[Severian]

Originally Posted by tw2113

I've made it through the prologue of LotR: Fellowship of the Ring.

The best one, but keep going!

[Severian]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

Just started 3rd book of the Vandermeer Area X trilogy. Not bad. Got em from my public library, so didn't (and wouldn't) buy em. :/

First book was freaking brilliant. Second and third were both much less so, but overall still a fun and intense read.

I would have been perfectly happy if the whole thing had ended with Annihilation, and if all the background and surrounding mythology had been anyone’s guess. Would have been a helluva statement. That book was truly terrifying and unnerving in the best way, and ending it with a mystery would have been a-OK by me. It still ended with a mystery, really; just one with another 400 pages of exposition.

Had it just been Annihilation, I think it would have been truly singular, a near-Lovecraftian work of horror. I for one enjoy the occasional loose end, as the imagination can roam into some pretty fucked up places with the right stimuli.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by Severian

a near-Lovecraftian work of horror.

Out of interest, what are the elements that make something 'Lovecraftian' for you?

[ilduclo]

I agree on the Lovecraftian concept. What that is for me is a veiled threat either suddenly revealed or hinted at. A discovery that there is something that is very significant to our very existence that we know almost nothing about and that is coming to us without anything we can really do anything about. A feeling that the end of reality and/or the world/universe is at hand.

Sev, what are your Lovecraftian descriptors?

BTW, a friend got a HP Lovecraft tattoo, I asked him, "why do you have a tattoo of Woodrow Wilson"

 

 

[demonrail666]

Yeah, that's pretty much my understanding, too: an existential threat beyond our control or understanding, hints of which can lead to madness and inspire cults.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Out of interest, what are the elements that make something 'Lovecraftian' for you?

A few different things.

- An emphasis on academic study of some kind, like anthropology or history or biology being applied to something uncanny and utterly unknowable.
- Psychological horror, particularly a threat that feeds on fear or madness or insecurity
- Giant, difficult to describe or amorphous/multifaceted amphibious leviathans that make Godzilla look like a tinkertoy
- Cults
- Americans in foreign places where the culture (or some other elements of the environment) proves utterly confounding and ultimately dangerous
- Humanoid genetic abberations living in the dark
- Caves and cathedrals and discovered civilizations
- Victims’ minds turning against them, or deceiving them
- Horrors and threats so great and so utterly without peer that the brain doesn’t know how to process them (like Cthulhu, or the “lighthouse keeper” in Area X)
- Water monsters
- Thought contagion

Etc.

[Severian]

Originally Posted by ilduclo

I agree on the Lovecraftian concept. What that is for me is a veiled threat either suddenly revealed or hinted at. A discovery that there is something that is very significant to our very existence that we know almost nothing about and that is coming to us without anything we can really do anything about. A feeling that the end of reality and/or the world/universe is at hand.

Sev, what are your Lovecraftian descriptors?

Nicely said.

Descriptors?

[!@#$%!]

i thought you guys were gonna say “terrible prose” and “schlocky themes”

[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i thought you guys were gonna say “terrible prose” and “schlocky themes”

Whatthefuckyousay?!!

[!@#$%!]

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

This made me laugh out loud for reasons I can’t explain

Do you really think Lovecraft’s prose is bad? I guess it’s been a while since I read any of his stuff, but I always liked it. Certainly the ideas are the bigger picture, but I think the writing itself is quite good.

Oh well. Gonna read “The Call of Cthulhu” now. Tell me what you think is shitty and I’ll look out for it. 4 srsly.

[ilduclo]

Color Out of Space

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by Severian

This made me laugh out loud for reasons I can’t explain

Do you really think Lovecraft’s prose is bad? I guess it’s been a while since I read any of his stuff, but I always liked it. Certainly the ideas are the bigger picture, but I think the writing itself is quite good.

Oh well. Gonna read “The Call of Cthulhu” now. Tell me what you think is shitty and I’ll look out for it. 4 srsly.

By modern standards his writing is very florid - although 'Cthulhu' is pretty restrained compared with some of his other stories.

Schlocky themes though? (symbol's point) On the surface maybe but they were underpinned by a worldview that other (arguably better) writers could take in a quite sophisticated direction, philosophically speaking. So I agree that people read Lovecraft now for his ideas far more than his style (and probably always have).

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Severian

This made me laugh out loud for reasons I can’t explain

Do you really think Lovecraft’s prose is bad? I guess it’s been a while since I read any of his stuff, but I always liked it. Certainly the ideas are the bigger picture, but I think the writing itself is quite good.

