Tuesday, 29 April 2008 02:30 pm
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deckardcanineYesterday, I sped up my reading and finished The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, a collection of H.P. Lovecraft shorts compiled by one S.T. Joshi. By "finished," I mean "read as much as I cared to read and then some," totaling about 100 out of 360 story pages. My only previous reading of Lovecraft was of the excellent "The Rats in the Walls." Beyond that, only his popularity had put him on my wish list.
I started with the biography and Joshi’s assessment of Lovecraft as a person. The best thing about him IMO is that he had been quite the wunderkind. Unfortunately, his bitter philosophical materialism leaning toward Nietzsche doesn’t appeal to me. (Ironic that someone with his name should have marital troubles.) He also expresses racism time and time again, but I enjoy enough 19th- and early 20th-century writers to overlook it -- most of the time.
Before I go into the stories, let me state a warning about the collection format. The stories contain plenty of superscript numbers for endnotes, not footnotes. The numbers restart for each story, and the table of contents does not indicate the specific starting page for each story’s notes. I wound up using two bookmarks at once, flipping pretty frequently. Due to spoilers, I soon learned not to read the note sets’ intros until after I had finished the story, which usually meant flipping back a page. To make matters worse, about half the notes cleared things up and the other half were beyond trivial. Why would even the most avid Lovecraft fanatic care that the newspaper the author mentioned was founded about five years before his birth?
Anyway, these are the stories I read:
Dagon: The first in the book seems the most amateur. In a nutshell, a guy gets lost at sea, encounters a strange landscape with creepy humanoid statues, meets a giant... something... escapes mad, and plans to commit suicide as soon as he’s finished relating the tale. What’s the problem? Too little told. Apart from the creature’s size, we have no clue what it looks like. And there’s no indication that it did anything but appear. I get scared by marine giants myself, but I doubt that merely seeing one, however closely, would make me want to die long after I had reached safety. Supposedly, the statues account for a substantial part of the fear, but there’s really no evidence that the real guys would come after him, or even that they ever existed.
This was one of many Lovecraft stories inspired by a dream. That may be a big part of the problem. Sure, it scared you, man, but we weren’t there. Our minds weren’t reduced to emotions like yours. We need more info. Sometimes less is more, but if you don’t give us enough to work with, our nightmare imaginations can produce only the same-old-same-old.
Small wonder that Lovecraft later wrote a letter titled "In Defense of Dagon." Man, if he’s so big and scary, why does he need someone to defend him?
The Statement of Randolph Carter: A slight improvement. Here the narrator doesn’t see anything he claims to be indescribable; he mainly just hears stuff. Once again, the dream basis comes into play, and too often he has to tell us flat out that something was scary. But at least this time, as rarely happens with Lovecraft, we get some dialog. The fact that the dialog is over a radio enables a simultaneous sense of aloneness, which surely helps.
It was in this story that I first saw parallels with the beloved gothic video game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Indeed, the game seems to owe more to Lovecraft than to Edgar Allan Poe or any other cited writer. Intrigued, I read on....
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family: Uch. All that writing to get to the point, and that’s it? Without spoiling, let me just say that the twist, while arguably scandalous, would have been much more horrific to Lovecraft’s contemporaries. So horrific, apparently, that ordinary suicide won’t do: The author (somehow not a first-person narrator this time) advises us to self-immolate. Dude, not even your brand of atheism should make you this susceptible to self-destructive urges.
At this point, I decided not to read all 18 stories. I would now limit myself to the ones mentioned by name on the back of the book, at most.
The Outsider: Okay, now the dream inspiration is going somewhere. It’s silly and ultimately predictable, but at least I can appreciate the colorful side, for the time.
Herbert West--Reanimator: I learned from the notes intro (before I knew not to read those ahead of time) that this 31-pager was published in parts over several issues of a pulp mag. That explains why each chapter starts out written as tho the narrator hadn’t already told us what happened in the previous chapters. It gets tiresome that way. In truth, so does the plot, in which the eponymous character tries to raise the dead with varying levels of success. As with the previous stories, I felt more drear than dread. But at least the last chapter, tho presaged, gets pretty exciting. And I’m usually not big on zombies.
The biggest disappointment is that the jacket described this story as "grotesquely comic." Grotesque, yes, but... I couldn’t even tell it was supposed to be comical. Ever. Even with the prompting, I can hardly see it that way. Old jokes are rarely funny, but when it’s been less than a century since their use, I expect to at least see the potential. Would Lovecraft and I ever have laughed at the same things? Or is it just Joshi?
The Hound: Awright! Now here’s an unmitigated chill. Bonus points for the Hound of the Baskervilles reference. It does sport the same questionable "grotesquely comic" description, apparently for the satirically grandiose language, but hey, works for me.
I would save the collection’s title story for last. I considered "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but at more than double the length of HWR, I backed down. One more HWR-length piece was already pushing it.
The Call of Cthulhu: From pop culture references, I knew a fair amount this story already. That did not stop me from appreciating the culmination of various decent Lovecraft trends into one magnum opus. It’s basically everything he wanted “Dagon” to be and more. Being a Christian did not stop me from enjoying the seeming mockery in the monster’s cult -- might have helped, in fact. Really, the whole thing succeeds for its imagination. What it might lack in structure, it excuses with madness, understandable secrecy, and bizarre science (including geometry).
Scary? Well, kinda. That’s almost beside the point. The fact that the narrator merely considered suicide was enough to keep me upbeat, but here was something to finally account for popularity.
And that’ll be all, thank you.
I started with the biography and Joshi’s assessment of Lovecraft as a person. The best thing about him IMO is that he had been quite the wunderkind. Unfortunately, his bitter philosophical materialism leaning toward Nietzsche doesn’t appeal to me. (Ironic that someone with his name should have marital troubles.) He also expresses racism time and time again, but I enjoy enough 19th- and early 20th-century writers to overlook it -- most of the time.
