Bolverkur posted:

I can definitely relate to this sentiment. Reading a handful of Lovecraft's short stories in a row puts you in a very strange mindset. Especially if it's before going to sleep and your brain is slowly drifting into a dream-state. Reading a story by Ligotti while slowly, almost-but-not-quite falling asleep is a sublime reading experience.

I personally never really find fiction to be that scary, not in the same intensity as a movie or a game. It's just such a very different medium and a different experience. If the purpose is really to feel scared, then I'll play a videogame. Thirty minutes of Silent Hill 2 make me more tense and scared than a whole reading of a horror novel. Horror fiction, and especially cosmic horror/weird horror, is however successful in evoking in me a certain type of dread that is way more intense and unsettling than just simply being scared. That sort of feeling stays with you, and can possibly alter your perception of something in a permanent way.

ravenkult posted:

I published my Best of Lovecraft anthology. Unfortunately Amazon is not convinced his stories are in the public domain, so they won't let me sell it. If there's any interest in the eBook I'll send it to ya or post a link here or something (I mean, you can get those stories anywhere, but this one has pictures!)

Pope Guilty posted:

He's been dead 78 years, what more do they want?

PayHip posted:

You don't have permission to access /b/7RDN on this server.

Dr. Benway posted:

Forgall posted:

You are not hip enough to pay.

Vorik posted:

I REALLY loved "The Events at Poroth Farm" by TED Klein though, so thanks a lot to the people ITT who recommended it. I just wish his "Dark Gods" collection was available on Kindle.

Shaquin posted:

The full length novel he turned that story into, The Ceremonies, is very very excellent as well. He's always been a curiosity to me as an author. Seemed to have had a wonderful talent and voice for horror writing, and didn't really get a chance to do much with it beyond the relatively scant body of his work that's available.

Neurosis posted:

Tried very hard to track this down for an ereader (whether legally or otherwise) a year ago to no avail. I really liked Dark Gods.

Neurosis posted:

Tried very hard to track this down for an ereader (whether legally or otherwise) a year ago to no avail. I really liked Dark Gods.

quote:

A great story changes with the times. Decades after it’s published, a narrative with depth and dimension will still give up secrets, signifying different things to each generation. But this feat is particularly tricky in the horror genre, since society’s fears—the fuel in any good horror story—can change significantly over time. A story that can still terrify readers 90 years after it’s published is a rare thing.

H.P. Lovecraft, master of the weird tale, has taken some hits recently. Greater awareness about his racism has triggered a re-evaluation of his work, including a call to remove his image from the World Fantasy Award. These (important) cultural conversations are emblematic of a fundamental problem: Lovecraft’s work hasn’t aged well, and as a result, some stories aren’t as scary as they used to be.

Effective horror stories present a stand-in for people’s anxieties. (For example, it’s not the ghosts that frighten us in The Shining—it’s Jack’s alcoholism.) In Lovecraft’s work, the underlying anxieties are often racial. For instance, in his most famous story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” a worldwide cult consisting of “diabolist Eskimos,” South Asians, and Louisiana voodooists attempt to raise Cthulhu, an apocalyptic alien god living in stasis under the Pacific Ocean. Multiple Lovecraft stories deal with race mixing. Taken as a whole, his stories seem to postulate that anyone who isn’t white or upper-class is secretly colluding to end the world. These elements are undeniably offensive to modern readers, but this racial dimension, originally intended to enhance the horror, also doesn’t scare us like it used to. Cultural progress has reduced (though by no means eliminated) American anxieties about race, blunting these stories. Like the 1950s tales of nuclear mutants, they no longer speak to modern fears.

But not all Lovecraft stories are getting less frightening. While one Lovecraftian theme loses its edge, another—the tainted landscape—is more relevant than ever. Because here’s what our society is scared of: being poisoned.