Oh well. Gonna read “The Call of Cthulhu” now. Tell me what you think is shitty and I’ll look out for it. 4 srsly.

lol i was just shitting ya

( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡°)

but yeah i could never get into him— when i tried, it read like a bad poe. and i love poe and so why read bad copies i thought

unfair, i know. maybe i’ll look at him again one of these days

(or maybe i’ll reread poe. ha.)

[demonrail666]

Poe was obviously an influence on Lovecraft but, while someone with minimal interest in horror can still read Poe and appreciate him purely as literature, you can't really say that about Lovecraft. At the level of ideas though, I find Lovecraft far more interesting (and frightening).

[Severian]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Poe was obviously an influence on Lovecraft but, while someone with minimal interest in horror can still read Poe and appreciate him purely as literature, you can't really say that about Lovecraft. At the level of ideas though, I find Lovecraft far more interesting (and frightening).

True. Though I think every literary should at least read “Madness” and “Cthulhu.”

[demonrail666]

The fragmentary nature of Cthulhu elevates it above most Lovecraft, at least from a stylistic pov, but I don't recall much about AtMoM beyond its story - which is awesome, obviously.

But even his most conventional writing is now getting interest from literature departments, if only for how it represents a certain 'pulp' style of writing that serious critics had previously dismissed. (The same way film studies programmes are now falling over themselves to focus on b movies or mainstream action movies.)

Postmodernism and all that.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Poe was obviously an influence on Lovecraft but, while someone with minimal interest in horror can still read Poe and appreciate him purely as literature, you can't really say that about Lovecraft. At the level of ideas though, I find Lovecraft far more interesting (and frightening).

that makes a ton of sense to me. i’m not a fan of “horror” per se, and have had little interest in the genre until recently (last year, i mean 2016, when i asked you guys what horror movies to watch, and actually had a blast with some of them.) so i can see why i didn’t find him appealing in the past.

i might take a look at it again for shits and giggles. or scares. and see what happens.

[demonrail666]

If you want to cut to the chase of his ideas, the opening paragraph of Cthulhlu is basically Lovecraft's worldview in a nutshell:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

To me, when people talk about 'Lovecraftian', that paragraph sums it up. It's also why I think Martyrs (the French version) might be the most Lovecraftian film ever made.

And Jack may be Cthulhu

 

[!@#$%!]

right im familiar with the passage. interestingly, current discussions of the potential dangers of AI have a similar bent. mainly the idea being that something that we cannot even see coming will wipe us out when we least notice.

anyway so i went and read dagon and realized i had read it before and left no impression.

and i have some comments now like what severian asked me to give, just different text.

so for this i’d like to vaguely cite nabokov from memory because i dont have the book of his lectures at cornell.

in his discussion of jekyll and hyde he talks about how good literature makes the senses tingle— it isn’t of the head and it isn’t of teh body but in between. he talks about a tingle in the back of the spine. something like that.

he then proceeds to show how precise stevenson was in his descriptions that you could actually draw a map of the house etc etc. all good.

florid language aside, which i can cope with when it works, this is what i see missing in dagon— a lack of precision that makes it hard to know exactly what the fuck one is supposed to fear.

lemme quote

Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail;

but but but

for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer,

“remember when you read poe? just like that” doesn’t make my spine tingle. but poe does.

it’s kinda like when people give the elevator pitch for their shitty, derivative screenplay: “it’s like pulp fiction meets sleepless in seattle”.

they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall.

starts going well then gets vague again. “unpleasant to recall” is more tell not show.

Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself.

i actually like the irony here. the implication being that they are actually giants. which— great. he’s seeing depictions of ancient giants.

I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.


this is fine. but it’s always “beyond” with him and i want to see the thing itself. if a skyscraper is bigger than a house i don’t want to be told it’s bigger than a house, i want to see the lines of the building disappearing into the sky. he’s musing: maybe his musings could illustrate “beyond-the-anthropology” instead of just being mentioned as “musings”.


Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

so he sees a giant like the cyclops in the odissey and he’s doing what? flaps his arms and makes a belches somewhat.

that’s my problem. the imprecission. i get that he’s seeing a creature unseen before. the problem i have is that i can’t see it with him and therefore i can’t feel his fear.

i don’t mean to shit on a dead writer, he writes better than i ever will, but it’s always been hard for me to feel him and i can’t help it. the above is not any sort of damnation, just a short and sloppy phenomenology of my disappointment. i can’t see and therefore can’t feel.

i get it that at the end the monster is coming for him at the window but since it never materialized for me all i see are the words.

but curiously, now after i have explained it i can see fishface better behind the glass. and it’s a funny image in this way.

but i get the idea of terrifying discoveries now. it’s a good one.