DiscoDadda wrote:A couple months back I picked up an anthology The Best of HP Lovecraft... primarily because several guys here gave Lovecraft 5 stars... I managed to read about 10 or so stories got about 1/2 way thru it before setting it aside.  Some of the stories were The Call of Cthulhu, The Hunter of Dark the Colour of Space, the Dunwich Horror... etc...  I found most to be okay and I can respect Lovecraft's ability to write... None of the stories really grabbed me and said you have to read this now!  Maybe its just too "old school" and I know this post will be sacreligious but the stories were kinda bland.

Probably my favorite was the Dunwich Horror which should have been a longer novel...

Also, there was one technique he seemed to use over and over again, where he would have the main character read the notes of a departed soul who was being driven crazy by some horror that was sooooo horrific, as to be >>>>>> "unspeakable" >>>>>> I really wish he would have described the "unspeakable" horror.... but then it would not have been "unspeakable"

Disco

Disco - You've hit your head square on the nail with Lovecraft.  He is an acquired taste.  When you read Lovecraft, you have to think in terms of the overall feel of the piece as well as the whole fun of the Lovecraft Game.

jasonw1239 wrote:In many ways Lovecraft's work was ground breaking and set the direction for many other horror writers in the 20th century.

What surprised me when I started reading some of the author's that Lovecraft talked about were the number of creepy old bastards there were out there writing fiction. Blackwood and Machen stand out. One of Lovecraft's greatests crimes is that all these no talent hacks like Lin Carter couldn't understand what anyone else saw in Lovecraft and were jealous as hell.

I was reading somewhere the other day that the guys at Marvel Comics feel that they are the ones that made Conan popular and that if they had gotten to do Thongar like they wanted (Carter turned down the $125 an issue fee they were willing to pay for the rights) then no one would know who Conan was but everyone would want the latest Thongar book.

Lin Carter hated Lovecraft (and helped to butcher the Conan stories) though he wrote several forgetable and forgotten Cthulhu Mythos tales of his own.

I know Disco here didn't get into Lovecraft, which is a damn shame because he is missing out on many hours of enjoyment if the stories clicked for him, and Formcritic likes to make fun of Lovecraft, but we all know he wears that Cthulhu for president underwear at convetions (and nothing else) while going around asking women if they want to see his three-lobed eye (I don't want to know what that means).

One of the greatest things that Lovecraft did was to encourage other writers like Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch. He not only let other writers use the Cthulhu Mythos, he encouraged it, and used their contributions in his stories. If Lovecraft used some named book, monster or elder god from outer space then that was the seal of approval for its general use by all the other writers writing in the Mythos.

Pipswich wrote:Granted, Lovecraft occasionally suffered from madness and that madness suffuses his writing.  I expect that for some people the more of the madness, cultural, geographic, academic and other attributes one shares with Lovecraft, the easier it is to look past his failures (as a person and a writer) to his success as a storyteller.

It sounds as if someone has been taking de Camp's biography too seriously... To my knowledge, there is no evidence for "madness" of any kind. I suppose it's arguable that people who share some of a writer's demographic and personality traits might find him more appealing, but I suspect HPL's popularity in some circles and the disdain heaped on him by others has more to do with the underlying worldview and philosophy expressed in his work (cosmic indifferentism is a hard pill to swallow). For every WASP New Englander who failed out of high school and works at McDonald's that adores Lovecraft, there're probably ten Asian-American PhD engineers... Might as well say that the typical Robert E. Howard (whom I don't particularly like) fan is a gun-toting, beer swilling, socially retarded latent homosexual with delusions of Nietzschean superheroism. Some undoubtedly are, but most just aren't.

JasonZavoda wrote:I know Disco here didn't get into Lovecraft, which is a damn shame because he is missing out on many hours of enjoyment if the stories clicked for him, and Formcritic likes to make fun of Lovecraft, but we all know he wears that Cthulhu for president underwear at convetions (and nothing else) while going around asking women if they want to see his three-lobed eye (I don't want to know what that means).

