Thoughts on HP Lovecraft?

The Dream Cycle stories are his best creation desu.
Polaris, The White Ship, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Strange High House in the Mist, etc. are pure kino.

He lost his virginity at 28 to a chick in Brooklyn that he married. IIRC, in her book about living with Lovecraft she says he like furiously studied how to be a good husband, what the duties included, and how to have sex.

HP Lovecraft is a strange example of how you can make something about existential dread at mankind's tiny place in the universe, how nothing really matters and how the best way to survive is by avoiding the notice of uncaring entities that are so much bigger and more important than the human race...

... and have such entities be rendered forgettable and trivially beatable by exposure to "Nerd" subculture and rampant consumerist fan appeasement, thus losing their significance and any of their horrifying elements.

>He lost his virginity at 28
Fuck 1 year left

...

That's wholesome as fuck, I love it.

I prefer Wounds Lovecraft

If you take his letters into account as well, he wrote more than most people in any country will read in their entire lives.
And he did it in half as many years.

HP Sauce > HP Lovecraft
Fact.

He was a shitposter and letters were the imageboards of the time

Very racist, absolutely brilliant horror writer. His most famous concepts are diluted and overplayed in popular culture, but his lesser-known stuff is genius and still is.

Just like phones were the facebook of the time. And face to face conversation was the texting of the time. And dinner parties were the bars of the time. And going to the theater was the clubbing of the time.

My god, he's one of us.

The more you find out about him the more you realised everything terrified him.

Completely misunderstood by his fans and his detractors alike. The more a person loves or hates Lovecraft, the less they actually know about him.

His father died in an insane asylum, most likely from syphilis. His mother, fearful that she and her son might have syphilis too, drive herself mad with worry. Two eccentric maiden aunts took over his care after that because the only normal person in his immediate family and the one he loved the most, his grandfather, had died when he was ten.

His social development was thus frozen from the ages of 10 or so until his 30s. Raised by loonies, he was one himself until he made himself grow out of it. All the racist imagery and beliefs which infuse his work belonged to a period in his life where he had not yet "grown up" and he disavowed all of it later in life.

Here's a man who was eventually able to grow beyond a horrific and damaging childhood, a man who set aside his own writing career to help others with their careers, a man who admitted his mistakes, and yet no one remembers that.

Love him or hate him, nearly everyone doesn't actually know him.

It always saddened me that he died so young.
I wonder what he'd have written if he'd lived through World War II and the start of the Cold War.

>All the racist imagery and beliefs which infuse his work belonged to a period in his life where he had not yet "grown up" and he disavowed all of it later in life.
Source?

Wife stuck by him no matter what, now that is a dedicated wife.

>tfw no eccentric maiden aunts to "take care" of me

recently i read "the colour out of space". i was surprised how it was still a genuinely scary story enough to give me goosebumps.

>All the racist imagery and beliefs which infuse his work belonged to a period in his life where he had not yet "grown up"
Yeah if he was born today he would've been a TUMBLRite and fight for social justice! Now I don't need to feel bad about liking him!

He was deeply autistic but he came up with some fantastic concepts for other people to build on

preddy gay post bruh

I don't know if what he said was true but I kind of get the feeling Lovecraft hated everyone equally, even if that's a edgy 90's comedian cliche. He had dark skinned protagonists in his works that weren't portrayed negatively and he also intensely hated many white people, especially poor ones. If I remember right he had a mental breakdown because s thought his bloodline was "contaminated" after finding out his grandfather had Welsh ancestry. Fucking Welsh ancestry. It apparently inspired him to write the Dunwich Horror

I mean that doesn't really excuse anything I guess and maybe I'm trying to hard to defend him. He probably was a legitimate white supremacist. Idk

Really fascinating writer and person who has had a deservedly massive impact on horror in particular and our culture more broadly.
But at the same time not everything he did was gold. Lots of his stories weren't particularly interesting (though he's hardly the only other writer whose weaker stuff gets forgotten about) and his distinctive style works against him as often as it does the opposite.
I do think that a lot of the sort of themes and ideas that he helped pioneer have since been done in a much more interesting or scary way by later creators.

>welsh ancentry
>"contaminated bloodline"
I really don't understand how British can be so racist to each other.

