What would H.P. Lovecraft be writing about now?

but yeah, you are right, Jon. All the racist stuff would be about t-heads, I imagine.

If he were writing now, I'd guess it would involve diseases wiping out middle American communities--in excruciating detail.

also, today's pedantic nerdery: it was Neal Stephenson, not Gibson, who was more likely to write about sumerian mythology & programming.

his wife was jewish

i find that just as often, lovecraft locates evil in the corruption of the old, established yankee families - see "rats in the walls", "the dunwich horror", "shadow over innsmouth" (especially), "the thing on the doorstep", "the picture in the house", etc ... many of his stories seem to be the 1920s version of bret easton ellis - corruption and decay in the houses of the rich and wealthy, the dangers of class isolation, xenophobia, etc

he is something of the perennial outsider.

he is something of the perennial outsider.

i agree with that.

Necronomicon Press and other small print-run Lovecraft ephemera (and now CLARK ASHTON SMITH THREAD)

also of course one of my examples (the hillbillies in "colour out of space") supports your point ... he was definitely a pulp writer, and stereotypes are stock-in-trade for pulp writing. combine that w/ the generally not-so-progressive mores of 1920s and you have some pretty crude and backwards charicatures in his writing - the middle easterners in his stories hurt me in my heart, man!! but (judged in the context of his day) i think lovecraft was hardly a racist or a classist.

"midnight meat train" = NY is owned by race of subterranean dwarves who use subways as cattle cars
"pig blood blues" = cannibalism in brit public schools
"in the hills, the cities" = bizarre ritual warfare in rural slav state (allegory ahoy)
"skins of the fathers" = comedy where great old ones come back for their alien love child
"the forbidden" = candyman
"hellbound heart" = hellraiser
"the madonna" = secret source of cremaster v, ancient fertility goddess lives in run-down urban bathhouse

i can't really recommend most of the rest of the books of blood, a lot of it is sort of corny splattercore and a lot of it is goofy comedy-horror. also he jumped the shark severely in the 90s when he decided to go all touchy-feely new-agey - sort of trying to split the difference between stephen king's homey homilies and neil gaiman's food court wiccanisms.

heh. speaking of which, where do you place Chuck Palahniuk's _Lullaby_?

Also, the noble, rational young man of good social standing who finds out that there is something tainted, impure in his bloodline is a common theme I think.

The vilain of "The Picture In The House" is surely neither rich nor wealthy, vahid!

all the way back to the greeks, right?

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places ... but the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous ... In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed

Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 in his family home at 194 (then 454) Angell Street in Providence, Rhode Island. His father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman of jewelry and precious metals. His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestors in America back to their arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 ... When Lovecraft was three his father became acutely psychotic at a hotel in Chicago, Illinois, where he was on a business trip, and was brought back to Butler Hospital in Providence, where he remained for the rest of his life. His affliction was general paresis. Lovecraft was thereafter raised by his mother, two aunts (Lillian Delora Phillips and Annie Emeline Phillips), and his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips ... Whipple Van Buren Phillips died in 1904, and the family was subsequently impoverished by mismanagement of his property and money. The family was forced to move down Angell Street to much smaller and less comfortable accommodations. Lovecraft was deeply affected by the loss of his home and birthplace and even contemplated suicide for a time. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1908, as a result of which he never received his high school diploma. this failure to complete his education — his hopes of ever entering Brown University dashed — nagged at him for the rest of his life, and he in fact maintained that he was a highschool graduate.

xpost

His mom raised & dressed him as a girl until he was 7-8, didn't she?

xpost!

all the way back to the greeks, right?

Haha, I meant in his work specifically. I'm saying fear of miscegenation (sp?) pops up a lot in his work, and I don't think he's mocking it, either - Arthur Jerymn is the best example, I mean, the conclusion of that one is actually quite comical, but Lovecraft seemed to think it very scary.

that's what i meant by the conflation. The miscegenation, especially.

shit, CoC and Pickman's Model are the only stories I've read of his in the last few weeks(since working at the HP Lovecraft Film Fest here in Portland)..

Yeah, pretty much. That or the crumbling ruins of old textile mills around Providence and how creeped out he is by the people at Waterfire.

Funny, I used to live about a block away from 194 Angell.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/recon83/mola.jpg

http://www.vgmuseum.com/pics/indy0000.gif

Maybe Lovecraft would be that drunk homeless dude who used to hang out by my old apartment building.

Dude, Waterfire is creepy! Everyone gets all quiet and serious like. And the music..

not that creepy really. isn't is sponsored by starbucks or fleet bank?

You mean like ^ ?

http://www.pbfcomics.com/temporary/PBF075ADZuthulu.jpg

"For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders intact through space was an easy matter."

haha if only his paragraphs delivered on the promise of his sentences

Mark S you would love nothing more to be a TRAVELLING BRAIN

Look out for full on brain-cylinder action in the HPL Historical Society's forthcoming "Whisperer in the Darkness" feature!

bah only one sentence is worth reading in ths feature

hurrah

"one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it"

^^ fascinating idea

IKEÅ!! IKEÅ!! THE BLUE BOX OF THE NORHT W/ A THOUSAND YOUNG!!

-- vahid (vahid), Monday, October 24, 2005 7:21 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

got a book from a dollar rack today--MALL OF CTHULHU.

From the back... "An awkward, geeky folklore student named Teddy single-handedly slew the undead occupants of the Omega Alpha sorority house ... He and Laura must spring into action, traveling all the way from Boston to the seemingly peaceful suburbs of Providence and beyond, all the way to the sanity-shattering non-Euclidean alleyways and towers of dead R'lyeh itself, in order to prevent an innocent shopping center from turning into... The Mall of Cthulhu."

That first post is a pretty good summation of Charles Stross' Bob Howard series (The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue)

Haunted Riding Lawnmowers and something in some kind of house.

"one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it"

^^ fascinating idea

― moonship journey to baja, Friday, April 25, 2008 5:46 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Maybe this explains some details I've heard about MJ's funeral.

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/26/grand-canyon-sized-valley-found-beneath-antarctica/?hpt=hp_t3

Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage.

http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z322/LouPendergrast/Snapbucket/417B3A6D.jpg

There's a store out here called Living Spaces and that always makes me think of Lovecraft.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/us/spreading-the-word-on-the-power-of-atheism.html

As a teenager, Mr. Joshi discovered Lovecraft, the American author who died young and largely unknown in 1937, but who was beginning to win a posthumous fame. “Initially I discovered him as a great writer of horror stores,” Mr. Joshi said. “But it turns out Lovecraft wrote thousands of letters, to friends and whoever, in which he expressed a forthright and vigorous atheism.”

"We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction."

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/sexymollusk/Mobile%20Uploads/image_zpsc5f3f39c.jpg