories–the “Cthulhu mythos” and the “dream cycle”, the latter of which culminates in the story “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. The dream cycle stories are essentially pastiches of Dunsany (if you’re not familiar with Dunsany’s writing, hie thee to a bookstore to pick up the Fantasy Masterworks anthology of Dunsany’s short stories). I think Del Rey issued an anthology of the dream cycle works (if you want to read them all without searching through other books).

6

That is not dead which can eternal lie
and after strange aeons even death may die

(Lovecraft was quite good)

My favorite bit, and one I’d advise reading due to its prototypicaly-lovecraftian nature, is Pickman’s Model

Lovecraft is the kind of writer who built a mood, set a story in motion, put the reader’s own mind in motion thinking up horrors…

Far better than the King school of horror. “Then the clown leapt out and hacked the people open and there were guts everywhere!”

7

The Dunwich Horror & The Shadow Over Innsmouth are IMO the most accessible Cthulhu Mythos stories to Lovecraft newbies. Enjoy!

8

Hmmm…I was alwayse quite partial to the longer stories, particularly The Colours Out of Space and In the Mountains of Madness, but to each their own.

9

Lovecraft is uneven, but at his best, he defined the horror genre. “The Color Out of Space,” and "The Rats in the Walls* are among the best horror stories ever written.

At his worst, there’s some sort of Unspeakable Horror; the story builds slowly to a confrontation, and then ends.

*Stay with it. There’s a big chunk of raw exposition at the beginning, but it’s worth it.

10

Lovecraft is definitely worth it. He was a MAJOR influence on Stephen King (it shows in some of the stories in Night Shift, and he admits it in Danse Macabre) and on most folks writing horror. I still pick up his books and re-read them.

Lovecraft was excellent at setting a mood. Like Hitchcock, he wasn’t heavily into concealing the shocks and ambushing you with them – he’d rather have you know about it and have you squirming as you saw it develop. (Although he did catch me once, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which I recommend highly).

Lovecraft generally ignored the established horror types, preferring to invent his own mythos, which have become established in their own right. (At the same time, it’s important to note the he wrote before a lot of what we view as “standard” horror types became established. He wrote one vampire story that I know of – and it was written before the Hamilton Dean play that eventually became the Bela Lugosi movie even left the British boondocks, so most of the “vampire” conventions we know about had not yet become established or even well-known. Lovecraft’s story shows us an entirely different vampire mythos than the one we have today.)

Once you’ve read the stories, you might want to have a look at S.T. Joshi’s annotated versions (Two trade paperbacks have been published, along with other smaller editions – I’ve got a copy of his Annotated “Shadow Over Innsmouth”). But not until you’ve read the stories once – the annotated versions spoil the sense and give too much away.

Lovecraft was a product of his times, and somewhat prejudiced, although I’ve heard that he got away from that as he got older.

He did some editing, and a paperback of stories he edited (but didn’t write) is out there. He also wrote criticism about literature, with the book “Horror in Literature” a classic that Dover still has in print.
Ignore the movie versions of Lovecraft – they’ve generally been pretty awful, not terribly faithful, and totally lack his sense of mood. Do read the stories written in imitation of him, both in his lifetime (The old pair The Horror in the Museum and others, but take the August Derleth volumes with a grain of salt) and afterwards (lots of recent Lovecraftian pastiches, collected in volumes like Cthulhu 2000, Shadows over Innsmouth, and others. Some of these work, others don’t).

11

It is, it is.
I had tried H.P. several times and thought he was just awful until I read this one. The C.O.C. made me a believer. (Phlatgn!)

12

If it weren’t for Lovecraft, how many of us would know of or properly appreaciate words like

batrachian
squamous
nacreous

?

13

eldritch!

14

…and don’t forget “cyclopean.”

IMHO, “The Call Of Cthulhu” wasn’t his best story. Others in this thread have said that his thick, florid writing style is pretty heavy stuff, and I agree with that… and “The Call Of Cthulhu” suffers pretty heavily from that. On the other hand, it’s the one story where we find out pretty much everything there is to know about Cthulhu, who is mentioned in many Lovecraft stories, but we only really get to know him in this one.

