H.P. Lovecraft: Worth my time?

Cafe Society
101

Ooookay. Quick literary lesson here, the short version with most of the details left out:

When Lovecraft died in 1936, he should have plummeted into the same literary obscurity as guys like Seabury Quinn, another popular *Weird Tales * writer. Most pulp writers simply never broke through into the mainstream, and most people today have never heard of the majority of 'em.

Due largely to two men – Donald Wandrei and August Derleth – Lovecraft is still in print. They founded Arkham House Publishing, a small press devoted to *Weird Tales * anthologies and reprints of Lovecraft stuff. Over time, both Arkham House and Lovecraft’s material developed a cult following.

Derleth obtained much of Lovecraft’s unfinished paperwork and manuscripts, and finished several stories that Lovecraft did not. He also reworked some of Lovecraft’s notes into complete stories. He published these works as “posthumous collaborations” under the authorship of “H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.”

When he ran out of Lovecraft notes and ephemera, he continued to write Mythos fiction, and continued to stick Lovecraft’s name on it in front of his own; some of his last “collaborations” were limited to a quote from an existing Lovecraft book or story at the beginning of the book!

…so is this bad? Well, Derleth wasn’t a bad writer, but he wasn’t Lovecraft. Most Lovecraft freaks will tell you that Derleth’s stuff wasn’t as good as the original.

Derleth was largely responsible for hammering together the “Cthulhu Mythos,” and he was certainly responsible for keeping all this stuff in print. This is good. On the other hand, rather than leave most of the cosmic stuff all vague and unstated, he tended to want to quantify and explain things, and turn the vague and horrifying conflicts of the Old Ones and the Elder Gods into a good-vs.-evil shootin’ match, which would have irritated Lovecraft to no end; his gods and monsters didn’t know “good and evil” from “dog doodle and Shinola,” and couldn’t have cared less. Hell, one of his more benign creatures thought they were doing people a favor by sticking their brains in jars and taking them on a tour of the universe…

Confusing the issue even further is the question of Lovecraft’s “revisions.” Y’see, Lovecraft ghosted a fair number of stories for various people. He ghosted one story for Harry Houdini, because the editor of Weird Tales wanted to cash in on his friendship with Houdini and that person’s very-well-publicized return from a vacation in Egypt, and he paid Lovecraft to ghost the story which would be published as “Imprisoned With The Pharaohs, by Harry Houdini.”

Other persons, notably Hazel Heald and C. J. Eddy, paid Lovecraft to revise and edit their material so’s they could get into print and be Published Authors, even if it was in the horror pulps. From what I understand, Heald’s stuff was so wretched that Lovecraft pretty much rewrote her stories from stem to stern, and therefore her stories that he ghosted… he pretty much wrote from scratch, perhaps with a germ of an idea provided by the patron. Other stories were anything from collaborations to mere editing jobs; the facts are unclear. At any rate, most of Lovecraft’s revisions are available in two paperback editions, The Loved Dead and The Horror In The Museum; both are quite worthwhile for Lovecraft buffs.

…but if you’re lookin’ for the pure stuff, check the book. If Derleth’s name is on the cover, you’re lookin’ at a “posthumous collaboration.” Caveat Emptor, and all that.

102

Lovecraft better be still relevant. My current unpublishable story is very much influenced by him.

103

DrFidelius I know what you mean about an unpublishable story. I have a huge stack of form rejection letters, all from folks who never read my submission. None of the folks who have read it have ever bothered to even send a rejection letter. Sometimes I wish I’d never written The King In Yellow.
Hamish
The term materia does indeed come from alchemy. Considering that Lovecraft has Curwen’s library stocked with works by Paracelsis, Albertus Magnus, Felix Agrippa and such, I’m certain he was familiar with alchemy and took the term from it. Considering the many Kabbalistic references in Neon Genesis Evangelion (The most obvious are the tree of life shown in the opening credis), the references to witches’ black sabbaths in DevilMan, and the importance of the half human Dhampir in Vampire Hunter D (Though the version I saw had ‘dunpeal’. It took me awhile to figure out this was simply the Godzilla/Gojira problem.), I have no problem believing that Final Fantasy has elements of medieval alchemy.

BTW When did Curwen possess anybody? He only takes a new body once, when Ward turns Curwen’s corpse into salts and raises him up. Curwen eventually kills Ward and poses as him. But, he never possesses anybody.

104

Well hell, the fact that this thread had reached 3 pages already says that there must be something significant in Lovecrafts work.

105

I don’t think the SDMB is an accurate gauge of Lovecraft’s signifcance or popularity. It seems to me that the percentage of Dopers who are Lovecraft fans is much higher than the percentage of the general population.

I attribute this to the fact that, as I’m sure somebody has mentioned, his work does not lend itself to film.
Re Thief Of Always

While this work IMHO has no Lovecraftian themes (OTTOMH the only thing that comes close is the central point of the chapter What The Flood Gave Up-And What It Took), some of Barker’s work does.

Trying to avoid spoilers-

Skins Of The Fathers- Sometimes the monsters come. Nobody knows from where. Tales say they are ancient, their age best measured in geological time. They father hyrbid children who look human.

The Midnight Meat Train- Ancient, strange things, live deep under the city- and rule it. They worship a great, inhuman thing.

