Hp Lovecraft: Good or trash?

Good. A lot of people trash his prose but it works for his alienated style; the archaic and verbose nature of it is integral to his innovating brand of cosmic horror. It's as central to his style as his ideas are, and the reason why Lovecraftian is a word now.
People also like to dismiss him because he was racist, even for his time period, but I argue that that led to his themes of alienation and corruption, which although are not nice to think about applied to human beings, work wonderfully well when applied to cosmic beings and humanity as a whole.

Some's good, some's not so good, and some (his earliest stuff) is wut tier. I'd say it's worth it, his complete works are available for free and ain't that long desu

The cultists are always dupes, this is covered and quoted extensively in the game.

cuz of memes like niggerman the cat, the horror at red hook, and others. ur reading a sci-fi horror story, and then hpl interjects with a loud declaration of "I hate niggers" and it's jarring.

i remember when I first started reading lovecraft. people talked about cosmic horror and all that. I decided to read them chronologically, and the first two stories are about a man getting spooked by a mausoleum and getting ptsd from a mermaid.

not to mention his poem "On the Creation of Niggers"

Depends on the story.

His good stories are worthwhile but there's a shitload of trash in there too.

>the white shit

"Colour out of Space" is still probably one of my favourite concepts to come from him

You might want to check out The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce.

Thanks user, I will

Certainly not trash. My personal favorite of his is:

>The dreams in the witch house

racism is pure evil. Lovecraft is excluded from any merit because of his vile, vitriolic and hateful delusions

His ideas are good, and his writing is trash. But he's readable. If his ideas interest you then give him a shot.

where should I start? Do I need to read the Cthulhu mythos chronologically, from what I’ve heard there are call backs to previous stories. Should I start with a few short stories?

n-nice bait

eat shit motherfucker

From the beginning, like you would with any author.

I'm about 60% through the collection. Even at his worst, he's still lots of fun. I wouldn't call the stories "horror" as they're rather comical by today's standards. Or maybe that's intentional? The writing tends to feel morbidly humorous in such a natural way that I don't think it's simply the work of times changing.

Like, I couldn't help laughing my ass off at the Case of Charles Dexter Ward; there's something really modern and hilarious about Ward's parents repeatedly scolding their son for summoning dead spirits in their attic, like it's just a really weird hobby.

At the same time, the "comedy elements" never get in the way of the narrative or detract from the atmosphere. Things turn appropriately, chillingly serious when they need to be.

I really like his prose too. There's this certain classiness in the way Lovecraft constructs his sentences and he stays true to his style from beginning to end. You can feel in every line that when the typewriter has hit the paper, it has never done so by accident. His voice is simply impossible for anyone else to imitate.

I like Lovecraft a lot, ignore the people complaining about racism, I'm not even anglo saxon and he snarks at my people every now and then (I'm spanish), if I can stomach it, so can you.

Lovecraft was obsessed with niggers when he lived in NYC. Far beyond "typical for the time". He was very neurotic and at some point fixated his anxiety on the "lesser races".

op here, i think that sold me on reading hp just because of how funny that sounds

>Good. A lot of people trash his prose but it works for his alienated style; the archaic and verbose nature of it is integral to his innovating brand of cosmic horror. It's as central to his style as his ideas are, and the reason why Lovecraftian is a word now.

I'm not sure that I'm persuaded by it, but that's one of the best arguments favoring Lovecraft's style that I've come across.

Which books cover Hatsur?

you mean hastur?

I fucking hate you

I don't fucking care

He wrote pulp fiction. Look up the definition of pulp.

>Try to read some Lovecraft
>Have to google every second word because I can't into "old English"
I wish I wasn't so fucking stupid.

>The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation

You find this difficult reading?

