/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1911442]

So what's /lit/s opinion on Lovecraft?
I think he's excellent.

[Anonymous No.1911455]

Not nearly as interesting as his fanbase lead me to believe.

[Anonymous No.1911462]

He is excellent

[Anonymous No.1911465]

Brilliant. Just as I was typing this I happened to notice a gigantic spider on the floor next to me.

[Anonymous No.1911470]

>>1911455
Seriously

I think I might have developed a thing for him if I'd come to him a little younger, but for me he's one of those nerdlit icons who make you see how an adult could develop a bias against genre fiction and defend it with a straight face. Please note that I LOVE genre fiction and tend to assume that people who passionately dislike it are either 17 or 83

[Anonymous No.1911501]

i liked call of cthulhu... his longer stuff was boring.

[Anonymous No.1911514]

>>1911455
this.

the way he gets praised you'd think he cured cancer.

[Anonymous No.1911539]

>>1911470
we should go on a date or something, that's how correct your opinions are

[Anonymous No.1911555]

Lovecraft was a below average writer (and an idiot to boot), but, though his idea of what's readable was wrong, his idea of what's fascinating was actually spot-on.

[Anonymous No.1911586]

niggerman.

that is all.

[Anonymous No.1911592]

>>1911586
>AND CALLED THAT THING A NIGGER
Look, it wasn't his fault, it was the society's.

[Anonymous No.1911611]

don't you find it irritating how every lovecraft discussion always ends in lolracism

[Anonymous No.1911612]

>>1911611
indeed.

[Anonymous No.1911621]

>>1911611
Why would that be irritating? The man was an idiot.

[Anonymous No.1911628]

>>1911621
Because it doesn't matter. He's dead. His racism is as relevant to anything as his favourite kind of butterfly. The only people who give a shit are idiots. Plenty of authors were racist too, but you don't see every on of their threads shat upon by imbeciles who just read Lovecraft Was A Racist in wikipedia and feel the need to parrot it back without any actual interesting commentary.

It's irritating because anyone who knows anything about Lovecraft knows about it and because when people say they want to discuss Lovecraft, they don't mean the asshole with a pen, they mean whatever the asshole wrote.

[Anonymous No.1911632]

>>1911628
He wasn't a plumber. He was a writer. It affected his works, and was a marker of his lacking general intelligence and sophistication. So it does matter indeed.

[Anonymous No.1911636]

>>1911632
>It affected his works,

Yeah, a minor mention now and then in every other story of a negress is such a fucking major influence.

Did you even read my post? Nvm, go kill yourself,

[Anonymous No.1911641]

>>1911632
>implying he wasn't intelligent
>implying that his racism came from low intelligence and not his aristocratic upbringing
>implying he isn't the picture of the early-20th-Century conservative

this is why I hide so many threads on /lit/.

[Anonymous No.1911642]

>>1911636
It was the whole plot point of one of his most famous novellas, faggot. A man found out he was half-negro and went mad of sheer horror.

[Anonymous No.1911646]

>>1911632
Please nearly every writer of that time period was racist, the rare exceptions were just that exceptions.

Lovecraft was a good writer in comparison to his time period. I think some genre writers have bested him in his field but there is still something about his writing inherently creepy that modern writers can't seem to grasp.

It's similar to the difference between the modern version of Miracle on 34th street and the original. While the modern version is technically a better version, the lighting is good, the effects are better it's not grainy and the movie is made more realistic, the feeling I get from watching the modern version is not as good as you get from the original, flaws and all.

With lovecraft he wrote in a way that once you sunk into the book really impacted your enjoyment in the way modern genre writers can't seem to match.

[Anonymous No.1911647]

>>1911641
do you know how fucking prolific he was? he could have written a whole book with just the word NIGGER repeated on every page and it would still be a minor fucking influence.