The Great And Secret Show- There are Things out there. They wait in another plane and hunger for our world. They cannot be properly perceived by human senses or described by human words. Their very presence drives men mad (though in this case, only temporarily)

I wonder if I’m reading in things that aren’t there. If any of you can see them, is it coincidence or is Barker also a Lovecraft fan?

106

Have read to date a grand total of maybe four short stories by Barker, no novels. Of the few I’ve read, this one and “Dread” from one of the later Books of Blood I found more disturbing and awful than anything in recent memory. That’s meant in a good way of course ;), being horror, but man. Think I’d have to steel myself mentally before diving into one of his novels.

107

Sounds familiar…Isn’t this much like the connection between Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague deCamp? Didn’t deCamp take a bunch of Howard unfinished stories, jottings & doodles and publish them as Conan stories? (even taking Howard non-Conan stuff and re-working into the Conan mold?)

108

For what it’s worth, DrFidelius, this fragment DOES sound very Lovecraftian. I like it.

Could you publish online?

109

I’m in favor of that–I’d very much like to read it some time.

110

The difference between what Derleth did and what de Camp, Lin Carter, and…umm…(shoot, I’m blanking on the third name) did is that the latter three didn’t bill their stories as being written by Howard. Carter also did some additions to finish incomplete Conan stories that he did mark as being authored or coauthored by Howard, but he made it clear what he was doing.

111

Perhaps if that was the only thing, it wouldn’t hold to this theory.

But the whole game has a very Lovecraftian feel. I mean,

[spoiler]The game is premised on the idea that an ancient horror, a sort of vampire that devours worlds instead of people, fell out of the sky. Her time is coming. She was dug out of the arctic – a very Lovecraftian device – and studied by scientists. The scientists of this world have discovered that there is a lot beyond science – a place where magic and science blur. And I can’t help but hear the name Dr. Tillingast in Dr. Gast. Tillingast was the scientist in “From Beyond” who pushes too far outside the known universe, and is eaten by some incredibly powerful horror.

And at that moment at the end of disk one where Cloud realizes what he is, I got the same shiver I got from the ending of “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

As for the way possession works in the two stories, I realize there’s a difference, with Curwen inhabiting Ward and Sephiroth controlling his clones from a distance. But there’s still the same shiver of horror when you realize what’s going on. I’d played FFVII twice before I realized why the trail of blood at Shinra HQ goes right back to Cloud’s cell, then stops, and why the door is open.[/spoiler]

While googling on the Internet, I discovered something else interesting. In the French version of FFIX, the Tarterian (the demonic book) is called the Lovecraft. I wonder which one is closer to the original Japanese?

112

SPOILER

Curwen didn’t inhabit Ward. Ward raised him from the dead and then Curwen strangled him when he got too “squeamish” and hid his bones in Ward’s original library. Curwen looked just like Ward, with the exception of certain mark. That wasn’t posession . . .

113

:smack:
I think I’m confusing it with another Lovecraft story – I know I’ve read something of his about switching bodies or possession.

It’s been too long since I read Dexter Ward.

114

You may be thinking of one of my favorites, “The Thing on the Doorstep”. Final paragraph:

Sounds not too unlike DrFidelius’s story fragment, no?

115

It’s not as though it’s the worst fiction ever written, but it’s not particularly distinguished or even all that interesting. It contains some warmed-over Lovecraft imagery, and far too much effort goes to trying to rationalize Lovecraft’s vision of unimaginable malevolent gods.

The crime is not in the text itself, but in its attribution to Lovecraft himself, which can lead the uninformed (as I was while reading it) to think that perhaps the man had severely lost his touch in his late years, when in fact, he did not write the book at all.

116

Yes.

de Camp and another chap, Lin Carter (Ballantine’s fantasy editor for most of the 1960s) were both huge fans of Howard’s, and de Camp even knew Howard’s family (and wound up with many of Dr. Howard’s furnishings and possessions after the man died, which the de Camps later donated to Project Pride, a local outfit in Cross Plains, Texas that’s set up the Howard House as a historical site.

Anyway, what they did was rearrange the Conan stories in a rough chronological order, and then they wrote MORE stories (some based on Howard’s notes, some not), and reedited some existing stories to make the new ones fit, and then sold the whole thing as a series of books to Ace Books, which published them as paperbacks with the famous Frank Frazetta covers, and the whole thing wound up going ballistic.

The gravy train began to run low around the eighth book, so de Camp and Carter wrote a whole bunch more stories to shoehorn in between the last Howard story of Conan the Adventurer and the first Howard story of Conan the King. I don’t remember how many volumes the series ran, but there were a bunch of them.

Each of the books lists as its authors Howard, de Camp, and Carter. In that order. Later printings, however, do not list Howard on the spine after volume eight or nine; all books after that are authored solely by de Camp and Carter.

In fairness, however, it should be noted that even Howard did some of this stuff when he was alive; it’s well-known that he took a King Kull story that wasn’t selling, rewrote it as a Conan story, changed the title from “By This Axe I Rule!” to “The Phoenix On The Sword,” and sure enough, it sold. Both versions of the story have been in print, by the way; one in the King Kull anthologies, and the other in the various Conan reprints.

Howard may have had his problems, but he wasn’t proud. He’d gleefully steal from himself if it meant selling a story.