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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, AJAY
for me. There had always been
Lovecraft freaks around.
To quote Algis Budrys (Again.
But I have to say that I don't regard I don't know why no one else
him as being all that great of a does), from the Sept 1975
writer. His prose style was already issue of "Fantasy and Science
archaic when he was working, and Fiction":
reading him these days, it's hard to
believe he wasn't from a previous "The babbling, fainting
century. 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
writer's to work with
this background, to But no slash
write stories set in as far as I
his universe. The know.
kind of thing we call (Yog/Wilber ?)
"fanfic" today was in
this case actually
sanctioned and The spirit of
encouraged by the the free/open
original author. software
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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