"comsic horror"

dear Veeky Forums,

I'm reading some H.P. Lovercraft for the first time (one of the collected stories), and there seems to be some concrete idea of the whole "things beyond human knowledge"... e.g. cults from one story are mentioned in another, specific monsters, or races, etc get name-dropped

Is this just a bunch of self-referential name-dropping, or does putting it all together form a coherent world-building sort of structures?

like, which guys are at war with the other guys, are they hanging out in the same area of outer space, etc

It's all self-referential but forms a greater mythos. More than a few stories reference the Shoggoth for example, or Yog-Sothoth.

Only one references the Mi-Go, if I recall.

He mostly just referenced himself, made up this cryptic background bullshit to make the setting look bigger and better thought-out than it really is. In truth there's not enough evidence of anything to form up much coherent.

The best you get is probably the Elder Things' history from At The Mountains of Madness: it kind of binds the rest of the stuff together somewhat but even then very loosely.

okay, thanks

My understanding is that the Mythos was made by multiple people. Sometimes they would throw in the forbidden books of other authors as some sort of shout out or something.

Are you reading only Lovecraft or the Mythos in general?

For the dream cycle and the weird tales cycle it was just self reference with no continuity. Due to fan demand from the self reference HPL said he would begin forming a continuity.

This began the Cthulhu Cycle, starting with The Call of Cthulhu. By itself it has no connection to ANY story. But then the story that came after referenced Cthulhu and a story from an earlier cycle, linking them. Then a later story referenced the previous two and a story from another cycle, linking them. Then a later story links and earlier Cthulhu story but not Call of Cthulhu, plus a story from an earlier cycle, but Cthulhu is still linked as a reference in a referenced story.

By the end of the Cthulhu Cycle, a coherent narrative placing Cthulhu at the center of a vast conspiracy spanning all reality was possible to link together, if you ever wanted to analyze it cork board and stringed photos style.

I bought "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories" off Amazon (was going cheap and I was buying a dildo, but not enough for free delivery). I also got Game of Throne (1st book in the series) and Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami. as a sort of "people talk a lot about these, but I've never read any" purchase.

It's got a bunch of really short short-stories, and some longer ones. And a bunch I've heard of; CoCthulhu, Reanimator, Rats in the Walls, Nyarathotep, Dagon, Colour out of Space, Shadow over Innsmouth.

There's also this annoying thing of spelling "show/showing" as "shew/shewing"... I have no idea wtf that's about.

>shew/shewing
Lovecraft wrote in an anachronistic style because he was obsessed with old stories about knights and chivalry as a child. It takes a little getting used to if you haven't read much outside of modern prose.

but, at least in this version, it's literally the only weird spelling (beyond the occasional "phonetic accent" spelling).

It feels like either the rest of his stuff was written perfectly normal by modern standards, or the rest of the spelling has been "translated"... except that one word.

Wow you're serious aren't you? You actually cannot entertain the thought that something has quality if it's not analysed to bits with every single peace of information available. I bet all you feel while reading Lovecraft is frustration because there aren't annotations, glossaries, maps, and an encyclopedia explaining it all, despite the fact that this is clearly what makes it good and terrifying. You have the purest form of (internet) autism there is.

No, he didn't really "systemize" his shit and didn't want to. And you definiterly don't need that to read the stories, it would probably be a bad idea even if you want to have an idea of the mythos before reading the book.
That being said, even considering the mythos others wrote, you can easily have an "official" idea of what -say- the Mi-Go are up to. Check out a COC (the game) book, the basic bestiary is more or less statical at this point in the fandom. A better source is Daniel Harms' encyclopedia; strangely enough there is not a decent wiki on the subject.

>He mostly just referenced himself
Well, that's not true. A lot of what Lovecraft brings into his stories comes from other authors - Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood. I think Arthur Machen's "The White People" is probably the best 'Lovecraftian' story I've ever read.

Lovecraft and the circle of writers close to him shared a lot of ideas and concepts, and referenced each other's work frequently, but they weren't building up to anything beyond that mutual storytelling environment. The concept of world-building as we understand it didn't really exist back then. It was just a bunch of guys writing scary stories to make a living.

I do strongly recommend you look into some of Lovecraft's fellow writers to get a broad view of Yog-Sothothery. Robert E. Howard's Conan stories are legendary, of course, and Clark Ashton Smith has some truly great material in his Zothique stories.

If you just read Lovecraft's works, there is little more than hints. If you go full Derleth (one of Lovecraft's penpals who didn't really "get" what HP was going for, and ended up making it more of a good vs evil thing) you get a more coherent setting, but one that is very much the worse for the codification

I've only heard it from people talking about him, but if I remember right it was basically him and his friends who wrote for the same magazines making a creative way of adding stuff to their books without the reader going "he just made that up." Basically, back in the 30's, you couldn'y just google the Necronomicon, but if a bunch of these authors are referencing it (sice the idea of a fictional universe with canon wasn't as much of a thing yet), it must be real and these guys just have a better stocked library than you.

The closest Lovecraft ever came to world-building would be in Dream Quest or At the Mountains of Madness. Dream Quest was just huge and full of stuff, AtMoM was a concentrated effort to build a timeline for the history of a few of the "weird" races on Earth.

Tons of shit has happened after his death, of course. But that should be taken with a grain of salt.

Laying out the setting like Derleth did so that everything is well-defined and clear is totally antithetical to the idea of cosmic knowledge beyond human comprehension. It's not all concrete, and that is a good thing in the context of these stories.

The spelling was a deliberate choice. He was something of an antiquarian. The Providence series by Alan Moore is a pretty thorough look at his stories and the times he lived in that I've really enjoyed.

>comsic horror
>not sitcom horror

The Call of Seinfeld

Derleth's writing is really variable in quality, it's generally at it's worst when he's trying his hardest to ape Lovecraft(especially many of the stories he wrote based on unused story concepts and fragments Lovecraft left behind after he died), while his more original stories are decent enough

it shouldn't be comprehensive, but having some basic consistency isn't a bad idea, at least if you want to do something RPG related with it

>Riff plays slightly off tune
>You enter your apartment
>A little bit later Kramer jumps in
>[Generic conversation]
>Go to your bedroom
>Kramer jumps in
>[Awkward Conversation]
>Go to the bathroom
>Kramer jumps in
>He slowly backs off
>Leave your apartment with Kramer
>Kramer enters the hallway from your apartment
>Riff plays at extremely low pitch
I can dig it.

>Sometimes they would throw in the forbidden books of other authors as some sort of shout out or something
it's too bad that people always use the Necronomicon and Cthulhu now instead of bringing up the other books and deities that Lovecraft made up

Why? Cause you're a fuckin hipster?

faggot.

wtf i hate variety now