Also what book are the dark skinned protagonists in? I haven't yet read one of them yet.

>Also what book are the dark skinned protagonists in? I haven't yet read one of them yet.
Not him but off the top of my head The Transition of Juan Romero is about a mexican dude and I don't remember him being a walking stereotype.

There's also Cool Air with the Mexican doctor.

>uses the word 'batrachian' three times in a short story

not saying you are wrong but HP Sauce tastes like shit :^)

Very lovecraftian

Nyarlathotep Is described in detail, on multiple occasions as being dark skinned and swarthy. He was also supposed to be resemble an ancient Egyptian pharaoh which is of note because most white people unironically thought the ancient Egyptians were white.

The character is sinister but he's exceptionally talented, charismatic and intelligent

>I really don't understand how British can be so racist to each other.
Welsh usualy have a swarthy complexion compared with their anglo-saxon neighbours.

Discrimination of that nature among a single race is incredibly easy, just research Barakumin.

>most white people unironically thought the ancient Egyptians were white
I was under the impression that the ancient egyptians were an aryan people with phoenecian/greek influences in their later history, with some periods where they were ruled by nubians.

Ancient Egyptians basically were one of these miscellaneous middle-eastern groups that didn't spoke a semitic language, like the mesopotamians.

good post user, and for anyone who wants a prime example of how this life influenced his works read "The Thing on the Doorstep" with this information in mind

Dude, even their language was semitic.
The current egyptians are not much different from ancient egyptians. Relatively light skinned people(more or less like iberians) living near the coast, and darker people living in the interior.

Though if you go back to the XIX century you'll found scientists putting north africans and middle easterners under the "caucasian" race. Pic related

Greatest fucking horror writer of all time

Prose was pretty mediocre tho

Unfairly maligned now by niggers and fat women for having feelings

He would have been one of us, had time been kinder to him.

He literally married a jewish woman. If he lived in the modern day and went full /pol/ he would be taken as a hypocritical laughingstock

Presumably based on skull shape.

>implying they aren't all racemixers and Mexicans on /pol/

Call of Cthulhu is actually a really good story even if the character of Cthulhu itself has been memed into oblivion.

...

I think Lovecraft is one of those people like Giger who channel their terrors and fears into their work and if you can empathize with their phobia then you appreciate their work. I'm deeply, deeply afraid of the deep ocean and the weird shit in it and the Deep Ones and Cthulhu continue to bother me.

Like a lot of virgins he mellowed the fuck out after getting laid.

Colour-Out-Of-Space-pilled you mean.

>Source?

Joshi's two-volume biography which quotes HPL's own letters to correspondents, etc.

Necronomicon Press and others have issued several volumes of HPL's huge body of correspondence. Different volume cover different topics, different periods in his life, those letters to specific authors, and the like.

When you read HPL's correspondence from the last five years or so, you see a man becoming an adult. He wrote an estimated 100K letters in his lifetime and most of those in his last 10 years. That correspondence expanded his outlook and broadened his mind. He became a different and better person, not all at once and not all the time, but his growth is noticeable.

Nice

Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. … But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

>people always claim Lovecraft was super racist
>ask for evidence
>everyone cites the same 1912 poem
>ask for more evidence
>nobody has any

Man, it's like you have an edgy racist phase in your early 20s and everyone just assumes you're a Grand Dragon or some shit.

>for anyone who wants a prime example of how this life influenced his works read "The Thing on the Doorstep" with this information in mind

Agreed. Once you know about his childhood and teens, "The Thing on the Doorstep" becomes an entirely different kind of horror story.

So if he lived now, he would be a /pol/ack with an asian girlfriend?

Kadath is lovely.

Semi-related, is Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket any good?

>new england fallen

>Be a girl
>Read Lovecraft
>Erogenous zones begin to tingle

Is this normal?

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Promotions !

TOLKIEN AND LOVECRAFT

69.89.31.129/~amyhstur/?page_id=510

Occupies the sad state where people assume that because his work is highly praised that that means they would like it. Then they go onto ottoman ottoman crafting boards and bitch and moan that they personally didn't like it so obviously it's overrated

and how not. Everything is terrifying

Eh, girls love Tyranids as well.

