/lit/ - Literature

Tolkien, lovecraft, or Salinger, which was the better writer?

Hello Anons, I am interested in your takes regarding the influence of Theosophy on the American pulp fiction of the early 20th century and its general popularity. So far, I have not dug too deeply into it, but I have found a number of either references or "vibes" that struck me as interesting and connected with Theosophy and I'm wondering if anyone else has poked into this.
>Lovecraft "The Haunter of the Dark" names the book of Dzyan alongside other occult works, implying he knows of the works
>Robert E. Howards works definitely have a Theosophic "vibe", especially some of his works that delve into prehistory, or his essay on the history of Hyperborea
>Clark Ashton Smith has noted that he knew of Theosophy and didn't care much for it, calling it "esoteric Yoga for western consumption", yet his Zothique setting seems, at least to me, in part influenced by Theosophy

>read Lovecraft influenced franchises
>they all changes the name and pronunciation of Shub-Niggurath because it sounds like nigger in the middle

Ironic that a word has become so forbidden in American language it’s become more eldritch than the eldritch fiction

I'm going to make an exposition of Lovecraftian horror, focusing on what the genre as such consists of, as well as the circumstances in which it arose.

Which fragment, paragraph or quotation from Lovecraft's works do you consider to be the best in expressing the idea of the ephemeral nature of humanity and that it lacks absolutely any transcendence and importance before the vast cosmos, that the human being is completely insignificant in the universe and that his desires, his science and aspirations have no validity in it?

I have looked into it and am starting to suspect this retarded muttoid nigger is sitting on a cache of Lovecraft's letters that have never seen the light of day. We may need to do something about that, if you know what I mean.

Any recommendations for any particular H.P. Lovecraft collection? Also any other horror authors or even generally more modern influential author recs also welcome
pic unrel

>Lovecraft a en fait toujours été raciste. Mais dans sa jeunesse ce racisme ne dépasse pas celui qui est de mise dans la classe sociale à laquelle il apparrient – l’ancienne bourgeoisie, protestante et puritaine, de la Nouvelle-Anglererre. Dans le même ordre d’idées, il est, tout naturellement, réactionnaire. En toutes choses, que ce soit la technique de versification ou les robes des jeunes filles, il valorise les notions d’ordre et de tradition plutôt que celles de liberté et de progrès. Rien en cela d’original ni d'excentrique. Il est spécialement vieux jeu, voilà tout. Il lui paraît évident que les prorestants anglo-saxons sont par nature voués à la première place dans l’ordre social ; pour les autres races (que de toute façon il ne connaîr que fort peu, et n’a nulle envie de connaître), il n’éprouve qu’un mépris bienveillant et loinrain. Que chacun reste à sa place, qu’on évite toute innovation irréfléchie, et tout ira bien.

Everyone knows about Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, but who are some more obscure pulp writers that you enjoy? I'm fond of Karl Wagner, I think his writings come closest to emulating Howard's style.

Realistically speaking, there are probably a considerable number of artistic types alive today who have the disposition and ability to write stories similar to those of Lovecraft, Poe etc.

We often lament the fact that Lovecraft and writers like him were overlooked and underappreciated in their day, yet there appears to be little interesting in actually reading or celebrating writers who exist on the periphery of the literary world yet whose works are still very interesting and may, in the course of several decades, be remembered in similar ways to how we look back on Lovecraft today.

That said, are you aware of any such writer?

I don't know what a man like Lovecraft or Poe would be doing in the 21st century. Part of me suspects they would have invested their time and effort into technology and would be working in some kind of tech role while writing on the side (like Ted Chiang) while another part of me naturally suspects they would instead be terminally online and possibly NEET.

Any thoughts?

Can anyone recommend books similar to the Castlevania video game franchise/series.

I know of the obvious choices like Dracula, Anne Rice, H.P. Lovecraft, and Necroscope by Brian Lumley, but I'm more into the introspective adventure/metroidvania aspects of the game that give the series its charm, as it's really a compilation of horror movie monster tropes in a dark fantasy setting.

Vampire Hunter D is the series I know that I'm looking for and is the one that makes the most obvious homages (i.e. Leila Basarb, Alucard's daughter, is named after Leila Marcus). But I feel like Michael Moorcock is the most similar to this, especially with his Eternal Champion book series because of how game-y they read, essentially. So I'm more inclined to look for something like that among the lines.

We had that thread recently where we found out that Tolkien was familiar with Robert E. Howard. Was he familiar with Lovecraft, too? I ask because there are certainly Lovecraftian elements in his stuff. The idea of things too terrible to mention, too awful even to speak of, crops up over and over in The Lord Of The Rings. I just recently got to "Fog on the Barrow-Downs" in my reread of the book and it feels more than a little like something Lovecraft would approve of.