You might like Lovecraft if you like any of the following...
Mysticism compatible with science
Theosophical allusions
Architecture
Dream-quests for beauty and innocence
Transcendent, haunting adventurous expectancy in the contemplation of certain aesthetic or imaginative phenomena
The 18th century
New England
Spooky rural areas
Wizards
Mental transference
Ancient aliens
Crumbling towns
Obscure occult books
Contemplating the smallness of humanity from a cosmic perspective
Scholarly protagonists
Advanced sentence structure

Thanks. It's hard articulating it but it struck me the most when reading At the Mountains of Madness. His prose is so cold, detached with its own loftiness. It fits in perfectly with his established cosmology; humanity struggling in a strange, bleak universe that is ultimately indifferent if not outright hostile to human life. A more emotionally warm style, or someone subscribing to the iceberg-theory could write with the same ideas, but it wouldn't be so effective. That's why most of the mythos stories by Lovecraft's friends aren't remembered as well.

Hollywood is merely the counter these days, and that as well is jarring.

He probably meant something like this

>But I am not unreadie for harde ffortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe work’d upon ye Way of get’g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye ——. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow’s Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.

He was enthusiastically racist and eugenicist at a time when most people were just vaguely racist, and incorporated these themes into his books more than other writers.

Just contrast him with Conrad or Hemingway in depicting non white people

I've read a few of his stories, admittedly not the biggest ones, but haven't been blown away. Personally I'm not very into short stories though. I prefer something I can sink my teeth into more.

Lovecraft is interesting because in many ways he is a terrible writer. A literal amateur. His stories have absolutely atrocious dialogue that is practically unreadable at points and frankly some of the worst I've ever seen in published fiction, he has a tendency to go off on irrelevant digressions which kill the narrative's momentum and mood, his characters are made out of cardboard, and he's so uptight and oblivious that he sometimes seems to parody himself.

But... his imagery and style are so original and unsettling, his ability to create a mood of suspense, unease, and awe so strong, his plots so thrilling, and his prose so intricate and sincerely beautiful that it makes it all worthwhile. Even in stories I don't really like e.g. The Curious Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, there is still always some description or image that justifies the boredom you have to sit through

>mfw The White Ship from the South came never again.

That fragment isn't even remotely close to lovecraft's average prose. Horror at Red Hook was a nightmare as a non native.

I find Lovecraft thorougly enjoyable for light entertainment. The style gets repetitive, but at least it's an interesting style.

You guys need to get into Clark Ashton Smith if you haven't already. The Weaver in the Vault is god-tier.

eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/241/the-weaver-in-the-vault

Man, that hit me hard when I first read it,

>The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

Is this the happiest Lovecraft ending?

hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/n.aspx

I genuinely despise most people who mention him but he is OK. His influence may be a bit disproportionate to the quality of his work. If you don't like racism then there's no good reason to like him or the themes that he popularized.

>If you don't like racism then there's no good reason to like him or the themes that he popularized
Fuck off

It's true, though.

It is not, learn 2 logic.

>Literally Xenophobia: The Author
Kill yourself and learn what the word 'context' means.

>implying racism pervades his whole ouvre
>implying racist elements nulify everything else

Lovecraft's racism is hilarious, eye-rolling at worst. It's also much more sporadic in his literary work than people are usually lead to believe. Grow up.

>Grow up.
Or maybe YOU could admit that YOU'RE a little bit RACIST like the REST of us have MANNED AND/OR WOMANED UP and DONE
What are you, a 14-yearo-old white girl?

>not taking early 20th century racism seriously means I'm actually a racist

Huh...

Are you really telling me that you have no prejudices whatsoever? I find that hard to believe.

>when you overdose on the soy intake

Well memed, my fellow frog :) lmao kantbot faceberg amirite?

What is the best collection of his stories that is currently published?

I read Call of Cthulhu and thought it was shit, but apparently he wasn't that proud of it either so I don't know.

tfw butthurt that you're losing the memewar

...

Don't you have some bad jokes or trite observations about blade runner to tweet or something?

This legitimately made me laugh.

How do you go about banishing a shadow back to the abyss?

And I'm not asking in the /x/ way. I'm asking in the referential way regarding Lovecraft and the mythos. Say you have something using forbidden power and plaguing you as a wraith. How do you banish it?

The whisperer in darkness, the silver key, and through the gates of the silver key are my all time favorites.

Bump

I made a reading chart based on Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Let me know what you think.

Nice, great job.

basically all the magic crap in lovecraft comes from ONE story, charles dexter ward.

the rest is pure sci-fi.

