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anilEhilated posted:It... depends. Horror in literature doesn't work very well for "scaring", good horror is more about pressure and inevitable doom. A couple of Lovecraft stories do this (in my opinion, obviously) very well - Color Out Of Space comes into mind - but a lot of it depends on the mood and setting; you read it alone in an empty dark attic or something, a lot of HPL stories is perfectly serviceable as scares, at least until the absurdity starts kicking in. Lovecraft's stuff is generally called cosmic horror for a reason. A lot of his stories have a protagonist that is in no immediate and apparent danger at any point. One of the major themes throughout his work is that the universe is vast and uncaring for man, and he carries through with this in many stories with monsters that aren't necessarily antagonistic towards humans but wish to be left alone or are willing to cause harm incidentally. He creates horror, but rather than being scary it's the horror of something weirdly wrong.
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Jan 13, 2015 05:57
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Croisquessein posted:Was Lovecraft misogynistic? This isn't a particularly useful question because "misogynist" isn't particularly well or consistently defined. You have to decouple both the customs of the time (for example, I wouldn't call a 50's director anti-lgbt because they didn't violate the Hayes Code) and what the creator was using the characters for. Lovecraft tended to write about things that disgusted or frightened him so I'm not sure that a lack of female representation in his works is evidence that he had any hatred of women. EDIT: To make a point, he was a racist by almost any definition and he tended to include racial commentary where it wasn't even particularly relevant.
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Jan 17, 2015 17:54
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Darth Walrus posted:You are aware that there are people who find racism in their sci-fi horror unpleasant and distracting, right? Not everyone can go 'oh, that silly Lovecraft, look at him call black people subhuman like it ain't no thing'. It's legit to criticise an author for their literary flaws or say your enjoyment was diminished because of those literary flaws, and Lovecraft's racism, along with his sometimes torturously florid prose, is one of his biggest and most criticised flaws as a writer. It's like doing a Dan Brown thread where you're not allowed to bring up his constant, hilarious research errors. The problem is that nobody's asking interesting questions. It's all "is Lovecraft racist?" and it's a bit like asking "it seems like these southern landowners in the 1850's were practicing slavery?" There are a lot of interesting things to talk about with Lovecraft's racism like how you teach it, how you adapt his works for a modern audience, that sort of thing. "Does this go in the racism/misogyny/whatever bucket?" is rarely interesting, it honestly seems like the question tends to be used as a shibboleth rather than being a real point of discussion.
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Jan 18, 2015 19:52
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Darth Walrus posted:It is certainly interesting, at least, to look at how you handle Lovecraft's unique and enthralling cosmic-horror 'we are alone and insignificant in a universe filled with ghastly, hungry monsters' atmosphere without bringing along the racial baggage of those ghastly, hungry monsters mostly being stand-ins for black people (and occasionally the Chinese). Certainly, the 'sinister alien heritage stuff' gets really uncomfortable when you remember what it was originally a metaphor for. I thought The Colour Out of Space actually did a half-decent job of that, mind you - it helped that the alien was just so alien that it wasn't an obvious stand-in for Creepy Howie's particular phobias, and was treated with a certain solemn respect rather than just gut-churning terror. Right, but one of the unique things about Lovecraft is that his fears and insecurities allowed him to tap into some common, very human insecurities. Take The Shadow Over Innsmouth. If you follow Lovecraft at all it's very obvious that the story can be summarized as "miscegenation is bad mmk" but it's possible to reject the racist aspects and still enjoy the story as a great piece of atmospheric horror that flirts with the idea of hidden monsters living among us. Modern audiences won't tend to make the leap between fish people and black people, which removes a lot of the aspects of the stories that have a possibility of creating real problems.
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Jan 18, 2015 21:33
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