THE FORTRESS UNVANQUISHABLE,
SAVE FOR SACNOTH

(1908?)

by

LORD

DUNSANY

>The story has been described as one of Dunsany's best and a major influence on sword and sorcery fiction.
>"The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" has been called one of Dunsany's best stories,[7] "his first indisputable masterpiece",[1] and "one of the finest short pieces of its type in English".[2]
>The story was a major influence and inspiration for writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Jack Vance, but Dunsany was unaware of this until nearly the end of his life. It has been called "perhaps the first sword and sorcery story ever written", with almost all the usual elements of the type present,[1][8] and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy states that it "almost singlehandedly created the Sword and Sorcery genre";[5] in his introduction to In the Land of Time, and Other Fantasy Tales, S. T. Joshi noted it as one of several of Dunsany's stories which might be said to have created the subgenre.[9] However, the sensible Leothric is more like a fairy-tale hero than a Conanesque barbarian,[1] and the tale does not have the thrills and excitement of typical sword and sorcery.[2][10]
>Sacnoth is the first sentient sword in fantasy fiction, and an influence on the sword Caudimordax in Tolkien's story Farmer Giles of Ham and Stormbringer in Michael Moorcock's Elric novels.[1]

>melville had hawthorne
>tolkien had lewis
>hemmingway had fitzgerald
>lovecraft had howard
i'm so glad i have all of you.

>Pessoa had Lisbon
>Toole had New Orleans
>Kafka had Prague
>Proust had Paris
>Joyce had Dublin (in exile)
>Lovecraft had Providence

On the one hand, I am jealous that these writers were so intimately acquainted with such unique geographical locations and cultures. On the other, I feel like the days of actually being rooted in a place so much that your literary output is embedded in it are gone.

If I was asked what place I call my home, whose language and idiosyncrasies I am most familiar, I would hesitate to name my hometown due to the fact I spend so little time outside around other people and the fact that car ownership has rendered such localised affiliation redundant. On the other, I feel that this place is not in fact a geographical location but the internet, specifically 4chan. I have spent so much time here over the past decade or so that any physical, real location is secondary to my life.

Which begs the question: how can a novel, or poetry, or anything else, be written about one's life online?

Houellebecq writes at the beginning of his first novel that writing a novel in modern times is extremely difficult to the atomised lives we increasingly live, wherein dialogue is sparse and experiences few. Fast forward thirty years, and this seems to be the case more than ever. The idea of there being any kind of "artistic centre" in the real world, such as Paris, or New York, or whatever, seems laughable now. Yet nothing has replaced it other than forums, messageboards, social media subcultures, and so on. Publications which began as small-scale magazines produced by a handful of literary friends, such as Pessoa's Orpheu, are now beyond irrelevant and are born not of individuals located close in a geographic sense, but those who find know each other online primarily.

It seems over to me.

As culture becomes bland and standardized (despite the praising of diversity) there is nothing really I can imagine that is "special" about living in, say, Lisbon today. There is no literary heritage studied and lauded on a local geographical level which produces literary successors who carry it into the future. People just post online, share the same memes, read the same "meme" books, and publish increasingly solipsistic memoir fiction. Granted, I may be projecting here. Am I wrong? Please tell me I am desu.

I had heard about live craft influencing creatures that are old ones, things beyond humans understanding. Things that had been on earth long before humans. But it’s all just aliens? Was lovecraft very much influenced by the Masonic lies at the time about space and so he thought the existence of aliens was very terrifying?

Did he have any stories about things that weren’t aliens?

I got bored. Here is a list of literary works and authors that H.P. Lovecraft mentions in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

Introduction:
>Sigmund Freud
>Charles Dickens
>Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning
>The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
>Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
>The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford
>The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
>The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs

So i was wondering, what are some other classic short stories that could be tagged as "horror", that were written by otherwise pretty unknown writers?

Because let's be honest, i doubt there's anyone in this board who has read other story by W.W. Jacobs that isn't "The Monkey's Paw".

So i'm looking for cases like that, so no Poe's and no Lovecraft's this time please.

Can we talk about lovecraft? I've been chugging through his entire collection on audiobook. ST Joshi seems like a pretty cool guy I'm curious about his writing after hearing he edited all the content in the collection. I just checked the mailbox and "Against the world, Against Life" and "Lord of a Visible World" were in it. By gods as I copy paste my previous posts and draft this I find myself tremulous with anticipation of the two new books. A sort of indescribable otherworldly amazement has taken hold, the kind of which could not be written into words lest the mind of the one writing or reading it frays at the very comprehension of such cyclopean writing. A loathsome antiquarian post chiseled into a bas-relief coupled with batrachian designs I couldn't begin to describe, jeering and sneering with the most noisome foetor wafting about. And the Acolytes of this place their lucubration unending with such piliferous necks while piteous are also somewhat piquant.

