The literature of H.P.Lovecraft

The thread is about one of the main names by now in the literature which usually is termed as horror. I thought that it might lead to some discussion of people's views of his work

Some background:

Lovecraft was born in Providence, near the beginning of the 20th century. His father was locked in a mental asylum when Lovecraft was still an infant. While in the following years he did enjoy the luxury of reading from his grandfathers large collection of books, in the attic of his first house, the economic disaster which struck that man after a failed buisness project (and his related death soon afterwards) meant that the house had to be sold, and the large library went with it.

Lovecraft was homeschooled, something obviously a lot more common at that time. He appears to have been sunk in a very deep depression for at least fifteen years, during which he made little contact with other people outside of his family. His first published story was at an amateur journal. It was the story titled "Dagon". His main works appeared mostly in the magazine "Weird tales" which had been established at the same time that he - in his thirties - was moving a bit outside of his circle in Providence.

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My own view of Lovecraft is formed by reading his letters as well as his stories (i haven't read all of his fiction). He does appear to be one who tried consciously to create a horrific effect, through metaphor and symbol. I would not claim that he was a better writer than his main influence, Poe, but he clearly moved to another direction, and -in the end- provided an entire mythos. My favorite larger work of his is The Rats in the Walls. Some shorter stories are excellent too, Dagon, Music of Erich Zahn, and The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Thing (1982) film was originally derived from a story by Lovecraft At the Mountains of Madness (1931) who submitted a story to Weird Tales, and in turn inspired another story Who Goes There by John Campbell Jr (1938). It then influenced the first Thing film with James Arness (1951).

Convoluted yes?

Lovecraft is classic purple prose and so difficult for people to digest due to his unique way of describing things, plus his very odd ideas about immigration and its negative effects on American culture. In a way, his attitude is like William Poole (William the Butcher) from Gangs of New York in that respect.

His stories are great and create their own mythology, so in a sense he's one of the earliest writers of urban horror fiction. You would have no Stephen King without Lovecraft.

Originally Posted by RubiconDecision

[...] You would have no Stephen King without Lovecraft.

So you view Lovecraft as a negative influence to literature?



Well, somewhat joking, cause i like a couple of short stories by King (like the Gray Matter, which at any rate is a parallel to Arthur Machen's excellent "The White Powder" story)

In my view H.P.Lovecraft was a quite good author, although not as good as Poe, but i think of Poe as the best US author by now. I don't regard the later horror US writers, who became so famous, as more able than H.P.L.

Fun fact, Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to head a $300 million dollar At The Mountains of Madness film staring Tom Cruise. It was well into pre-production until Universal put the Kibosh on it due to Del Toro outright refusing to direct the project unless he was allowed to make it with an R-rating in mind.

At The Mountains of Madness is, reportedly, Del Toro's dream project.

My opinion of Lovecraft in general is that he was a flawed writer with interesting conceptual ideas. His prose is far too thick and dense, however, for me to call him a "good" writer. It has nothing to due with not being able to understand classicism and everything to do with his prose being meh even for his day among his contemporaries. Too tired to make out a list of other writers from that era with similar concepts I enjoy more, might do it tomorrow. Probably wont though.

Stephen King the hack or Stephen King the often successful novella and short story writer? If you can, pick up an old copy of say the Skeleton Crew short stories, or better yet read Different Seasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Different_Seasons
Hopefully at some point, the Breathing Method will be filmed. I doubt it. It involves a decapitation and the feminists would somehow turn that into a violent slam against women. That story is really about an extraordinary independent woman, but due to the graphic nature of the story, it will never be filmed successfully. It is an extraordinary collection of four novellas, all excellent and superior to the films they spawned.

One of the excellent aspects of Stephen King is the way he has sat down and populated a fictious region with lots of reoccuring characters, who then subsequently come up in successive stories. One of the negative things about King is he was so popular from 1977 or so until the early nineties, that people bought anything that had his name on it. The publishing houses wouldn't be disciplined at all. Why should they? So he produced as much schlock horror as he did excellent horror.

An exceptional idea was the co-authoring of The Talisman with Peter Straub.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tal...traub_novel%29
It's a fine tale especially for a young person approaching adulthood.

There are quite a few short films created by Lovecraft fans. Check them out if you enjoy his stories. Read them enough and you'll have nightmares.

Lovecraft is Lovecraft...deeply flawed but a visionary in the 1930s. There's something to be said for that. For Lovecraft, an encounter with the alien led to madness. The concepts of extraterrestrials were so inhuman that merely seeing a depiction of their language, their technology, an ability to create lifeforms, all of these things so radically beyond the science of 1930 as to make him think they would drive people insane. Today we've all seen lots and lots of science fiction films, whether we enjoy that genre or not. It's a normal activity. Not so in 1930.