...

I very much like his works. I own a rather large anthology of his short stories. The Music of Erich Zann, the Lurking Fear, the Shadow Over Innsmouth, the Color Out of Space and the Rats in the Walls are among my favourites. He gets a bad rep for his language, but hey, it gave us things like:
>My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea. Something bumped into me—something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living. . . . Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? . . . The war ate my boy, damn them all . . . and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret . . . No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died! . . . Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer? . . . It’s voodoo, I tell you . . . that spotted snake . . . Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do! . . . ’Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust . . . wolde ye swynke me thilke wys? . . . Magna Mater! Magna Mater! . . . Atys . . . Dia ad aghaidh ’s ad aodann . . . agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas ’s dholas ort, agus leat-sa! . . . Ungl . . . ungl . . . rrrlh . . . chchch . . .
(continued because of char limit)

He was a man of superior intellect and refined taste.

Well the good news is that tentacles are a bit like dicks so you should still be appealing to trap lovers at least.

>That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have blown up Exham Priory, taken my Nigger-Man away from me, and shut me into this barred room at Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and experiences. Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the priory. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
I suppose I'm a bit weak to the blood-inherited curse schtick.

>ctrl-f
>only 2 mentions of niggers
Someone post the rhyme

The man was scared of
>Penguins
>Dogs
>Black People
>Asian People
>The Ocean
>Jews
>Germans
>Poor People

>Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
>But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings,
>They come in legions on the north wind’s swell
>With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
>Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
>To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

>Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
>Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
>But ho! If only they would make some sound,
>Or wear a face where faces should be found!
No.

Mediocre writer with some good world-building ideas.

And, to his credit, I suppose that's actually better than a fundamentally good writer who is shit at world-building.

You forgot going insane and inbreeding.

>Thoughts on HP Lovecraft?
His better stuff is excellent. His lesser stuff is boring and uninspired. His prose is evocative, but some people find it unnecessarily stilted and hard to wade through. I tend to prefer it when his stories stray further from witchcraft and closer to science fiction (either that, or when they're full-on dream fantasy). Overall, I'm a big fan of the guy, though I don't think his works make a very good basis for a role-playing game.

The complete works of H. P. Lovecraft:
pdf -- cthulhuchick.com/?dl_id=6
epub -- cthulhuchick.com/?dl_id=2
mobi -- cthulhuchick.com/?dl_id=3

Some stuff I like:

DREAMLIKE, OTHERWORLDLY & SHORT STORIES -- read in any order, but put the longer Dream-Quest towards the end
The Outsider
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Colour Out of Space
The Nameless City
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The White Ship

CORE MYTHOS (all longer stuff) -- probably better if read in roughly the order listed
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Call of Cthulhu
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Out of Time

The files come from here: cthulhuchick.com/free-complete-lovecraft-ebook-nook-kindle/

You could've just said that he was a typical American who happened to be afraid of penguins and dogs.

I'd have a breakdown too if I found out that I had the blood of an anorak wearing sheep fucker.

People focus on the wrong part of his works.

>Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Yes it is.

>The Outsider
Aw heck, I forgot about that one.

The last part should have been cut out.

#ourguy

What, Johanson's account?

That would explain why he started to be actually good somewhere around writing At the Mountains of Madness, despite bulk of his works being written earlier.

youtube.com/watch?v=J8eJJ_Smobk

>Spend 20-odd years under careful "care" of your over-bearing, unhinged aunts
>Turn into complete shut-in in the process
>People are somehow surprised about this

I'm a big fan, and you're terribly right.

You know what I think no one gets? That he was a bro. Seriously, read the letters. It's funny (and actually pretty heartbreaking in reprospective) how nice he was to people in his circle.

Niggers and Jews: bad news.

>HPL

>writing anything about jews

kek

>you
>not reddit spacing
kek

>most white people unironically thought the ancient Egyptians were white.
no they didn't you dicknugget

Many people were quite isolated which increased that racism - just like the modern altright twats mostly grow up in gated communities or housing associations that discriminate by the back door
And like many of that time who became more aware of the world he changed his views - just like Abraham Lincoln or those Nazi anthropologists sent to Tibet and other places

>reddit spacing