For starters, I’d recommend:

**The Haunter Of The Dark ** (a young man with an interest in architecture investigates an abandoned church, and awakens something he should have left alone)
**The Rats In The Walls ** (a man inherits his ancestral property in Europe and comes to renovate the place… and begins to learn unsavory things about his ancestors…)
**Pickman’s Model ** (a man discovers some disturbing secrets about an artist acquaintance)
**The Colour Out Of Space ** (an odd meteor has an effect on a New England farm. Lovecraft’s personal fave of all his own work)
**The Dunwich Horror ** (a decayed town holds creepy secrets)
**The Shadow Over Innsmouth ** (another decayed town holds more creepy secrets)

15

“The Dunwich Horror” I also liked a great deal.
“Pickman’s Model” left me cold and “The Rats in the Walls” had this magnificent buildup that just collapsed under it’s own weight. (I realize I’m in the minority on that one.)

16

Cool Air is great. I read At The Mountain Of Madness late at night, and was convinced that the Shoggoths were coming. I could hear them piping weirdly. I can still hear them…
I didn’t like CoC as much as some of the other stuff, but YMMV.

17

I’ll be the voice of dissent. In my teen years, I was a rabid HP Lovecraft fan. Owned everything he published, in fact. Also had a whopping great heap of similar stuff written by his inner circle. I was enchanted. After I read his work over a few times, got a little older, and a little more sophisticated (I hope), certain glaring shortcomings became more than I could ignore.
Lovecraft doesn’t inspire fear, he describes it. His standard-issue effete protagonist encounters some eldritch, cyclopean horror out of the depths of time, and gets really, really scared. Then he goes mad and/or dies. We get a description of this. I, at least, am not frightened by descriptions of how frightened someone else was. Lovecraft was kind of locked into this, I guess, since we hear over and over again that his eldritch horrors from their non-Euclidean universe are indescribable.
Lovecraft’s style goes way beyond florid. He uses adjectives where they make no sense. In one of his stories (I got this referense from a volume of criticsism) he describes an ancient city as being built from “ghastly marble.” IIRC, he also used the word “builded” in an effort to sound quaintly antique. How, I ask you, can marble be ghastly? In the end, it is only stone. If Lovecraft had had the benefit of a ruthless editor to render a lot of the fat out of his stories, his work would have been better for it. Too bad Mark Twain didn’t live long enough to “correct” Lovecraft’s work as he did James Fenimore Cooper’s.
Overall, the world of fantasy and horror owes a lot to HPL because of some fantastic ideas he had. It’s too bad that his execution of those ideas wasn’t as fantastic as the ideas themselves.

18

Jorge Luis Borghes, the great Argentinian writer, wrote a “Lovecraft” story. :smiley:

19

Many of the pulp mags for which he wrote paid by the word.

20

I have read the majority of Lovecraft’s published short stories, and a recent collection, The Best of HP Lovecraft, truly delivers on its title, although it lacks some key stories, such as “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, and “At the Mountains of Madness”, a masterpiece. Still, for those who wish to get at the meat of Lovecraft without reading hit-or-miss collections, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

It contains the original “Call of Cthulhu” story, and a number of others that are masterworks of what Lovecraft liked to call “Supernatural Horror”. Not your standard suspense stuff, but stories where normal people have brushes with forces not only beyond man’s experience, but beyond his ability to comprehend.
If you like everything spelled out for you, Lovecraft may be less than satisfying. His style was to leave as much as possible to the reader’s imagination.

I agree with Hunter Hawk, his works divide themselves into two categories:

Most describe ancient forgotten gods that bring destruction and madness upon mankind when stirred from their rest. Many take place in the fictional North Massachusetts shore town of Arkham, and it’s clear that he knows that landscape well.

Others however, are mood pieces that set out dreamscapes that are vividly described, although as much as I admire his time-and-place setting abilities, these stories are somewhat unsatisfying to me, particularly his magnum opus of this genre “Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

Lovecraft claims he inherited both aspects of his style from the obscure Welsh author, Arthur Machen, whom he holds in much higher regard than literary history has.

If you get into Lovecraft beyond the collection, be wary. Lovecraft himself never cared much whether the mythos he created in his stories was consistent. Some of his followers, however, such as August Derleth, busied themselves after his death trying to tie his stories together into some sort of mythological continuum, with disappointing results. To make matters worse, they sometimes published such stories as “new” Lovecraft works or “posthumous collaborations”. I warn you away from “Lurker at the Threshold” and “Watchers Out of Time” for this reason.