[Anonymous No.1911651]

>>1911636
to be fair it's pretty easy to see a lot of his supernatural concerns as proxies for his feelings about race and cast. the revulsion towards the monstrous standing in for revulsion towards those of other races, or for a revulsion towards lower-class proles who he also hated. it's not something you can entirely divorce from his writing. it's also true that lovecraft was particularly virulent and, well, crazy about how racist he was - it wasn't just run-of-the-mill racism.

i don't think that the racism of lovecraft is the only fact about him. it doesn't mean we can't read what he writes. but it is something you have to address. does it dominate discussion of the guy on /lit/ to a degree that, perhaps, it shouldn't? yeah probably.

also, imo lovecraft was only really okay as a writer. he relied too much on flowery language but w/e

[Anonymous No.1911653]

Racist, Anglophile, bland writer.

Seems alright to me.

[Anonymous No.1911658]

>>1911647
Writing one racist book and ten dozen unrelated books still makes you racist.

>>1911646
>Please nearly every writer of that time period was racist, the rare exceptions were just that exceptions.
Actually, for example, Mark Twain was not only done writing his stuff, be actaully, in fact, died, that's how long it was since bashing racism seeped into mainstream literature by Lovecraft's time.

[Anonymous No.1911669]

>read The Lurking Fear, first time reading Lovecraft
>dat last sentence about the eyes on the beast
OH MY GOD I'M CUMMING WITH FRIGHT

[Anonymous No.1911668]

>>1911651
flowery language was typical of his time and required to get published. once you pick up that language habit and start to enjoy a piece from that time period meant for adults and read enough from the period the flowery language adds to the book. But since modern writers can only write as flowery as advertisment jingles, and we modern readers tend only to have short attention spans flowery language becomes more of an interference from enjoying a book

[Anonymous No.1911672]

>>1911668
no

hes too flowery, it dominates his writing, it becomes purple prose, and it becomes too much of a feature of his stories.

[Anonymous No.1911676]

>>1911668
>Writing one racist book and ten dozen unrelated books still makes you racist.

WHAT?! REALLY?! THIS CHANGES EVERYTH-

Wait, no, you're still a retard, no one is saying he isn't racist, we're just saying you don't need to make it the point of every thread to say Lovecraft? LOLRACISMXDDDD

[Anonymous No.1911686]

>>1911668
>flowery language was typical of his time and required to get published.
Where are you getting these tidbits? You're plain wrong. It was early 20th century. Modernism was all the rage. Purple language stopped being mainstream, like, 70 years ago.

[Anonymous No.1911714]

Borges hated him, therefore, I hate him.

[Anonymous No.1911725]

>>1911658
yeah btw forgot to mention this one minor detail, niggerman was also the name of his cat when he was a kid. Frankly though literature and the rest of the world did not seem to be as advanced as you give cause. Antisemitisim was rampant among writers of that time, and while you have a lot of social upheaval and writers working towards better race and cultural relations you also have the development of eugenics, the uniculturalist nationalist movements in china the US Russia and England. And you have incidents like the rosewood massacre. In Australia they were producing racist literature, and only racist literature for the children until the thirties. You have book like the awakenings but man you also have the newspapers of the day with headlines like, Nig#$# rightfully lynched" There was no pretty era of anti racism in that era. Heck if anything the nationalist movement was so typical and extremely racist that I bet if you looked at any country 1899-1908 for every book written that was anti racist you'd find 10 racist nationalistic books. I know for sure both France and Germany produced far more nationalist therefore racist books than anti-racism books

[Anonymous No.1911726]

>>1911714
>i don't have any opinions whatsoever.

[Anonymous No.1911728]

Let's see.

Purple prose.
Shitty plotting.
No actual characters at all. Not a single one throughout the works.

Gee, I wonder, I guess I don't like him much. Chthulu shit is fun to joke about, but reading Call is a goddamn torture. The only thing by him I at all enjoyed was the Search for Unknown Kadath, and even that, certainly not for prose or characters either.

[Anonymous No.1911731]

>>1911725
yeah but - again - you have to differentiate between different kinds of racism, and lovecraft was remarkably fevered and virulent in his opinions on race. it really was a kind of revulsion for him, something different from the usual social attitude towards race.

[Anonymous No.1911737]

He wrote about things as if taken from cheap horror movies of the 60´s. "Oh, I can hear them comming now, those horrid things from another world. They have purple tentacles and monstrous little pointy teeth. They have existed for centuries but nobody knows of their existence but I was able to come across them by pure randomness."
Sorry, but the stories were boring as fuck.

