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LOVECRAFT

Suddenly, she popped the question:
"Why do people care about H.P. Lovecraft?"

And that stopped me for a moment.

Lovecraft is a fixture of the scene,
for me. There had always been
Lovecraft freaks around.
                                              To quote Algis
But I have to say that I don't regard         Budrys, from the    (I don't know
him as being all that great of a              Sept 1975 issue      why no one
writer.  His prose style was already          of "Fantasy and      else does.)
archaic when he was working, and              Science
reading him these days, it's hard to          Fiction":              AJAY
believe he wasn't from a previous
century.                                         "The babbling, fainting
                                                 narrator of the typical
                                                 Lovecraft tale does not
                                                 act to show the reader's
                                                 imagination a story.  He
My best answer:                                  files a passionate
                                                 affidavit that something
Early on he wrote some very                      traumatic happened to
competent horror fiction,                        him.  His assertions are
along the lines of Edgar                         sometimes intricate, near
Allen Poe.                                       unto poetry, and
                                                 evocative.  They have to
   But he hit his stride when                    be eloquent; we see no
   he pulled a Balzac, and                       proof they are not lies."
   wrote a series of stories
   with a shared background.
                                                     TELL_ME_TRUE
   This alone is the kind
   of thing that captures
   the mind of a certain
   kind of fan.  There's
   a body of work here
   that you can research,
   there are interlocking
   cross-references that                        Much as James Joyce
   you can trace.                               geeks like to wander
                                                through "Finnegan's
                        You can get lost        Wake"?
                        in this maze.

                                  TRAPS
    Further, Lovecraft
    actually invited other
    writers to work with
    this background, to                But no slash
    write stories set in               as far as I know.
    his universe.  The
    kind of thing we call                     (Yog/Wilber ?)
    "fanfic" today was in
    this case actually
    sanctioned and          The same spirit that
    encouraged by the       underlies the free
    original author.        software/open source
                            movements applied to a
                            fantasy universe.



Notably, Lovecraft's mythos
owed little to the commonly
used fantasic tropes of horror
fiction.  No ghosts, vampires
or werewolves; no "pacts with
the devil"; no unicorns,
gryphons or chimera.

For myself, I think the key                       ACTIVE_NAMING
innovation in Lovecraft's
metaphysics is the notion that
there are some strange forces
at work beneath the surface of
ordinary reality.  There are
demons or gods who created the
world-as-we-know-it as fallout
from their own nearly
incomprehensible activities.
And this undercurrent of
weirdness threatens to seep out
and overwhelm the mundane world
at any moment.

The key point being that
these gods are not so much
hostile to humanity as
completely indifferent.               an icy void, not
They aren't evil, exactly,            a malevolent hell
they just don't care.



            And if I were going to criticize this,
            I think my angle would be: "Yeah, so?".

            A univese indifferent to humanity,
            capable of destruction without reason?
            That certainly sounds familiar.

            What's the point of inventing a
            weird mythos, and piling it on top of
            this notion?


                Cthulhu.
                Yog-soth-thoth.
                The Necronomicon.


       Perhaps... the point is to emphasize it's
       incomprehensibility?  Relativity,
       Evolution, Quantum Mechanics... none of
       them begin to get near the slimey, toxic
       underpinnings of the lovecraftian
       reality.



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