If you pick up an Edgar Allan Poe collection, I think you'll find that the most famous stories are sometimes excellent, while there was a lot morose stuff that just doesn't translate well in the postmodern period. Likely this is from an overabundance of horror and gruesome cinema. What was shocking for Poe's generation, seldom has meaning for us, but entombing someone as happens in The Cask of Amontillado is still chilling. He directly influenced lots and lots of writers besides creating the detective genre.

If you ever look up the RAND study on extraterrestrials done in the 1950s, the experts of the time felt that an encounter with extraterrestrials would lead to societal collapse. That religious tensions would result in anarchy when faced with life from outside the Earth. That the radical advance in technology would render our own useless. Governments worried about any release about anything that had to do with UFOs as some subset of them could be extraterrestrial. Debunking definitely went on, partially to cover black budget projects for things like the early RPV (proto-drone) program to cover some of this, but also the RAND study made politicians nervous.

Reading someone like Poe or Lovecraft is like watching old cinema. You can't judge them by the evolution of the art. They were ahead of their time and suspected of mental illness for being bold enough to capture their vision. While all of us have had disturbing nightmares, these writers fully fleshed out those ideas to create complex stories.

While i do like a lot of works by both of them (Poe and Lovecraft) i think that they weren't entirely isolated at that time as being writers of considerable power. Poe in my view was far more able to produce a progression of a plot, to the point that some of his works are formed pretty much as repeated patterns leading to a climax (He who was Used Up, would be a good example of this ).
Lovecraft seemed to be more involved in creating a larger image, maybe because his other main influence was Dunsany, a writer of very impressive skill in making a story be an echoe of something far larger than the (usually) one or a couple of pages it consists of

Interesting, but very repetitive in my opinion.

^It was, yes

Lovecraft himself in some letter noted that "one can write the same story only so many times". And indeed almost all of his stories have the same overarching plot (man stumbles upon something unknown, the unknown is revealed to be horrible, madness or assimilation by it are the only possible outcome in the long run).

He wasnt a briliant writer by any strech of the imaginanion, even though there is a natural development has he go on, his type of writing was often influenced by other older literature for instance.
Regardless, about its genre and content, he wasnt very well understood in his time, it is my belief, he was way ahead of his time, and maybe because of that very influencial in the propagation of sci-fi and horror in decades later by other authors.
He had also a quite xenophobic vibe, and mentality, was knowned to be one during his life on New york, completely anti-imigrant, it is believed though he end up changing his views later in life.

The cult and fan thing about his works it came way post morten.

Although G. Del Toro (in my view) is not that consistent in creating good movies (and i heard that his fictional writing, in the books he co-wrote, is rather very bad...) i too was looking forward to the At the mountains of Madness movie...

And an r-rating sounds pretty logical for such a film. I mean no one would want it to be some feel-good nonsense given that the original story is bleak. Very sad that the current film circuit kills such projects while endlessly feeding superhero movies

I would love to see At the Mountains of Madness filmed, but not for 300 million. That would be enough money to seed ten films. At a certain point, following a film project model of that kind of investment results in inevitable disappointment in the results. That's a huge sum of money.

The best way to film it is animation. Maybe we'll get lucky and some animators will get together and do it as a project, then have it distributed by a larger organization.

Films like Primer prover that it's possible to make an film on a limited budget and produce something of quality. Or Another Earth with Brit Marling.

It takes a serious fan of Lovecraft to be faithful to the story or any Lovecraft story as they are "weird" in the true sense ofthe word. Far different than most kinds of science fiction horror.

The oddest science fiction film I saw recently was Antiviral. I felt repulsed and horrified by the story, but then, that's the idea. A glorification of celebrity that results in the most perverse kind of body modification by direct infection from celebrities.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2099556/
Not too surprising since its director is Brandon Cronenburg, son of David Cronenburg. Hopefully such a director wouldn't do a Lovecraft story. It would take someone very special to do it, but that usually means a very expensive budget.

Guillermo del Toro did two very good films: The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. The others were not as good. I wanted to like Hellboy as I read several of those comics when they came out. It was fair. He collaborated with Chuck Hogan on The Strain, a different take on the vampire mythos, but didn't Hogan truly ghost write it for him? It's not a good novel, but there were several sequels and plans for filming it.

While I enjoy the vampire genre, truthfully there are only a handful of films that were good about that subject matter. Shadow of the Vampire, which pokes fun of Hollywood, but deals with immortality. 30 Days of Night which remade vampires into horrific feral creatures to be feared rather pretty young adults who appear in clothing ads. And the original Nosferatu of course. The German film We Are the Night, which is really a film mocking the crass commercialism of young women, and how it dooms them, deserves to be seen. The more modern Nosferatu by Werner Herzog brought back the tortured damned soul who is at once powerful and pathetic.

I like animation, but 3d animation is by far my least favorite one (on par with Disney-style animation that i also find to be dumb).
That said, even a stop-motion or Anime-like film of At the Mountains of Madness would most likely not be one i would personally like. I have seen a couple of short animation film-adaptations from classical literature (Gogol's The Overcoat, Kafka's A Country Doctor) and i cannot say that i really liked them, despite the great source material and the good animated attempt to show it.