[Anonymous No.1911741]

>>1911737
Actually, his subject matter was often great. Too bad he was a horrible writer, though.

As for "60's movies", man, I hope you were kidding. Those movies were based on all the horror pulp Lovecraft and his bros were the main contributors to.

[Anonymous No.1911739]

>>1911714

>Borges hated him, therefore, I hate him.

Borges didn't hate Lovecraft, you clown; in fact, he dedicated his story “There Are More Things” “to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft”:

See:

http://www.contrasoma.com/writing/borgeslovecraft.htm

[Anonymous No.1911747]

>>1911555

Idiot that had ties to cubism, multi-dimensional science, observatory's, and married a Jewish woman. Was friends with an Arab man who gave him the nick-name Alhazarad then in his later career wrote The Walls of Eryx which a dying man recants his hatred of an indigenous people on Venus. Accusations about rats in the walls fail to note setting or origin of character being from aristocratic southern US. Fails to mention Lovecraft lost aristocratic title after grandfather died. Lovecraft died at his aunts penny-less and of intestinal cancer.

[Anonymous No.1911754]

>>1911747
Please.

>When, long ago, the gods created Earth
>In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
>The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
>Yet were they too remote from humankind.
>To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
>Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
>A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
>Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

Let's see an actually intelligent man write something like this. In the twentieth century, to boot. Having an education and all, too.

[Anonymous No.1911783]

>>1911754
Publication date. Bet its before 1920.

Also forgets to mention Lovecraft's classical upbringing and interest in idealized humans in Greek mythology. young people write stupid shit, late career Lovecraft work is not shown in example, why? Afraid argument won't hold? water?

[Anonymous No.1911788]

>>1911783
He wrote this when he was 22. Not 13.

[Anonymous No.1911791]

>>1911788
I loled.

Thinks 22 isn't young.

[Anonymous No.1911799]

>>1911791
Old enough.

Anyway, racism is just a bad sign. Lovecraft's actual fault was in poor, poor writing. He couldn't even come up with a proper character for his stories, and god, the purpleness, it hurts.

[Anonymous No.1911804]

>>1911791

For the time it wasn't that young, certainly not as young as it seems to us today, when we live to be 80 or even 90 pretty regularly.


Also, to anyone doubting, just go the The Street, it's like something straight out of Glenn Beck's drawer.

[Anonymous No.1911814]

>>1911799

I know you won't agree, but I think his stories work better without any actual characters, they're mostly short things where you're supposed to be scared for yourself not get attached and fear for the main character's well-being.

[Anonymous No.1911816]

>>1911804
Every word from Lovecraft is like something Glenn Beck would write. He was freaking stupid.

[Anonymous No.1911820]

>>1911814
>they're mostly short things where you're supposed to be scared for yourself
That's bad writing. You scare the reader through menacing the likeable character. Telling "cosmic horror" is okay, but when it's all the author ever managed, he's a shitty writer allright. Also, it's not like he doesn't atempt to write characters. It's jsut that he fails every single time.

[Anonymous No.1911818]

>>1911799
No, his writing wasn't poor. You're saying that because you're a Jew and a Negro and you are butthurt that Lovecraft dared to express the truth.

>>1911804
Yeah. People only lived into their forties in Twentieth Century. Moron.

[Anonymous No.1911821]

>>1911816
Herp Derp
You have no imagination

[Anonymous No.1911825]

>>1911804
Aware "The Street" is shitty, but also aware one of his earliest works (written in 1919).

Also learn how to post in an existing thread before starting your own on the same subject.

[Anonymous No.1911824]

>>1911818
>You're saying that because you're a Jew and a Negro
Fuck, how did you know? Now I'll have to make brother Moot find you out and fuck you up.

[Anonymous No.1911827]

>>1911825
In 1919 he was thirty freaking nine. He freaking died in the next ten years or so.

[Anonymous No.1911832]

>>1911827
Looks like someone doesn't know he was born 1890. Found you out fag.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

[Anonymous No.1911838]

>>1911825

You're right I'm sorry. I didn't check before posting, because I was in a hurry to vent after finishing that awful read.

