What with the imminent closure of this forum (see http://callofcthulhu.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4683) I thought I'd start a sort of I'a Lovecraft thread. (Plus, I thought it would be more artistically pleasing to have this forum end with an intellectual fizz rather than a bored mumble.)My question is this: Lovecraft was a pulp-fiction magazine contributor. His stories made so little money he had to subsidise his income with ghostwriting jobs. His stories were hardly ever published in book form during his lifetime, apart from (I think) the Shadow over Innsmouth which was sold as a cheap pamphlet version. So why has his work lingered, and been remembered and adored by horror buffs?I believe that the Mythos is not only a Literary canon: not merely a collection of stories, terrifying though they can be. Compared to some writers, his prose can seem difficult (though I prefer to look at his work as a tapestry of fear woven carefully with each new word: and it's a big tapestry, hence all the words). The Mythos is also a philosophy: a way of looking at the world codified as nihilism. Lovecraft's creatures are symbols for the indifferent forces that form or wreck mankind, and for the ultimately vast and purposeless nature of the universe; Cthulhu is a representation of the unstoppable nature of time, and the insignificance of humanity in the unimaginably long history of an earth which we have never really owned; Azathoth is a magnificent atheistic take on a creator God - a way of saying "none of us truly know what our purpose is - because there is none". The reason Lovecraft's work has survived and is still read and appreciated is that when "The Idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away", not only are we seeing the unfolding of a tale - we recognise an insight into the ultimate loneliness of humanity in the cosmos.Thoughts? :cthulhu: Or am I reading too much into this?

Being an Atheist myself, I can relate to Lovecraft's views that human beings are but a speck of dust in that which we call the Universe, and if there are indeed beings out there more advanced than us, they would no doubt see us as such. I think that is why I admire his work so much.

I think Lovecraft in his own time found it hard to get publishers to see his value, since he just didn't tick right boxes in terms of what a publisher would think is popular, a bit of factor x if you will, which can also account for example the impossibility to predict the popularity of say for example Tolkien. What he didn't have was a patron with vision to back him, but other writers could recognize his value, like Derleth for example. I think Lovecraft either deliberately or through sheer fluke of his troubled personality touched a nerve, and with every progressive breakthrough in science like discovering more and more how we are not special, we are not the centre of the universe, how insignificant we are in the big picture, the more relevant his nihilism became. Maybe he was ahead of his time, but slowly his vision became accurate, if only Lovecraft wrote during for example the paranoid atomic age of the 50's for example he would have found a ready audience for his catastophic sentiments, but in the pre-war coddled turn of the century he was more like eccentric and an oddity, his appeal was at that time only as a curiosity. Sure he deals with monsters from space, in other words pulp-science-fiction, and yet there is a certain uncanny dark and scary similarity to his attitude and the one that understanding the rammifications of cosmological discoveries create in us, we are the oddity, the fluke and that any number of things too big for use to even understand can destroy us without even a hint of deliberate mailce, like ants carelessly trod on while elsewhere occupied. Maybe Lovecrafts own anology of people who are affected in their dreams by a monster so great and bewildering that they become insane before they have even beheld it is like him having intuitive visions so dark and unreal that no-one can understand his apprehension and through his literature merely gave it a face, but since he only hinted at it, the horror is our own too. What makes Lovecrafts horror scary is our own imaginations, he is just a catalyst.

I could not agree more!Also, I can't help thinking that the fact Lovecraft didn't write in the men-in-flying-saucers age of the 50s was a blessing (for us, not for him) because rather than blending his vision with science to make the tales feasible, he blended them with horror to give them a surreal, ritualistic edge. I think that blending of nihilism, horror, cosmic science and ancient ritual gives his work a timeless quality because it reaches into both the past (with the rites and sacrifices) and into the future (with the science).

It's creepy but true. His writings involved ancient creatures with futuristic-like technology (the Yithians).