It isn't easy to get past HPL's turgid prose at first, and I think he loses a lot of modern readers that way. I suppose he isn't for everybody, but my advice to Disco is that a little concerted effort to "get into" the stories will be repaid.

Don't mistake my lack of reverence for Lovecraft the writer for a dismissal of Lovecraft the literary figure.

It is important to separate Lovecraft's writing from Lovecraft's literary achievement.

Lovecraft was such a turgid and eye-rollingly melodramatic writer that it has been fun for generations of writers since the 1930's to parody his style.  From a writer's perspective, he can be a maddening author who often uses hyperbole and meaningless adjectives when what he really needs to do is just describe.  His characters are either wooden versions of himself or sneaky, lowlife, halfbreed racial scum.  It isn't hard for biographers to jump to the conclusion that Lovecraft himself had mental problems because of both his strange private life and his frequent use of madness as a theme or plot device.  (If I had a dime for every time a Lovecraft narrator cannot explain what he saw because it might drive him mad.....)

BUT (and it's a very big but)

Lovecraft also succeeded in creating almost an entire genre of sci fi/horror that is still rolling today.   The Cthulhu Mythos, and the idea of utterly inhuman alien presences looming out there, has become a theme running through fiction, movies and games.  Lovecraft's influence is found everywhere.  Every author
in the fantasy/horror field takes a try at a Lovecraftian story or two....some with great success.  People who don't know Lovecraft's name know his themes from movies and television (Robert Bloch's Star Trek episodes, for instance).  Lovecraft looms far above the lesbian/wicca/eco-freak writers of today.  His stories will still be in print and widely read when all of the talking animals, female warriors, impossibly noble eco-elves and girl mages are out of style and consigned to used bookstores.

FormCritic wrote:Lovecraft was such a turgid and eye-rollingly melodramatic writer that it has been fun for generations of writers since the 1930's to parody his style.  From a writer's perspective, he can be a maddening author who often uses hyperbole and meaningless adjectives when what he really needs to do is just describe.

Your point is well taken, but it has to be remembered that a good part of HPL's project was to convey a sense of the unplumbed depths and incomprehensible infinitude of an indifferent universe and man's infinitesimal significance on the cosmic scale (as he viewed it), so to some extent his "antidescription" was a conscious device--he was forced to suggest rather than describe. Considering he was basically the first to attempt to write this way, I tend to cut him some slack. Granted there are some laughable instances where this technique falls completely flat, but there are also some stories and passages where it's quite effective. And, he was getting better at it as he gained experience; the style of "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time", while still in the same vein as his earlier work, shows a lot more refinement in his philosophy and aesthetic and the use of "meaningless" adjectives to create the desired effects. YMMV.

His characters are either wooden versions of himself or sneaky, lowlife, halfbreed racial scum.  It isn't hard for biographers to jump to the conclusion that Lovecraft himself had mental problems because of both his strange private life and his frequent use of madness as a theme or plot device.

I can't argue with you there. Lovecraft's empathy and capacity to understand those different from himself was rudimentary at best. He was without a doubt the Great Granddaddy of all social misfits (or at least the Granddaddy, as Poe was probably a bigger freak), despite the fact that the extent of his seclusion is grossly exaggerated (he actually had a quite a few friends, and traveled extensively).

 (If I had a dime for every time a Lovecraft narrator cannot explain what he saw because it might drive him mad.....)

This goes back to my point, above.

Well a lot of points here and too many to comment on individually.

1. De Camp and Carter were both hacks.  They glommed onto the Howard legacy because that's where the money train was heading, proceeded to chop up Howard's works and insert their own benign bullshit and make it of the same level as Howard's writing, and finished it off by denigrating Howard (and Lovecraft) and their writings at every instance (they wrote bios of both that called them insane and worse).   Thankfully, I've lived to see the slide into total irrelevance of both De Camp and Carter and the stars of Howard and Lovecraft rise to prominence.  In another generation when the names of Lin Carter and Sprague De Camp are mentioned I'm hopeful the next sentence out of someone's mouth will be "Who?"

