julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
Posts: 70
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Post by julieh on Jan 12, 2011 20:52:32 GMT
Oh, absolutely true - it's his words that make him exemplary - like I said, that's what makes any visual translation particularly awkward and generally pale in comparison. People criticize Lovecraft for being wordy, but the scope of his abillity to paint a scene's tone and convey a mood (without necessarily ever giving you a concrete visual description to piece together), is amazing.
Sad part is many of those who followed "the school of Lovecraft" (*cough*August Derleth*cough*) didn't have the scope and understanding of vocabulary Lovecraft did, and thought that just by using the same words he did, they could inspire the same kind of horror. Most just end up sounding silly to anyone who has a dictionary.
However, I will put a caveat on reading as a best way to experience HPL - If you get a good reader doing a straight reading of a story (*cough*David MacCallum*cough*), then you can really hear and fully experience the lyrical nature of his words themselves. Much of what Lovecraft wrote is surprisingly evocative. You can't help butthink that Lovecraft must actually have spoken like that (and by all accounts he may very well have) since he clearly knew the sounds of his words.
It can be very powerful, when well done, and there are readings that are worth searching out.
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Post by monker on Jan 13, 2011 2:07:31 GMT
I have wildly conflicting feelings about not being able to get into Lovecraft; on the one hand, I feel a bit like a literary snob p*****g into a tsunami and on the other, simply like a pitifully slow reader looking for an excuse to legitimise my lack of patience and other inadequacies. I do love 'The Music of Erik Zahn' but that's only one story and hardly representative.
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julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
Posts: 70
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Post by julieh on Jan 13, 2011 2:58:56 GMT
Lovecraft is a very peculiar taste, and not necessarily for everyone. He pioneered a new school of horror that has continued to this day, so there is no question of his merit, regardless of whether you like his style or not.
But just because something is good doesn't mean everyone MUST like it.
[My personal motto applies here: If everyone had the same taste, every TV show would be "The Bachelor"]
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 13, 2011 9:14:22 GMT
David A. Riley remarked on another thread that tastes change. I can remember devouring Lovecraft as a youngster. I recently reread The Music of Erich Zann and found it faintly enyoyable. I just picked up 'The Boats of the Glen Carrig', by Hodgson which I can remember enjoying some years ago and to be honest I struggled to turn the second page. He is simply a shadow of Lovecraft.
I think there are a number of aspects to this change in my appreciation of Lovecraft.
Firstly, I've read it all before so there are no surprises. The creeping horror has kind of crept away. As a teenager the idea that there were dark areas with shocking unnameable monstrosities was not so intellectualised in my brain and therefore produced the appropriately physically horrid revulsions. Now home grown horror confronts me every time I walk out the door or stare at my computer screen. Not much need to seek it out in uncharted regions and unknown countryside.
For me the language is now thirty years older than when I started reading it and moving into the archaic nonsense category. (on reflection I think I prefer that)
My taste has changed. I like more immediacy on the one hand, terser writing, more direct. A large part of my brain cannot be bothered trundiling through 200 pages to find out that the horror was a) nameless b) formless c) Unseen d) from the deep
Having said all this. there is no doubt that Lovecraft was a greater writer than most if not all the pygmies that followed in his wake and that he far excels most if not all modern writers in the genre. He would be greater purely on the grounds of being seminal but he was also as tremendous at evoking an atmosphere. None of this means that we are forced to like his work.
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Post by monker on Jan 13, 2011 9:51:20 GMT
I love his idea of 'cosmic' horror, without there necessarily being any science-fictional connotation, but he did tend to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the mix. Lovecraft writes with a kind of effected melodrama that I don't take to. I've certainly championed at least one writer, however, who I'd say was technically inferior to Lovecraft so it is just a matter of taste.
I like the intrusion of the supernatural onto a prosaic backdrop. You could not say that was a characteristic of H.P.
I think it's a bit unfair to call William Hope Hodgson a "shadow" of Lovecraft when he happens to predate him. It's like giving the former a burden of prove that he does not have to answer to.
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Post by David A. Riley on Jan 13, 2011 9:52:05 GMT
I recently started rereading my 1963 Arkham House edition of The Dunwich Horror and was surprised how much I actually appreciated the stories in it. The Colour Out of Space, in particular, was a joy to read - and in some ways I had forgotten so much of what happened when I last read it that it was like discovering it for the first time - which came as a big surprise and even bigger bonus to me! Lovecraft's descriptions in this story in particular are so vivid they created a perfect mind picture of everything that took place in it. I was also very impressed with The Dunwich Horror itself, especially Lovecraft's use of colloquial language - in particular the telephone calls exchanged by those under attack by the unseen monster.
I agree. Compared to those who followed him Lovecraft still stands as a giant.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jan 13, 2011 10:24:02 GMT
Lovecraft writes with a kind of effected melodrama that I don't take to. I think people often neglect that there are several, very different, phases to Lovecraft's writing. In particular, with "The Call of Cthulhu" he definitely says goodbye to anything resembling traditional horror fiction, and to the spell of Edgar Allan Poe. His best work is what he wrote late in his life, such as "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time." These have nothing of the "purple prose" that Lovecraft is so often accused of; instead, they are very sober, almost journalistic narratives.
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Post by Craig Herbertson on Jan 13, 2011 10:52:36 GMT
I think it's a bit unfair to call William Hope Hodgson a "shadow" of Lovecraft when he happens to predate him. It's like giving the former a burden of prove that he does not have to answer to. You are absolutely right and I apologise. I had utterly forgotten that as its so long since I read him. I'd also forgotten even that he wrote 'Night Lands' which stands alone as a disturbing and perhaps unique work in the genre. In fact I've forgotten just about everything I knew about him and I think I'll have to make another effort at reading him in that light.