I don’t mean in the Agatha Christie, this-tea-smells-like-almonds sense; I mean in the asbestos sense. We worry that our society is full of toxic materials that corrupt our bodies and our planet. Articles warn us away from pesticides in our food, baby products made overseas, and anything dyed with Yellow No. 5. Air purifiers fly off the shelves in China, and Americans show increasing concern about contaminated groundwater. We worry everything we touch, eat, and breathe is killing us—and Lovecraft is right there with us.

In Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” a meteor lands on a farm in rural Massachusetts, not far from the university town of Arkham. Puzzled by the meteor’s strange properties, the Gardiner family invites scientists to examine the object, which emits an unknown spectrum of ultraviolet color. Soon, local farmers realize something not quite right is happening at the Gardener place. The well water tastes foul. Fruits and vegetables grow in fantastic colors, and animals exhibit strange behavior. Before long, the vegetation turns gray and brittle, and the bodies of their livestock start to crumble and cave in. At night, the farm glows with an indescribable color. A neighbor warns the Gardeners not to drink from their contaminated well, but the family—already going mad from the noxious water—doesn’t listen. The Colour, a sort of vampiristic pollutant from the stars, eventually leaves Earth after eating its fill. The ashen blight around the farm, however, continues to spread about an inch a year. In the end, the narrator reveals that the state intends to flood the valley and use it as a reservoir for the nearby city of Arkham.

“I hope the water will always be very deep,” he concludes. “But even so, I shall never drink it.”

“The Colour Out of Space” is a story with staying power, malleable enough to adapt to changing fears. Though Lovecraft died in 1937, long before mass-pollution became an American concern, the story resonates surprisingly well with 21st-century horrors. Nuclear meltdowns like Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant leap to mind when one reads about the glowing trees and mutations at the Gardener farm. Likewise, the most disturbing part of the story—that the family is unable to leave, even when warned—recalls the so-called cancer villages in China, where whole towns live in a carcinogenic environment. “The Colour Out of Space” speaks to our mass-pollution fears—air quality, industrial pollutants, oil spills—the unwholesome elements we breathe or consume, but have little power to change. In “The Colour Out of Space,” as in life, once we admit there’s a problem it’s often far too late. By the end of the story, we can only hope the Colour won’t pollute the reservoir.

But if “The Colour Out of Space” is about macro-pollution, Lovecraft’s The Shunned House zeroes in on the micro-pollutants that make an individual property unlivable. In the story, an antiquarian takes interest in the sinister legends surrounding a home in Providence, Rhode Island. The house isn’t so much haunted as it’s unwholesome—for more than a century, anyone living there has weakened and died. It’s as if something, perhaps the unnatural basement mold shaped like a doubled-over body, saps their vitality. Eventually, the house develops a distasteful reputation and sits empty. It’s only after the narrator confronts a sickly vaporous entity, and fumigates the basement with chemicals, that the property becomes safe for habitation.

The Shunned House is one of Lovecraft’s most frightening tales. While other works contain more sweeping or original visions, there’s something disturbingly credible about a house that sickens tenants. What’s particularly chilling is that it kills gradually—so gradually the pattern’s only detectable with decades of hindsight.

Lovecraft deepens the dread with descriptions familiar to anyone who’s lived in a house past its prime. His treatment of the humid cellar, full of unexplained vapors and “white fungous growths,” cues immediate recognition and revulsion.

I’ve been in places like that cellar, and I bet you have, too. For me, it was a hotel room where the bathroom’s wooden walls were soft and stained black with mildew. My throat could feel spores in the air. Like the characters in The Shunned House, humans instinctively know and fear contaminated dwellings. Asbestos will drive us out of a building. Studies increasingly raise concerns about carbon dioxide building up in homes. Gas stoves feed a constant, low-level anxiety that a leak might suffocate us in our sleep. The fear is familiar, and thus terrifying.

The story even takes a brief detour into social commentary at one point, when the homeowners desert the house and begin renting it to poor families—a situation that really occurs in apartments with black mold.

