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Post by helrunar on Mar 8, 2022 2:31:08 GMT
Hi Andreas, sounds like an interesting documentary. There's so much perfidy buried in American history and, of course, the evil lives on today--nobody from Yuggoth or Y'hanthl'ei is involved. Just plain folks.
I doubt whether Lovecraft's concept for the original Innsmouth novella had anything to do with internment camps, however. That's really a very clever angle to take with a sequel. I thought McNaughton's story was superior to Brian Stableford's, which seemed as if it was going to go in a potentially good direction, but I thought just did not lead to much. Perhaps Stableford's other work would pique my interest more.
Steve
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Post by andydecker on Mar 8, 2022 11:21:53 GMT
I doubt whether Lovecraft's concept for the original Innsmouth novella had anything to do with internment camps, however. That's really a very clever angle to take with a sequel. I thought McNaughton's story was superior to Brian Stableford's, which seemed as if it was going to go in a potentially good direction, but I thought just did not lead to much. Perhaps Stableford's other work would pique my interest more. Steve No, the camps are mentioned in HPLs story, directly at the beginning. While Stableford has written so many books, he is a basically SF writer. In horror McNaughton sure is the better writer, Steve, as far as atmosphere is concerned. Stableford has been sometimes described as a cold writer, as an academic more intellectual than suspenseful or convincing in his charaters. As he comes from Biology and Sociology, his stories are always grounded in something. If I remember correctly, his Mythos tales - if you want to call them that - are more into biology than in anything cosmic.
In the last years he has focused on translations from and studies of the French literature of Decadence, which I personally find unreadable. But I salute his hard work in this. |
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Post by helrunar on Mar 8, 2022 15:40:37 GMT
Thanks for mentioning about the camps in the original Lovecraft yarn, Andreas. I'd completely forgotten that. So now I have an excuse to go back and re-read! Or listen to Richard Coyle's marvelous reading of the story again. Always a delight.
The Stableford Innsmouth story has the main character as a geneticist who wants to study the genetic material that produces that "Innsmouth look." The most fantastic element of the story is that he reports lengthy scenes of the character discussing the nuts and bolts of his research on the human genome mapping project and actually has the people listening to these long disquisitions get interested and engaged in the science.
The ending seemed from what I took in (the memory is fading fast and I just read it a few days ago--no doubt a comment upon my own superficiality) to be a matter of "there is more in Heaven, Earth, and Y'hanthl'ei than is dreamt of in your equations, Professor."
cheers, Steve
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Post by helrunar on Mar 10, 2022 5:58:04 GMT
"Ghoulmaster" by McNaughton was an odd one--his riff on "Pickman's Model." It was not a Mythos story, but I'm glad it was included, because it was definitely one of the more colorful and amusing stories in the anthology. Some of it made me think of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories, or Alan Moore's pastiches on Haggard, Lovecraft et al. (printed as prose supplements in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books). The ending seemed curiously diffident; wonder if he wrote other tales featuring the lead character (who seemed possibly to be living with early onset dementia).
H.
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