2. Both Lovecraft and Howard were not sociable people by any definition. They were not, however, mentally unhealthy any more than your average skatepunk, computer nerd, folk rock artist, or video game fanatic is nowadays.  That both were loners that found satisfaction in spinning pulp yarns is not remarkable nor should it be seen as a sign of aberration.  If you consider them "mad" then surely Lindsay Lohan or any of her ilk would be considered crazier without the benefit of creating a genre that has lasted almost 100 years.

3. There was one point in the 60s/70s when Conan paperbacks were hard to find....the comics did fill a void, and all Roy Thomas was doing was rewriting Howard tales for the comic (Roy Thomas is a nice storyteller but no comic writer ever went farther with less original ideas than Thomas during his career).  But however you feel about the comics, the Barry Smith art did bring a lot of new faces into the genre with their incredible color covers (myself one of them, I had never heard of Conan before the comic book, so that was my introduction) and then the great Buscema art that followed.  I'm sure I would have eventually discovered Howard's Conan but my seeking him out was a direct result of the Thomas/Smith/Buscema Conan series.  

4. Since Thongor is but a poorly written Conan it is laughable to think that he would have ever been as popular as Conan even if Marvel Comics had made him an Avenger alongside Iron Man, Cap and Thor     Carter's entire career is one of pastiche and obvious jealousy at his inability to rise to the heights of others in the genres he wrote for (his fantasy is passable; his Cthulhu Mythos is dreadful).  For fun, when you pick up an old collection of fantasy that was edited by Lin Carter, check to see if one of his OWN stories is in the collection....chances are the answer is yes.  And think about the kind of guy with the chutzpah to put his OWN substandard fantasy in a "Year's Best" collection when he is the one EDITING THE COLLECTION HIMSELF!  

Mike B.

LOL. Yeah, the title Unspeakable Oath is unspeakably stupid , but let's not confuse Grandpa Theobald with his misbegotten offspring--he himself was far too conscious of the meanings of words to coin that phrase. I understand that some of the "circle" wanted to translate Unaussprechlichen Kulten as "Unspeakable Cults", but they ended up with "Nameless" (by Derleth's suggestion, IIRC). But the original "German" title for the forbidden tome was your boy Howard's creation.

If I have any special problem with HPL's choice of words, it's the repetitive use of the word "cyclopean". When I was 14 reading this stuff, until I picked up a dictionary I kept picturing walls, masonry, etc. with single eyeballs staring back at the narrator... guffaw.

Perhaps "An Unspeakable Oath" is an oath which is too horrific or blasphemous to utter out loud, except in extremis. Thus it might be referred to tangentially.  This is not entirely uncommon; here in the UK for example there is a swear-word which is often referred to as "the C word", that is a kind of unspeakable oath. I am sure there are words in the US that are in a way unspeakable by many in most circumstances. Or, to be a bit more Lovecraftian, perhaps this oath is too powerful to utter as its very mention brings about some kind of magical doom - perhaps some entity the very naming of which risks attracting its dreadful attention  

Or... maybe we could be talking about a terrible oath of allegiance which is so profoundly regretted as to be beyond discussion, e.g. some calamitous Faustian pact. Or maybe some oath which might be read, but one dare not speak out loud. ... I like the phrase, thinking of it this way is possibly more true to Lovecraft's writings.

Peeking in for a bit - I wanted to recommend a book I picked up last week, The Weird:  A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ISBN 978-07653-3362-9).  It's a phone-book-like compendium dedicated to tracing the thread of uncanny stories from the early 1900s to the present, regardless of language or rarity, and contains over 1,000 pages and over 100 authors, with a lot of original translations and reprints of hard to find stuff that's still in copyright.

The more recognizable authors included:  Foreword by Michael Moorcock, Afterword by China Mieville, H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Saki, Lord Dunsany, Franz Kafka, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Mervyn Peake, Gahan Wilson, George R. R. Martin, Ramsey Campbell, William Gibson, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman, and a jillion people you might only know by name or never heard of.

It's good stuff.