Bob Howard and HP were the greatest writing-team that were never actually a team, in literary history. Only the Bronte Sisters and the Brothers' Grimm can come-close.Steve King and Pete Straub's The Talisman was essentially a predictably-formularized flop. You can remove the Conanism from Lovecraft, but it's hard to remove Lovecraftian themes from Howard's body-of-work. -And Howard would be the first to admit it. Since they only corresponded by slow-moving postal-mail, that 'gap' allowed a dynamically-inspired competition to flourish and expand. Both men had unique afflictions that kept them at home a lot. Howard; psychological, Lovecraft; medical. Bram Stoker 'married' six with horror for a UK-audience that was mostly stay-at-home Victorian wives... Howard brought six, Lovecraft brought horror, to a US-audience that was basically young, non-conformist men. The Pulp Fiction-era was born... the 'magazine' became cool, the 'novella' became viable, comics were born, cover-art became 'art', porm became a thing allowing Ray Chandler/Dash Hammett detective-fiction to evolve, horror became pop-culture, etc. etc. etc.The Mythos' creation is HP's comfort-zone. -Like keeping most of his work based in New England. In fact, Lovecraft created the myth of New England being a place of surrealistic mystery. In my opinion, HP was tired of the Biblical 'satan'... a not very scary cartoonish-character, so he logically created something more sinister, broader, and deeper. And once the Mythos came-together as a plot-gimmick, he probably deemed it as a progressively-logical backdrop for more stories, rather than jettisonning it after one story.

I want to jump in here but i can't think of anything else to add. Plus, The forums shutting down? When? WHere is everyone going after here?Back on topic: I think thr reaon HP's work endurs so much is because it gives us the answers most people spend their whole life looking for but he also puts a horrific twist on it. I think we as humans are fascinated by scale. Monsters and adventures smaller than us ,(Fantastic Voyage) or larger than us (Cloverfield, Godzilla). Even the most mundane things can become awesome when shrank or grown. I think thats another reason Lovecraft endures (besides the more advanced methods of relaying information) because he dealt a lot with scale.

I agree.-Plus you've written the best definition for 'morbid fascination' (or, the 'deer in headlights'-theory) I've ever read. If Gorgo, or Godzilla were prowling-thru a metropolis, there'd be as many motionless gawkers on-hand as there would be panic-y crowds running whichwaywhenforwhy...The people that remained in Galveston during last month's hurricane were the kid who peeked from the covers to catch a glimpse of the monster...Lovecraft, like no other, understood the link between evil and fear... Then used an intelligent, but naive/weak/easily-intimidated 'hero' as his standard story-character to fully hammer-his-points-across to the reader.

Don't worry about the forums shutting down - callofcthulhu.com expired but then it came back to life. That is not dead...I'd add more thoughts, but I already put them into my other posts

Given my own experiences and the experiences of those I know, I almost wonder if some of Lovecraft's writings were, even if in a small part, inspired by personal experiences.I've long held that some people seem to us "mentally ill" because they're capable of perceiving a different level of reality, or perhaps the same reality in a different way or to a different degree. Even if you study things commonly accepted, such as the Bible, if you really dig down into the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, there is this same narrative of cosmic battle and the suppression of vast and unstoppable horrors that are inches away from wiping out mankind (for a good, scholarly treatment of this, see Gregory Boyd's "God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict"). It's said that Lovecraft developed an intense fear of the ocean and many other things. I can't help but wonder if some of those fears weren't unfounded.No matter what our philosophical presuppositions or religious (or non-religious) convictions might be, there is so much in this vast universe of which we have no inkling.

Lovecraft's stories inspire such fear and awe in us because he has realized something we should all know. TIME is not the enemy of man, SIZE is. I quote Walter O'Dim, of Stephen King's Dark Tower series; "As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain- although it may think it can (and this is religion; the idea that the mind cannot be dead, that there must be somewhere for it to go)- the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite."Lovecraft knew this and believed that our universe, so large we cannot fathom its true depths, must contain something living (or part-living) somewhere else in our endless cosmos. He chose to interpret these as beings to vast in size and power that the mind is forever changed. It either breaks you or you become able to grasp it; in both cases, you are now "insane". In the Bible, it IS said that the dying and the insane, bot with a changed pattern of thinking, can see and hear God's voice. Maybe the so-called "crazies" have it right, and we're the crazy ones.

I am NOT a nihilist, but those beliefs that Lovecraft had are what make his stories so scary-good; he is outside religion, outside faith in anything, questioning or disbelieving in everything, and this carried over into his stories. It's a religious nihilism, he believes absolutely nothing any church will tell you.