Despite Lovecraft’s archaic writing style, these stories feel at home in today’s fiction, where eco-horror is the bleeding edge. You can see this environmental anxiety in the mutated landscapes of the Southern Reach Trilogy, the resource scarcity of Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and carcinogenic wastes of Mad Max: Fury Road. Climate change is sci-fi’s new nuclear war, the overriding force that creates monsters or turns us against one another.

Any horror writer can frighten readers, but only a master can frighten his original readers’ great-grandchildren. What other modern fears will make us reinterpret Lovecraft’s work? Will our social media-steeped society, where stolen identities are just a copied profile picture away, identify with Charles Dexter Ward? Perhaps climate change will strengthen At the Mountains of Madness, which ends with scientists begging their colleagues not to drill or melt Antarctic glaciers.

In the future, when the sea rises, will we think of Cthulhu emerging from the deep as we watch our cities drown?

quote:

It has come to my attention that the World Fantasy Convention has decided to replace the bust of H. P. Lovecraft that constitutes the World Fantasy Award with some other figure. Evidently this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a “vicious racist” like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award. (Let it pass that analogous accusations could be made about Bram Stoker and John W. Campbell, Jr., who also have awards named after them. These figures do not seem to elicit the outrage of the SJWs.) Accordingly, I have returned my two World Fantasy Awards to the co-chairman of the WFC board, David G. Hartwell.

Xotl posted:

You might as well throw out the classic canon of SF and fantasy if terrible opinions held by dead people are that worrysome. I wish people could just accept that temporal context means something and that these people had horrible opinions by modern standards--because they weren't modern people--and just leave it at that. No one loves Lovecraft because of his ethics or moral stances. His influence is undeniable, regardless of how much of a racist weirdo he was back when the Teapot Dome scandal was a hot-button current event.

ravenkult posted:

Tim Waggoner (doesn't write cosmic horror, but he does write horror) had a great status on Facebook the other day, questioning why we don't mind having a Poe award all that much, considering he was pro-slavery and married his 13-year old cousin. While it's largely pointless (plenty of terrible authors are admired today) it was hilarious watching nerds doing mental gymnastics to explain away pedophilia.

One lady's opinion was that racism is a big problem in the US, while ''children brides'' aren't, so why should we care about that kind of stuff?

ravenkult posted:

Tim Waggoner (doesn't write cosmic horror, but he does write horror) had a great status on Facebook the other day, questioning why we don't mind having a Poe award all that much, considering he was pro-slavery and married his 13-year old cousin. While it's largely pointless (plenty of terrible authors are admired today) it was hilarious watching nerds doing mental gymnastics to explain away pedophilia.

One lady's opinion was that racism is a big problem in the US, while ''children brides'' aren't, so why should we care about that kind of stuff?

Xotl posted:

You might as well throw out the classic canon of SF and fantasy if terrible opinions held by dead people are that worrysome. I wish people could just accept that temporal context means something and that these people had horrible opinions by modern standards--because they weren't modern people--and just leave it at that. No one loves Lovecraft because of his ethics or moral stances. His influence is undeniable, regardless of how much of a racist weirdo he was back when the Teapot Dome scandal was a hot-button current event.

ravenkult posted:

If you're not interpreting fish people as ''immigrants,'' racism doesn't show up in his stories too much either.

ravenkult posted:

Tim Waggoner (doesn't write cosmic horror, but he does write horror)

General Battuta posted:

It really does, though? Just to grab the last one I read/listened to recently, The Call of Cthulhu is pretty explicit in tying Cthulhu's cult to Eskimos and poo poo.

quote:

Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.

This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:

quote:

The vast majority of your books deal with either horror or the supernatural. What drew you toward those subjects?
It's built in. That's all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi. When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated. I can't explain it. My wife and kids drink coffee. But I don't. I like tea. My wife and kids won't touch a pizza with anchovies on it. But I like anchovies. The stuff I was drawn to was built in as part of my equipment.

Did you ever feel shame about that?
No. I thought it was great fun to scare people. I also knew it was socially acceptable because there were a lot of horror movies out there. And I cut my teeth on horror comics like The Crypt of Terror.