[Anonymous No.1911839]

>>1911832
29, sorry. He was an imbecile at what, 22. At 29, he was still an imbecile. Sounds like an all around general imbecile to me all right.

[Anonymous No.1911842]

>>1911839
Like I'm going to listen to a fag that can't count?

[Anonymous No.1911846]

>>1911842
Yeah, maybe you're going to listen to a "fag" that calls a negrosemitic attack force on your ass.

[Anonymous No.1911850]

>>1911501

Where is my "Call of Cthulhu" movie?

[Anonymous No.1911851]

>>1911846
Look at the little boy trying to use $10 words to hide his mistake. Its so cute when they're stupid.

[Anonymous No.1911855]

>>1911846
You don't have the attention span to read through a 10 page horror story. You sure as hell don't have the attention span to call anything on his ass.

[Anonymous No.1911858]

>>1911851
I'm not hiding anything, I even apologized.

[Anonymous No.1911863]

>>1911855
I don't like ten-page horror stories that only contain two paragraphs of story and nine and a half pages of shlock.

[Anonymous No.1911871]

>>1911863
>Mommy, I don't like these books without pictures!

[Anonymous No.1911873]

>>1911820

I don't think he ever really tried breathing more than the minimal required life into a character, it certainly never felt to me like he did. To be fair he'd probably end up recasting Glenn Beck as every character in every story if he did try.

The fact of the matter is that I enjoyed reading his stories. I got chills while reading some of his stories and thinking about "cosmic horror." All that's left now is to call me an idiot for enjoying shitty writing.

I do think that there are other, entirely different and "superior" levels of writing which he doesn't reach, probably couldn't reach, but he does his little niche thing very well.

I honestly feel that the stories won't be as enjoyable to me with actual characters instead of the paper cut-outs he used. At the very least it would be a different experience, and I'm not sure I want a different experience.

[Anonymous No.1911880]

>>1911850
I'd like one that was big budget, but I'm also afraid that studio executives would rape the everliving shit out of it. That's why Del Toro bailed on At the mountains of madness, Studio Execs wanted it to be PG-13.

There is a silent movie of it on netflix that was for the Lovecraft film festival.

[Anonymous No.1911884]

Lovecraft was bro tier.

I can imagine playing xbox with him and us calling everyone a bunch of a stupid niggers, just broing it out.

[Anonymous No.1911891]

>>1911884
Your imagination paints him wrong. Actually, you'd have been, like "Ha ha! faggot! teabag you... right, Howard?!" And he'd be like "THIS NIGGER, WHAT IF I'M PART NIGGER TOO, WHAT IF YOU'RE NIGGER, EVERYONE IS PLEBIAN, ONLY MY ENGLISH ROOTS ARE TRUE, NIGGERS EVERYWHERE"

[Anonymous No.1911893]

>>1911873
I concur with this. We give him alot of guff for his lack of built characters, but often we don't take into account these were short stories for a pulp magazine. This means he had limited word count and available room as per the editors requirements. I also like to note that aside Jules Vern and H.G. Wells there really isn't another author that had such far thinking or risky as to address alien creatures from beyond.

[Anonymous No.1911906]

The Rats in the Walls has a great ending.
The Shadow over Innsmouth has a good ending.
The Colour out of Space is kinda creepy.
The Shadow out of Time is pretty interesting.
At the Mountains of Madness is waaay too fucking long and descriptive.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a fun, dumb fantasy adventure.

I've read literally everything of H.P. Lovecraft thanks to Amazon.
Those are the most notable stories.

[Anonymous No.1911911]

My favorite lovecraft book was the one where the man finds out he's half ape/negro.

I could really relate, because I know a few mulattos and they are so self loathing it almost makes me feel sorry for them.

[Anonymous No.1911915]

>>1911906
Where's The Walls of Eryx?
What of The Dunwhich Horror?
Pickman's Model?
Call of Cthulu?
Dagon?
And by far the best Herber West Re-animator?

[Anonymous No.1911922]

>>1911918
Shadow over Innsmouth.
Probably my favourite.

[Anonymous No.1911918]

>>1911911
>1911

Anyway which one was that?
Dudes become fish monsters and get possessed by ancient time-traveling aliens, but I don't remember something so... banal.

