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Post by cw67q on Oct 28, 2010 9:54:56 GMT
Pickman's Model is a favourite of mine, one of those stories where HPL's method of the anti-twist-ending really works well.
I really like the atmosphere created in the Rats in the Walls but every time I read it I find it difficult to envisage the later parts set in the vaults.
Colour out of Space is another very strong story marred only by the laughable dying Victorian Ham-actor speech at the end. The final line of this might be just dandy but I can't help seeing the guy exclaiming "and now I die!" then staggering to his feet <again> with the mock rapier under his arm to the horror of the rest of the cast. Despite that a true classic.
Zann I think is perhpas HPL's best story, although there are three or four perhaps that I am fonder of (e.g. Pickman's above).
On appreciation of HPL in general: I thought he was okay when I first reda him as a teenager, but not up to what I'd expected (it had taken me a long time to trcak any books down, HPL was not easily available in the UK at the time of which I write).
I revisted HPL every few years though despite having lost interest in horror fiction during the great 80s boom of ... wel crap really, everytime I returned to HPL I enjoyed him more. Then when I strated reading horror again some years back now I started with mnay of the authors that HPL wrote about in his famous essay. I found that I liked more than a few of the other authors I came across considerably more than HPL.
I still like HPL as much as I ever did. However, having reda more widely in horror I really don't subscribe to waht I see as the modern consensus to place HPL right at the top of the list of writers in this genre. Great fun to read, but primarily entertainment. Not that ther is anything wrong with that (said Chris casting a wary eye towards the "Anti-intellectualism" thread), but I'm bemused by how much more than entertainment so many commentators credit HPL with. I'd place his work firmly in the same camp as MR james, AM Burrage, EF Benson etc camp rather than Aickman, Machen, Blackwood, de la Mare etc camp in terms of being primarily about the entertainment or chills rather than exploring something beyond and above the simple fun of it. (I repeat no problem with the for fun stuff).
Finally, almost every HPL book I've seen (and I've owned dozens of different editions down the years) carries a blurb on the back saying something like:
"plumbs the absolute depths of sheer blood-curdling horror"
and I ask you: in all honesty has anyone ever found HPL's work frightening?
I don't read horror fiction primarily to be scared (or even "horrified" for that matter, I'm not really sure I'm that fond of the "horror" label) so it doesn't bother me that it's not in the least bit frightening, but does anyone eslse find these blurbs faintly ludicrous?
Sorry to bang on so long.
- Chris
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Post by weirdmonger on Oct 28, 2010 11:55:30 GMT
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Post by dem bones on Oct 28, 2010 13:06:58 GMT
Pickman's Model - Not sure how many times I've read this now but like a lot of the stories in here it rewards repeat readings. I love stories about horror in art anyway, and the disappearance of Richard Upton Pickman after painting a number of pieces depicting horrible things beginning to encroach on our world stlll packs a few chills. Pickman's Model is a favourite of mine, one of those stories where HPL's method of the anti-twist-ending really works well. my first taste of Lovecraft was via the - i would go as far as to call it essential - Hamlyn hardback, The Best Ghost Stories which ran Pickman's Model, The Rats In The Walls, The Dunwich Horror and The Music Of Erich Zann, a selection so jaw-droppingly magnificent it set me to seeking out a HPL greatest hits collection as a matter of prioity. With the notable exceptions of The Call Of Cthulhu and The Colour Out Of Space and The Shadow Over Innsmouth (it's been a long time, but isn't there a scene where the moribund fishy-smelling inbred's board a bus? for some reason, that image has remained vivid in my mind for years!), none of his acknowledged classics ever affected me quite the same way, although some of the early, unashamed pulp horror stories - The Hound, Herbert West: Re-Animator, The Picture In The House - certainly did. At a push, i'd go for Pickman's Model as my personal favourite for it's head-on collision between trad Gothic horror melodrama and cosmic far-out ness. "God, how that man could paint! There was a study called 'Subway Accident', in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform ...". i've a suspicion that John Bolton's excellent artwork for the Humgoo sequence of The Monster Club was at least partly inspired by the paintings Lovecraft describes in Pickman's ModelFinally, almost every HPL book I've seen (and I've owned dozens of different editions down the years) carries a blurb on the back saying something like: "plumbs the absolute depths of sheer blood-curdling horror" and I ask you: in all honesty has anyone ever found HPL's work frightening? I don't read horror fiction primarily to be scared (or even "horrified" for that matter, I'm not really sure I'm that fond of the "horror" label) so it doesn't bother me that it's not in the least bit frightening, but does anyone else find these blurbs faintly ludicrous? chris, that one is worthy of a thread to itself. i think we've maybe touched upon this before, but the ratio of how many horror stories that actually do what they say on the tin - horrify you, or at least give you even a slight shudder - must be minuscule. which isn't to say, of course, that they can't still be brilliant for other reasons (no-one would bother reading them otherwise!).
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Oct 28, 2010 15:42:29 GMT
Thanks Des, very kind- You're benefiting from me doing everything I can to put off working on lyrics for the new CD. Now's the time to put in any other requests
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Post by killercrab on Oct 29, 2010 0:57:43 GMT
Watch out for your ankles, George...
This one is certainly ideal for an E.C. Comics adaptation !
KC
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Post by jamesdoig on Oct 29, 2010 8:00:28 GMT
I still read Lovecraft pretty regularly and get a kick out of it, though my reading tastes aren't particularly sophisticated. There something about his writing style...there's a great little piece by Robert Price in Twilight Zone magazine that illustrates some of the worst excesses of the man himself and his disciples, but you've still gotta love 'im.