I am not sure if Lovecraft will ever be a good material to show in a movie. Most of the work is flashbacks, and obviously a first person narration. This usually (in my view) is more suited to a short film rather than the usual 1.30 hour one, or the larger durations. Unlike writers like Stephen King, who often benefit from images in a movie replacing their words, i think that the case is not that with better authors. I still recall how boring the 1993(?) movie adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, was. A very bad movie.

First, Lovecrafts' ideas concerning a loss of self-identity by encountering the alien...are very dated in a multicultural world in which diverse people are a constant aspect of life even if we choose not be among them.

Second, Lovecraft was horrified by the prospect of alien technology when postmodern people adore science fiction. What once was terrifying has been embraced as a potential answer shrouded in pseudo-benevolence, when in reality most encounters in history with a people with superior technology have been hostile, unwelcome, and likely resulted in a severe change in that lesser technological people.

Third, Lovecraft's vision would be enormously expensive to portray alien technology that is disturbing, the weirdness that has little humanoid appearance, without lots of special effects and CGI and bluescreens. This is why a potential 300 million budget was discussed.

Fourth, Lovecraft's particular language style while adding to a certain subset of fans, if offputting to most people, and so they start reading it, then sit it down. It's relegated to drek in some of their opinions, as being dense to comprehend, as being irrelevant to others, and difficult to swallow to others.

Luckily, John Carpenter's The Thing as made in 1982 and no mention was made of Lovecraft affecting the vision, but Campell instead. The only ones who knew were hard core fans of the genre of science fiction who had extensively read early science fiction or who read it afterwards.

Lovecraft does not possess the genius of Shakespeare, nor is timeless as the immortal Bard's work, and it's entirely possible for it never to become cinema.

A truly great short story is Neil Gaiman's Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft homage "A Study in Emerald" that is free and from his personal website: http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles...es/emerald.pdf

I think the community will enjoy it. Neil obviously cares enough for Lovecraft to make the Elder Gods appear but in a way that is absolutely entertaining, readable, and chilling too. It does however remove the horrific aspect or the induced madness of Lovecraft.

Mr. Gaiman won a HUGO for that short story, and he deserved to win for creating it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Emerald

Hey, why so much hatred? The elder gods need some sympathy too...

While his early work has a huge number of problematic passages (to the point of being sickening in the repetition of terms which unlike what Lovecraft seemed to have thought of them, in reality are boring to the reader), i do not agree that his entire work is badly written. It still has many issues linguistically (in my view as well), but i regard Lovecraft as a far better writer than those who wrote horror after him. I have to note, since you mentioned Gaiman, that i have not read him (i will check out the story you linked), but i have seen some of his work in movie form, and also he was part of the people interviewed for a (suprise ) Lovecraft documentary produced a few years back.
I wouldn't say that he made a positive impression on me. While balance is in my view very important in a writer, Gaiman seemed to me to be not very serious in his idea of literature, either his or that of other people. However i will have a look at the story you linked, and maybe form a new view of that affair

Gaiman is actually a big fan of Lovecraft and has encouraged people to read his work. That comes across in that short story link, but at the end, if you're familiar with Sherlock Holmes, you realize that your initial guesses were probably incorrect. It's quite a story.

There's no hatred of the elder gods, but they were particularly cruel and drove their adherents insane. I'm not sure what you're getting at there.

In the early seventies there were few horror writers who made money at the genre. Robert Bloch was one. There were several who crossed genres with science fiction like Richard Matheson. They sold their stories to pulp earlier then to growing short story fans, plus wrote screenplays. Several admitted being influenced by Lovecraft. Some even wrote stories within his mythos.

There really haven't been any films which could translate his vision into film. But his stories have directly affected tv serials like the Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, or the later Night Gallery. Probably because both of those horror writers mentioned were also writing scripts for those shows. The seventies UK tv serial Space 1999 featured a Lovecraft inspired alien with a gapping maw that a astronaut was perilously close to being swallowed by.

Then Carrie was written by Stephen King, and suddenly an ex-dishwasher became a published author. He had made reference to Lovecraft as well. His success led to lots of other horror writers getting work sold and several specifically mentioned Lovecraft as an influence.

The same was true for horror in comic books. In the late seventies comics became more serious. There had been horror comics like Eerie and Creepy in the early seventies, but they were never mainstream. Many had weird tales with Lovecraft themes. The newer generation of comic writers and artists often liked Lovecraft.

A newer Creepy magazine with Lovecraft influence

But the general public didn't really know his work all that well. Other than an odd story or two in high school literature classes, one might miss his work entirely in America. His opinions on immigration had relegated his work as politically incorrect. All of the other writers and artists ended up popularizing Lovecraft again, and you'd actually run into someone at a party during a discussion, or in a university class, who actually had read several.