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Post by monker on Jan 13, 2011 11:42:38 GMT
Lovecraft writes with a kind of effected melodrama that I don't take to. I think people often neglect that there are several, very different, phases to Lovecraft's writing. In particular, with "The Call of Cthulhu" he definitely says goodbye to anything resembling traditional horror fiction, and to the spell of Edgar Allan Poe. His best work is what he wrote late in his life, such as "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time." These have nothing of the "purple prose" that Lovecraft is so often accused of; instead, they are very sober, almost journalistic narratives. True, but then again, I'm so hard to budge, that I'd just relegate his later stuff as being 'science fiction' and therefore lower down in my list of priorities which is really just the gist of it.
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Post by cw67q on Jan 13, 2011 12:51:11 GMT
Lovecraft writes with a kind of effected melodrama that I don't take to. I think people often neglect that there are several, very different, phases to Lovecraft's writing. In particular, with "The Call of Cthulhu" he definitely says goodbye to anything resembling traditional horror fiction, and to the spell of Edgar Allan Poe. His best work is what he wrote late in his life, such as "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow Out of Time." These have nothing of the "purple prose" that Lovecraft is so often accused of; instead, they are very sober, almost journalistic narratives. I'd disagree with your choices JoJo At the Mountains of Madness and the Shadow Out of Time have some very enjoyable elements but I find the innordinately long and self indulgent passages about the details of the alien culture and history a real chore to read through, particularly in the second half of AtMoM (although I like the first part of theat story). My favourite of the three longer tales is by some distance Charles Dexter Ward (another late tale), I think I'd even take the patchy Dreamquest over AtMoM although I have read both multiple times. Shadow Out of Time has a great central idea, but I have always found actually reading the tale one of the dullest experiences in reading HPL, even at the height of my Lovecraft appreciation. Again I find the Alien sequences overlong and uninteresting. This of course comes down to personal preference, and I tend to be biased against the all out weird the completely alien, fantastic or magical world interests me much less than the intrusion of the weird into the mundane. - Chris
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julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
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Post by julieh on Jan 13, 2011 14:06:54 GMT
I really enjoy the impenetrable prose (though I also enjoy Shakespeare, so maybe I'm just a masochist), but his ideas were so groundbreaking - the Colour out of Space boggled my mind with the very concept of a colour that doesn't exist in nature - something you can't quite even imagine, no matter how hard you try.
What drives me nuts about Lovecraft is how nearly all his heroes are similar (apart from Karl Heinrich in the Temple - a massive standout), in being bookish, unstable, and not very comfortable with people (particularly women). They're all basically Lovecraft himself, but so much of each story completely revolves around this characterization. If the charcaters weren't weak, in many respects, they wouldn't even notice "the story' - let alone get involved in it.
I also find the "inevitable doom' of some of his stories vastly inexplicable. He never quite convinces me that the characters really truly can't just walk away (in stories like Whisperer in darkness, particularly).
But I can still enjoy so much of his work, I can overlook that...
I also like Hodgson, though his writing is clearly from an earlier era. Lovecraft is a very voluntary throwback, stylistically, but reading Hodgson and Poe is the real thing - it's clearly a different era they're writing in (even though they're also seperated by many years).
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Post by andydecker on Jan 13, 2011 18:52:20 GMT
My reception of Lovecraft changed over the time, there were times I really dug in all things Lovecraft including pastiches, then there were times when I thought I was tired of the formula.
Some of the underlying themes and elements have become so silly and more a topic for some abominable reality show or Fox News. So what if the natives fu**ed the fishpeople? Better them than the sheep.
And his heroes are mostly douchebags, who I wouldn´t trust to get a bag of milk for the corner-market.
But all of this doesn´t count if I read some of his stories again and am still in awe how this guy invented such a nihilistic and hopeless cosmos, how he made things alien and frightening.
And he could write rings about most of his friends. Some sequences are just unforgettable; the drive and the sightseing to and in Innsmouth, his description of american backwoods, his space-gods who really don´t give a damn about puny humanity. (Which makes the often cited never very bright acolythes so ironic)
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julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
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Post by julieh on Jan 13, 2011 19:29:21 GMT
That touches on another whole area of horror that Lovecraft completely avoided - that of the female point of view.
But the true horror, from a female point of view, to the comment "so they fu**ed the fish frogs" is - you know it was the women who get to do that, since the men were in charge. And it was the women who had to bear the creepy children. There was more intermarrying as it went along, but the women really had to just close their eyes and think of New England.
He vaguely alluded to some of this with the isolated case of Lavinia Whately, but the rest of it is just glossed over.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jan 14, 2011 13:12:30 GMT
I just picked up 'The Boats of the Glen Carrig', by Hodgson which I can remember enjoying some years ago and to be honest I struggled to turn the second page. Completely agree on that - he seemed to just throw everything he could think of into that story, giving it the feeling of one of those old serials that could just go on forever as long as he kept thinking of new adventures for the characters.
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julieh
Crab On The Rampage
One-woman butt-kicking army
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Post by julieh on Jan 18, 2011 21:52:58 GMT
Yet in his story "The Derelict" Hodgson touched a bit on the same mindless, incomprehensible creeping kind of terror that Lovecraft was so good at. That one and "A Tropical Horror" are really good, but of course Hodgson was a guy who had worked and lived on boats. So I would assume his descriptions of boats are pretty accurate.
As opposed to Lovecraft's fanciful WWI Uboat in "The Temple", which has portholes and a airlock-like double port, both of which I've been assured by people who know are anachronisms.
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