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Post by Johnlprobert on Nov 27, 2010 21:45:22 GMT
The Haunter of the Dark - HPL's response to a Robert Bloch tale (quite possibly The Shambler from the Stars but I'm not sure) was to put him (as Robert Blake) into this one. This is the first story I've read in this volume that's disappointed me - I remember it being far more atmospheric and frightening and while the opening descriptions of the evil church are quite splendid this fumbles the ball a bit in trying to describe just how terrible the unnamable horrors are and unfortunately it goes over the top to the point where more definitely becomes less.
The Picture in the House - A slight story but nevertheless quite punchy.
The Call of the Cthulhu - It always surprises me that one of HPL's most famous stories isn't really a story at all but a series of fragmented narratives glued together to give the overall impression of something global and terrifying taking place. But my God it works. Really, really good.
The Dunwich Horror - Not as good, mainly because there's far too much of local yokels trying to describe stuff that means that all the tentacles and eyeballs and 'alf a face of the creature gets sorely dimiminished in effect. I've never been a huge fan of this story, or of the 1970 film with rubbish Sandra Dee, although it does have the wonderfully mental Dean Stockwell and classic Les Baxter music.
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Post by dem bones on Nov 28, 2010 10:06:07 GMT
The Picture in the House - A slight story but nevertheless quite punchy. In all seriousness, i find this story far more frightening than any of his Cthulthu Mythos stories, which is not the same thing as saying that The Picture In The House is "better" than The Call Of Cthulhu or The Dunwich Horror, you understand. By dispensing with the cosmic dread & Co., HPL gives us a mundane, everyday, it-could-happen-to-you tale of terror, not dissimilar in feel to the likes of Alex White's Never Talk To Strangers! Colin Wilson pointed out that this was one of only two (?) occasions when HPL made any reference to sex in his fiction (perverted, of course: the old timer getting a "tickle" from ogling the woodcut depicting extreme cannibal excess), the other being The Loved Dead which may or may not have been mostly the work of C. M. Eddy.
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 12:33:25 GMT
The Picture in the House - A slight story but nevertheless quite punchy. In all seriousness, i find this story far more frightening than any of his Cthulthu Mythos stories, which is not the same thing as saying that The Picture In The House is "better" than The Call Of Cthulhu or The Dunwich Horror, you understand. By dispensing with the cosmic dread & Co., HPL gives us a mundane, everyday, it-could-happen-to-you tale of terror, not dissimilar in feel to the likes of Alex White's Never Talk To Strangers! Colin Wilson pointed out that this was one of only two (?) occasions when HPL made any reference to sex in his fiction (perverted, of course: the old timer getting a "tickle" from ogling the woodcut depicting extreme cannibal excess), the other being The Loved Dead which may or may not have been mostly the work of C. M. Eddy. Yes, I think "The Terrible Old Man" and "In The Vault" are also of that short-sharp-shock kind of proto-EC comics terror HPL sometimes wrote. Mark S.
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Post by killercrab on Nov 28, 2010 19:58:36 GMT
Yes, I think "The Terrible Old Man" and "In The Vault" are also of that short-sharp-shock kind of proto-EC comics terror HPL sometimes wrote.
God yes but there's a part of me likes the other crawling creeping stuff that goes on descriptively forever moodily creeping the plot forward. Immersing oneself in his big works is addictive. I'd like to have listened to John's talk on Lovecraft on film because I can't think of many films offhand .
KC
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Post by marksamuels on Nov 28, 2010 23:11:01 GMT
Sounds to me that you require a copy of this reference book KC, published by Nightshade Books in 2006. It's sent me on many a hunt after Lovecraftian celluloid horrors... Mark S.
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Post by cw67q on Nov 29, 2010 9:31:40 GMT
Hi John,
"Haunter of the Dark" is indeed a sequal to Bloch's "the Shambler from the Stars", many years later Bloch wrote a story as a sequal to tHotD called "the Shadow from the Steeple". I like Haunter more than you do John, but I agree that the climactic passage is probably the worst case of "help I'm been eaten alive, I type this with my last remaining digit" in HPL's work (and I think the insane namedropping in the same paragraph doesn't help the ending much either. But I think there are aome very atmospheric scenes in this one, and a pretty good plot too.
"the Picture in the House", yes is very "punchy", particularly by HPL's standards. I think it is a very effective tale. I don't like the thunderclap ending, although it could be a (humourous?)nod in the direction of a well worn gothic trope.
"the Call of Cthulhu"* has some of HPL's best passages and I like the fragmented structure of the tale. This tale still works very well for me.
I agree with you on "the Dunwich Horror". Out of all of HPL's most highly regarded tales this one always falls a bit flat for me. I do like it, there is a decent story in here, but it seems to lack the energy and power (and also come to think of it, the flaws) of HPL's other big hitters.
Best - Chris
*ps (I might have posed this one here before) Who can identify the source, author and story, for the quotation that opens the tale?
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Nov 29, 2010 9:44:18 GMT
Who can identify the source, author and story, for the quotation that opens the tale? It is from Algernon Blackwood's novel THE CENTAUR.
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Post by cw67q on Nov 29, 2010 11:02:57 GMT
Who can identify the source, author and story, for the quotation that opens the tale? It is from Algernon Blackwood's novel THE CENTAUR. Darn tooting it is - Chris
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Nov 29, 2010 12:08:24 GMT
What do I win?
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