Before I go into the stories, let me state a warning about the collection format. The stories contain plenty of superscript numbers for endnotes, not footnotes. The numbers restart for each story, and the table of contents does not indicate the specific starting page for each story’s notes. I wound up using two bookmarks at once, flipping pretty frequently. Due to spoilers, I soon learned not to read the note sets’ intros until after I had finished the story, which usually meant flipping back a page. To make matters worse, about half the notes cleared things up and the other half were beyond trivial. Why would even the most avid Lovecraft fanatic care that the newspaper the author mentioned was founded about five years before his birth?
Anyway, these are the stories I read:
Dagon: The first in the book seems the most amateur. In a nutshell, a guy gets lost at sea, encounters a strange landscape with creepy humanoid statues, meets a giant... something... escapes mad, and plans to commit suicide as soon as he’s finished relating the tale. What’s the problem? Too little told. Apart from the creature’s size, we have no clue what it looks like. And there’s no indication that it did anything but appear. I get scared by marine giants myself, but I doubt that merely seeing one, however closely, would make me want to die long after I had reached safety. Supposedly, the statues account for a substantial part of the fear, but there’s really no evidence that the real guys would come after him, or even that they ever existed.
This was one of many Lovecraft stories inspired by a dream. That may be a big part of the problem. Sure, it scared you, man, but we weren’t there. Our minds weren’t reduced to emotions like yours. We need more info. Sometimes less is more, but if you don’t give us enough to work with, our nightmare imaginations can produce only the same-old-same-old.
Small wonder that Lovecraft later wrote a letter titled "In Defense of Dagon." Man, if he’s so big and scary, why does he need someone to defend him?
The Statement of Randolph Carter: A slight improvement. Here the narrator doesn’t see anything he claims to be indescribable; he mainly just hears stuff. Once again, the dream basis comes into play, and too often he has to tell us flat out that something was scary. But at least this time, as rarely happens with Lovecraft, we get some dialog. The fact that the dialog is over a radio enables a simultaneous sense of aloneness, which surely helps.
It was in this story that I first saw parallels with the beloved gothic video game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. Indeed, the game seems to owe more to Lovecraft than to Edgar Allan Poe or any other cited writer. Intrigued, I read on....
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family: Uch. All that writing to get to the point, and that’s it? Without spoiling, let me just say that the twist, while arguably scandalous, would have been much more horrific to Lovecraft’s contemporaries. So horrific, apparently, that ordinary suicide won’t do: The author (somehow not a first-person narrator this time) advises us to self-immolate. Dude, not even your brand of atheism should make you this susceptible to self-destructive urges.
At this point, I decided not to read all 18 stories. I would now limit myself to the ones mentioned by name on the back of the book, at most.
The Outsider: Okay, now the dream inspiration is going somewhere. It’s silly and ultimately predictable, but at least I can appreciate the colorful side, for the time.
Herbert West--Reanimator: I learned from the notes intro (before I knew not to read those ahead of time) that this 31-pager was published in parts over several issues of a pulp mag. That explains why each chapter starts out written as tho the narrator hadn’t already told us what happened in the previous chapters. It gets tiresome that way. In truth, so does the plot, in which the eponymous character tries to raise the dead with varying levels of success. As with the previous stories, I felt more drear than dread. But at least the last chapter, tho presaged, gets pretty exciting. And I’m usually not big on zombies.
The biggest disappointment is that the jacket described this story as "grotesquely comic." Grotesque, yes, but... I couldn’t even tell it was supposed to be comical. Ever. Even with the prompting, I can hardly see it that way. Old jokes are rarely funny, but when it’s been less than a century since their use, I expect to at least see the potential. Would Lovecraft and I ever have laughed at the same things? Or is it just Joshi?
The Hound: Awright! Now here’s an unmitigated chill. Bonus points for the Hound of the Baskervilles reference. It does sport the same questionable "grotesquely comic" description, apparently for the satirically grandiose language, but hey, works for me.
I would save the collection’s title story for last. I considered "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but at more than double the length of HWR, I backed down. One more HWR-length piece was already pushing it.
The Call of Cthulhu: From pop culture references, I knew a fair amount this story already. That did not stop me from appreciating the culmination of various decent Lovecraft trends into one magnum opus. It’s basically everything he wanted “Dagon” to be and more. Being a Christian did not stop me from enjoying the seeming mockery in the monster’s cult -- might have helped, in fact. Really, the whole thing succeeds for its imagination. What it might lack in structure, it excuses with madness, understandable secrecy, and bizarre science (including geometry).
Scary? Well, kinda. That’s almost beside the point. The fact that the narrator merely considered suicide was enough to keep me upbeat, but here was something to finally account for popularity.
And that’ll be all, thank you.
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That said, I tried to read Lovecraft, and got tired of him quickly. I respect his work, but it ain't me. OTOH, without it, how would I get to The Unspeakable Vault of DOOM!"?
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Lovecraft
The other movie scared me. The whole bit about a man's brain being stuck inside a bat creature and flying around while his mind is screaming...that's pretty horrible to think about. The Kluthu thing was weird, too. It's like a tower and this monster is puppeting everyone. Strange, but not as horrible as the bat.
Lovecraft cartoon
Re: Lovecraft cartoon
Ursula Vernon's deviantart page http://ursulav.deviantart.com/ has some very strange Chthuliana; the Elder Soap ad is my favorite.
Re: Lovecraft cartoon
And then they show Lovecraft's grave, and then Lovecraft's skeleton bangs its head on the coffin lid.
Re: Lovecraft cartoon
In glow-in-the-dark green, of course.
Re: Lovecraft cartoon