It being Halloween week (the time of year when one should naturally consider the strange, the frightening & the ghoulish), and partly hoping to find some insipiration for a brilliant NaNoWriMo project, I googled H.P. Lovecraft to find out something about him. I’ve read most of his stories several times, knew a lot of the background about his life, but had actually never seen a photograph of him.
Whew. If he happened to be walking down the sidewalk in my direction, I think I’d cross the street the instant I saw him coming. You know the old trope about guys who write thrillers / horror books (Stephen King, James Patterson, etc.) look like nerdy doofus-es, while children’s book authors (like Shel Silverstein) looks like ex-cons? Well, it doesn’t apply in this case.
Lovecraft certainly looks like someone who, when asked at a cocktail party what he did for a living, could answer “I scribe strange & unnatural tales of maleficient creatures hailing from the realms beyond mankind’s understanding,” and nobody would be surprised that he would say such a thing. Most likely, folks would think to themselves “Figures.”
When somebody asked what he did for fun, people were probably surprised when he did NOT state “I stalk random strangers in the dead of the night, until I corner them in dark, unsuspecting places, where I mercilessly butcher them in cold-blooded fashion.”
Lovecraft looked as if he’d had been staring at non-euclidean architecture for a tad bit too long.
Not really seeing the freakiness. He’s got a long face, but so what? I voted for Kerry. A lot of '30s photographs look rather grim; it was a more formal time. His hair is slicked down which may not look right to us now but was the fashion of the time.
Another vote for not looking terrible–he has a slightly odd mouth and a big jaw, but that’s really it. I wouldn’t run screaming in eldritch terror or whatever.
What happened to his mouth between childhood and adulthood? It looks like he has a big wad of chew behind his lower lip. I just tried jutting out my jaw (yeah, you make faces at the computer too and don’t deny it!) and I don’t get that effect.
I have to agree – I’ve long thought that Lovecraft looks weird. But he’s not the only one. As Ivan Astikov points out, Poe looks pretty damned weird, too.
So, for that matter, does stephen King. They tried to hide it by having him angle his head and cup his chin in his hand for the dust jackret photo for The Shining, but King’s face looks a bit odd.
Agreed Cal. I certainly wouldn’t like to meet you in a dark pirates cave. If you’d had an eye-patch, you could have settled in there. No offense intended!