By writing horror novels, you entered one of the least respected genres of fiction.
Yeah. It's one of the genres that live across the tracks in the literary community, but what could I do? That's where I was drawn. I love D.H. Lawrence. And James Dickey's poetry, Émile Zola, Steinbeck . . . Fitzgerald, not so much. Hemingway, not at all. Hemingway sucks, basically. If people like that, terrific. But if I set out to write that way, what would've come out would've been hollow and lifeless because it wasn't me. And I have to say this: To a degree, I have elevated the horror genre.

Few would argue with that.
It's more respected now. I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature. I'm not trying to be conceited or anything. Raymond Chandler elevated the detective genre. People who have done wonderful work really blur the line.

A lot of critics were pretty brutal to you when you were starting out.
Early in my career, The Village Voice did a caricature of me that hurts even today when I think about it. It was a picture of me eating money. I had this big, bloated face. It was this assumption that if fiction was selling a lot of copies, it was bad. If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb. And that's elitist. I don't buy it.

But that attitude continues to this day. Literary critic Harold Bloom viciously ripped into you when you won the National Book Award about 10 years ago.
Bloom never pissed me off because there are critics out there, and he's one of them, who take their ignorance about popular culture as a badge of intellectual prowess. He might be able to say that Mark Twain is a great writer, but it's impossible for him to say that there's a direct line of descent from, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Jim Thompson because he doesn't read guys like Thompson. He just thinks, "I never read him, but I know he's terrible."

Michiko Kakutani, who writes reviews for The New York Times, is the same way. She'll review a book like David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, which is one of the best novels of the year. It's as good as Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, has the same kind of deep literary resonance. But because it has elements of fantasy and science fiction, Kakutani doesn't want to understand it. In that sense, Bloom and Kakutani and a number of gray eminences in literary criticism are like children who say, "I can't possibly eat this meal because the different kinds of food are touching on the plate!"

Film critics can look at a popular movie like Jaws and heap praise upon it, then in another section of the paper, the critics will bash you for The Stand.
By its very nature, film is supposed to be an accessible medium to everybody. Let's face it, you can take a loving illiterate to Jaws and he can understand what's going on. I don't know who the Harold Bloom of the film world is, but if you found someone like that and said to him, "Compare Jaws with 400 Blows by Francois Truffaut," he'd just laugh and say, "Well, Jaws is a piece of crappy, popular entertainment, but 400 Blows is cinema." It's the same elitism.

quote:

How about evil? Do you believe there is such a thing?
I believe in evil, but all my life I've gone back and forth about whether or not there's an outside evil, whether or not there's a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or whether it all comes from inside and that it's all part of genetics and environment. When you find somebody like, let's say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes went back and had sex with the dead bodies, I don't think when you look at his upbringing you can say, "Oh, that's because Mommy put a clothespin on his dick when he was four." That behavior was hard-wired. Evil is inside us. The older I get, the less I think there's some sort of outside devilish influence; it comes from people. And unless we're able to address that issue, sooner or later, we'll loving kill ourselves.

What do you mean?
I read a thing on Huffington Post about a month ago that stayed with me. It was very troubling. It was a pop-science thing, which is all I can understand. It said we've been listening to the stars for 50 years, looking for any signs of life, and there's been nothing but silence. When you see what's going on in the world today, and you have all this conflict, and our technological expertise has far outraced our ability to manage our own emotions – you see it right now with ISIS – what's the solution? The only solution we see with ISIS is to bomb the poo poo out of those motherfuckers so that they just can't roll over the world. And that's what's scary about that silence – maybe all intelligent races hit this level of violence and technological advances that they can't get past. And then they just puff out. You hit the wall and that's it.

TheWhiteNightmare posted:

See also: Mass Effect

Blindsight, by Peter Watts, has probably my favorite take on the Fermi paradox and I'd say it qualifies as cosmic horror.