/lit/ - Literature

is there anything of value to be found in HP Lovecraft's bibliography or is it all just easy reading for the masses?

Is it just me or does his prose kind of suck? I don't even mind much, I like other aspects of his stories.

Why is he every edgy teenagers favorite author?

>I SAW A SQUID AND NOW I'M GOING INSANE AAAHHHHH

did rejecting Christ made him a better horror writer?

He could write 36 sonnets as a cycle with a plot over the Christmas break (about a week) just over a dream he had. No one here could do that, ever. Proves that a classical education is all you need.

For the discussion of HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, and all the rest.


People who like Robert E. Howard, Ambrose Bierce fans, and of course Edgar Allen Poe also welcome. Sword and sorcery, and gothic literature may not be quite "weird", but their relations to each other should not be ignored. Pre-Tolkien fantasy also welcome from writers like Lord Dunsany.

Hacks like Stephen King and Michael Moorcock can go die in a hole. Contemporary fantasy literature is an awful, commercialised, creatively bankrupt endeavour and an ignoble end for 'fantastic' literature.

what do I need to start with to get into spookyman?

>>22334453

im writing a lovecraftian short story right now, it's turning out great, im going to post it here once it's done, tho it may take a couple of days to polish it out and perfect it

I took leave of my father's decrepit farmhouse in my modest Guatemalan automobile, making reasonable pace across a landscape bereft of anything resembling what I had come to know as modernity. I eventually reached the general store, a flimsy wooden structure that emitted a dark cloud of smoke from a narrow chimney. Two locals sat outside in the midday sun, accomplishing nothing and seemingly content in their doing so. Their bestial stupidity, likely the result of generations of inbreeding, was apparent in both their appearance and vocabulary.

My eyes were immediately drawn towards the words emblazoned above the door. These words perplexed me in such a manner that defy ordinary description. I shall not repeat them here, for I fear that anyone who stumbles upon this tome will meet the same fate as I should if they read them.

I have not slept in weeks, as I have tried in increasing desperation to decipher their true meaning of that inscription. I fear that it is pointless. The fate of this city slicker is sealed.

>>22185876
>Lovecraft and his friends had all of this in their minds when they wrote.
on this topic, does anyone know how well read in metaphysics Lovecraft was?

Post the best horror writings you have.
No stale creepypasta that everyone has already read.

it wasn't that scary

>>21592960
I liken myself to Jack Ketchum for stark brutality in my stories but I end up getting compared to HP Lovecraft the most

As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict . . . In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable . . . Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence. . . . There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary. . . . In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent . . . If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life . . . For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing.

Hey fellas,
At the Mountains of Madness is one of my favourite books, and I would be interested in reading further cosmic/existential/Lovecraftian horror. Any recommendations? I've read Chambers, he's great. I figure you guys will have recommendations that exceed the modern Lovecraftianism = "big monster is impossible to comprehend??!!!" I'm searching for material that builds upon Lovecraft and Chambers' themes, not merely reducing them to their most marketable aspects.
Thanks!

>>21326187
That's fair, I agree, he also influenced Lovecraft which is pretty based, a lot of cool gothic cosmic horror came out of Calvinism

This man invented fantasy before Tolkien.

>>21241803
>Shared universes were not popular in the mainstream at all before the MCU.

>reading letters written between Robert E Howard and Lovecraft
>both are avowed atheists who have disdain for Christianity for its supposed backwardness
>Lovecraft states openly that he believes in the Witch Cult hypothesis and that he thinks folklore like fairies, goblins, and gnomes actually describe a pre-Aryan race of "mongoloids" that were driven to the fringes (caves, forests) of Europe by the Aryans through conquest which would explain their diminutive stature and grotesque appearance as a result of malnutrition and interbreeding
>Howard's next letter to Lovecraft more or less agrees completely with this theory

>>20985068
Everything about this video feels wrong, both morally and legally.

Recommend me some Lovecraft stories.

What would he think of his current day legacy?