Scots Taffer on 24/4/2008 at 10:29
Quote Posted by Brian T
HP Lovecraft is a bit like Blue Oyster Cult; cool when you're younger, silly when you get older. Cosmic horror! Wooooooo!
You take that back! Cowbell will never go out of style. :(
Gingerbread Man on 25/4/2008 at 04:59
Quote Posted by Moi Dix Mois
Am I the only person who found it dull and anticlimactic?
I think an awful lot of Lovecraft's particular quirkiness / charm stems from precisely this. He writes a story about an ordinary person who stumbles upon something so completely incomprehensible, alien, and nonchalantly malevolent, and afterwards it's just "and that's what happened" because a journal ends or a flashback has finished... and there's just this sense of overwhelming mundanity and existentialism, despite (or maybe because of) the world-changing revelations of the story and its events. Not quite nihilistic, but certainly bleak and insinuating a future the same or worse.
Tonamel on 25/4/2008 at 05:18
I agree with you for the most part, but I don't think that Call of Cthulhu did it very well. It's been a number of years since I read it, but I remember being far less impressed with it than I was with Rats in the Walls or The Music of Erich Zann, which I think both handled the "man meets incomprehensible horror, the end" style quite a bit more elegantly.
Stitch on 25/4/2008 at 15:00
That would be because Lovecraft is in many ways a terrible writer and as such is best in short doses.
I'm not sure I ever managed to finish The Call of the Cthulhu.
Jepsen on 25/4/2008 at 15:29
I agree. Call of Cthulhu was overlong for me.
My favorite is Pickman's Model; it is shorter, more effective and, in my opinion, more interesting.
Edit: However, "a mountain stumbled" is still one of my favorite phrases from Call of Cthulhu.
Koki on 25/4/2008 at 19:34
Vote No for Lovecraft, vote Yes for mythos.
AR Master on 25/4/2008 at 22:29
The spergin virgins on Wikipedia have a plot synposis of pretty much every one of Lovecraft's stories. I find a few paragraphs of consise summary to be much better than the shame of checking out a Lovecraft book from the local library. Part of the problem are neckbeards screaming "CUTUHLULUSLUS FAGTAN!!!!" whenever Lovecraft's name is so much as mentioned.
It introduces the concept pretty well. "Three men go out in the woods for some reason why not. One is eaten to the horror of the other two. One guy sees something and goes insane. The last finds a door and therein finds the other two men, only they're not really them, but aliens from another dimension, and then the statue of liberty is there and it was Earth all along.
Ps the statue was an elder god or something"
Koki on 26/4/2008 at 06:25
Wasn't that Blair Witch Project?
Brian T on 26/4/2008 at 08:39
If you think Call Of Cthulhu was overlong don't even think of reading At The Mountains Of Madness:nono:
I have to admit the world of the Cthulhu myhtos is quite erm, "fun" to experience by late night reading, but to me it's like James Bond; at heart you know it's silly. I don't think he's a "terrible" writer, to me he's very good at explaining what's happening to the character at the moment, but he can be just too darn long winded.
BTW if you like Lovecraft then I recommend Clark Ashton Smith too. A contemporary and friend of Lovecraft. Probably more "fantastical" than Lovecraft but at least he acknowledges the existence of pussy.
Neil Peart = complete and utter cowbell god.
Stitch on 26/4/2008 at 21:53
Quote Posted by Brian T
I don't think he's a "terrible" writer, to me he's very good at explaining what's happening to the character at the moment, but he can be just too darn long winded.
Yeah, Lovecraft is certainly not without his charms, although I have a lot more respect for his concepts than I do his prose. I will admit that his writing, once you get over its inherent silliness, can be pretty effective.