[Captain Baha No.1911923]

Why do none of you people enjoy the Dream-Quest stories? Sure it can be a little aggravating at times, but they reveal some of the greatest places his imagination could dream up.

That said, I am shocked he sat down and wrote Dream-Quest, it seems very... un-pulpy, might be the best word for it.

[Anonymous No.1911924]

>>1911918
"The truth of aurthor jermyn" or something like that.

[Anonymous No.1911925]

>>1911922
Shadow over Innsmouth is what I was referring to about fish monsters.
The dude's not half ape, he's half... fish. An Innsmouth resident.

[Anonymous No.1911943]

>>1911923
I've been wanting to read the Dream-quest but I have trouble finding it. The closest I've gotten is reading Celephaïs.

[Anonymous No.1911946]

>>1911943
How can you have trouble finding it?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&biw=1680&bih=928&q=dream+quest+of+unknow
n+kadath+mediafire&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

[Anonymous No.1911948]

>>1911943
Amazon's $4.00 Ultimate Collection for Kindle was where I found it.
An enjoyable romp, 100 or so pages, worth it only if you really like the Dream Quest.
It pretty much goes through the whole place as a single narrative.

[Anonymous No.1911951]

>>1911943
Amazon's $4.00 Ultimate Collection for Kindle is where I got it.
Pretty enjoyable - 100 or so pages - though really only worth it if you loooove the Dreamlands and the whole Dream Cycle,
as it goes through all of it again.

[Anonymous No.1911952]

>>1911948
What, you actually pay for public domain books? What are you, a freaking imbecile?

[Anonymous No.1911954]

>>1911946
Cuz I hate Calibre files.

[Anonymous No.1911956]

>>1911954
Just write ' "[book name]" txt' on Google, ffs.

[Anonymous No.1911976]

The Whisperer in Darkness is my favorite. The letters are gripping to read as he describes the tense standoffs Akeley faces each night.

[Anonymous No.1911984]

Racism aside. Lovecraft was one of the first writers to deal with the "mankind is insignificant in the grand scheme of things" thing. Readings his stuff gives me the Cosmic Dread.

[Anonymous No.1912023]

Come on /lit/, Herbert West Reanimator was pretty damn good.

[Anonymous No.1912046]

Okay, here's my problem with Lovecraft, and tell me if anybody else has the same problem.

Whenever I read him, I can't help but hear Garrison Keillor and "The Prairie Home Companion" in my head.

Like, I hear Garrison Keillor's voice narrating all of Lovecraft's more ridiculous prose...."Nyarlathotep...The Crawling Chaos....I am the last....I will tell the audient void...."

Then I just imagine that it would go somewhere like "It was just two summers ago that the Elder Gods first re-emerged from under the rippled shores of Lake Wobegon, and Carl Engstrand--the Norwegian bachelor farmer who first spotted Cthulhu surfacing on a bloodstained dais hewn from living basalt in spirals of non-Euclidean geometry---was starting to get fed up. It was more than enough for him to have to make his way down to Pastor Olsen's Lutheran church on Sunday mornings. Carl didn't see why he should have to make a blood sacrifice every evening to some giant fish."

And then it would have Herbert West Reanimator in the style of Guy Noir Private Eye....and maybe a bluegrass band singing some of Lovecraft's more offensive poems set to music.

I have no idea why this is, but it really has affected any attempt I've made to read Lovecraft.

[Anonymous No.1912047]

>>1912023
I second that!

[Anonymous No.1912057]

>>1912046
Nah I don't feel that way. Lovecraft uses elaborate wording(like many other writers of his time), and I really enjoy that. It's a small part of the reason I enjoy Tolkien, too.

[Anonymous No.1912059]

>>1912046
This sounds like a personal problem.

[Anonymous No.1912084]

>>1911642
As would I.

[Anonymous No.1912089]

>>1912046
this may be the greatest thing

[Anonymous No.1912090]

>>1912046
I tend to get a Paul Harvey or Walter Cronkite vibe when I read his stuff.

[Anonymous No.1912100]

>>1912090
Paul Harvey or Walter Cronkite is close enough to what I get. Thanks. I feel a little bit vindicated.