>we now present to you from the HP lovecraft society shadow over innsmouth
>I noticed immediately the negroidal lips of the creature standing before me
>his canthal tilt was droopish and depressing depicting minor sentience of some education if only by a mammy in a shack
>his eyes were watery and soft focused the left often wandering as his right struggled to maintain a track on my face as I asked to buy a bus ticket
>his speech was stilted with a shudderingly off balance cadence like he was addled by some sort of off world emptiness
>much like other poles he wasn't quite white but instead a washed out grey with oily translucent skin
>and by god the oil like the filthiest of wops when he took my nickel his hand brushed against mine leaving a thick film on my wrist staining my 2 dollar suit
>anyways enough of the inspiration of this macabre tale I present to you now chapter 1 . . .

imagine being Mark Fisher

you luck out and get to do your PhD at Warwick right as one of the most interesting movements in contemporary philosophy is at its peak and everyone there is convinced we're on the brink of a neo-cyberpunk techno-leftist cultural revolution but then you notice their prose is actually way better than yours like ouch way better and you don't understand mathematics or thermodynamics like Land does and you'd never be able to translate an entire text of Lyotard like Iain Hamilton Grant and you couldn't believe it when you walked in on Land screwing Sadie Plant in the ass wtf you thought she was a dyke but you finish your PhD anyway even if you had to whip up some gobbledygook about Toy Story being the epitome of capitalism's uncanny reterritorialization of existence near the end to pad the word count holy fuck what were you even doing and Brassier won't shut up about Laruelle and honestly his brand of nihilism seems way cooler than yours but this Graham Harman guy seems neat he likes Lovecraft and the latest Goldsmith workshop was a smash hit everyone assures you but no one seems interested in talking about cybernetic Oedipus anymore Grant has moved on to Schelling and Land is sober and you still can't believe he got to fuck Sadie Plant but you have to shit out another essay about how The Clash and The Jam exemplify some arcane element of marxism through whatever bullshit Lacanian lens god you wish you had went with the Qabalah schizo stuff like Land (who got to fuck Sadie Plant) and now he's an altright nazi or something on Twitter and Zizek just mentioned you in some stupid lecture goddamnit now you'll have to respond in some blogpost and tie it into big pharma and Kubrick and Lacan (yet again) oh and be sure to use "jouissance" and Sadie Plant hasn't published a book since the 90s and the CCRU has decayed into really lame Accelerationist cliques and let's face it Capital Realism was a fluke you know deep down you've been typecast as "le marxist-gnome manlet music depression guy" and you're in your late 40s now and you just mentioned James Cameron and fucking Avatar in your latest superfluous essay and we were going to change the world weren't we where did it all go wrong but the rope's right there isn't it hell yeah it is

I mean holy shit just imagine being Mark Fisher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GcH9j2pwZA

Would you say that Lovecraft's entities align with Taoist traditional thought of the divine as an unknowable and unexplainable existence beyond man's ability to comprehend?

>Everything fantasy Robert E. Howard
>Everything by HP Lovecraft
>Everything by Clark Ashton Smith
>Everything by Lord Dunsany
>Everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs
>Everything by Poul Anderson
>Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series
>The Dying Earth series
>Everything by Michael Moorcock

Is my list missing any essentials or should I just move on to history and mythology after finishing these?

>Reading Wodehouse instantly realize he's the basis for Douglas Adams
>Reading nonfiction Twain instantly realize he's the basis for Kurt Vonnegut
>Reading Poe instantly realize he's the basis Lovecraft

Does this happen to you? How far back does this shit go? Is there really nothing new under the sun? Are there Wodehouses and Twains from the 1200s they were ripping off?

What are you reading?
How do you feel about it?

I'm currently reading ''To Rouse Leviathan". Some of the stories are interesting but holy hell is Cardin long-winded. This guy just cannot end a story, he just keeps wringing out the water from the already dry sponge until it evaporates.
I also don't understand his huge ego thinking he's the one and only person to use Christian mythology in his try-hard Lovecraft copy stories.

>that Lovecraft pastiche
Don't think anything has made me laugh so hard. In general the way he uses pastiche and the interaction between them all is really impressive, not sure if I completely missed them when I first read it years ago or completely forgot but I am loving it. This is easily his most complex and enjoyable work and if he maintains it through the entire work it will be by far his best and my memory of that first read suggests it will.

He seems to pastiche just about all of those genre defining authors and styles from the time period and does it well while maintaining his own voice but the whole Iceland spar Lovecraft pastiche is really something else.