You can expand the list to contemporary writers but other than Ligotti, I'm not sure whether Laird Barron (Ligotti lite at times), Stephen King (wrote best Lovecraftian story not written by Lovecraft, forgot the name, it's basically about OCD), maybe Ramsey Campbell and DEFINITELY Alan Moore. Seriously, Providence is a comic book but it's the best study and hommage to Lovecraft ever written.

I'd rather save that for another chart -- one not grounded in Lovecraft's essay. I'm working my way through a huge swath of horror books and will try to come up with some more chart ideas at the end of the process. I agree with a lot of your suggestions and I'll take a look at Moore's book. Sounds rad.

It's pretty good. Read the one he wrote before it even though it's shit, forgot the name. It's a continuation. What makes Providence click is that it's written for people who know Lovecraft well so it's very rewarding to get all the references (this sounds like indie 'comedy' script writing tier but it's not).

Thanks for the info. Are you talking about Necronomicon? It looks like The Courtyard is also somehow connected.

yeah

Nice chart, but I don't think Vathek is a good choice to be first. It's so unrepresentative. I'd put Otranto there in a heartbeat. Or just expand the first section with Otranto, the Old English Baron, and even Sir Bertrand

The placement within a category is just chronological. And Lovecraft didn't praise Otranto, so I didn't include it, since the whole conceit of the chart is to show the books Lovecraft thought were both important/influential *and* great. You could make a general gothic horror chart of your own to post -- you seem to know your stuff. Also, Vathek is dope, albeit unrepresentative.

I seem to remember him hyping up Lafcadio Hearn in the essay, maybe that was somewhere else.

Oh yeah, like the alchemest.
>Well, your great great...ect... grandfather screwed me over so I have been killing all of his decedents when they reach a certain age.
>How do I keep doing it? why with my eternal youth and endless gold from my philosophers stone. Yes I do live in a cave underneath the castle... for some reason. Yes I do kill about one person every twenty or so years.

To get it to manageable size, the criterion I used was "those works or authors that are both praised and given more than passing mention by Lovecraft." Hearn only gets a short paragraph where Lovecraft mentions a couple works. There are a ton of authors who get similar treatment. By contrast, Dorian Gray, for example, gets a slightly longer paragraph devoted entirely to it and so was included. The others that made it onto the chart had even more space devoted to them. It was definitely a judgment call to decide what constitutes more than passing mention, but I think I was pretty even-handed while going through the essay.

Just read his imitators and you will realise his archaic style is a big plus. Great writers have made cosmic horror bland and prosaic trying to adapt his mythos for themselves.

Ah, fair enough, then. I remembered him being kinder to Otranto than he actually is. And I agree, Vathek was good stuff.

arkhamarchivist.com/lovecraft-recommended-reading-list/
Is this a good reading list? I wanna read some after I come back from my morning run. Thanks.

Pretty solid list, for sure. Can't think of anything I would add, though I think it could be pared down.

>I come back from my morning run

milk or newpapers?

>niggerman the cat
kek is this real

wtf im interested HP Lovcraft now

Rats in the Walls (ft. Nigger-Man) is a phenomenal story.

youtube.com/watch?v=EkupUtNYeAA

Posting rare Lovecrafts

...

>""I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background."

> One should come to realise that all life is merely a comedy of vain desire, wherein those who strive are the clowns, and those who calmly and dispassionately watch are the fortunate ones who can laugh at the acts of the strivers. The utter emptiness of all recognised goals of human endeavour is to the detached spectator deliciously apparent - the tomb yawns and grins so ironically!"

> "all rationalism tends to minimize the value and importance of life, and to diminish the total quantity of human happiness. In some cases the truth could cause suicide, or at least precipitate a near-suicidal depression.""

I was in Providence on Tuesday looking for Lovecraft stuff and I happened to find an exhibit at Brown about his travels, which had a lot of letters and postcards. Found some cool stuff there and environs. Will dump some photos if there's interest.

Here's a postcard he sent to R. H. Barlow in '34. I suspect it served as the inspiration for their '36 collaboration "The Night Ocean".