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Monday, September 22, 2003 The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre H.P. Lovecraft Perhaps the best time of the year to read Lovecraftian tales is now, when the weather gets a bit chillier, the trees are turning colors, and the sky gets darker earlier and earlier. The best time to read them is in the middle of the night. Or maybe just before you go to bed so your dreams are filled with "Cyclopean" horrors. The best place would be in New England where all the stories take place. One can so easily imagine that not so far away, in a run-down farmhouse, lurks something strange and horrible. Or maybe it doesn't really matter where or when one reads them--because you start questioning your own sanity anyway. What was that flitting at the very edge of your vision? Did I hear someone walking behind me? I looked, and didn't see anyone. Robert Bloch who wrote the introduction to this collection recalled how some critics would call Lovecraft's writings "sick" and that anyone who read and liked his stories were also "sick". The critics are only in denial--despite the frequent, cloying prose, Lovecraft gets into that dark side of us, our fears and deviant desires. In The Picture in the House, a print in a medieval book tips a madman from only thinking about his perverse pleasures to actually acting it out. The Thing on the Doorstep is also about desire--this time an insatiable appetite for immortality. The majority of Lovecraft's characters lose their sanity, although a more cynical reader might say that if they reined in their curiosity for reading accursed books like the Necronomicon, they would have gone on living a blissfully ignorant but normal life. In fact, a reader with no sense of the fantastical at all might think that these were all sci-fi tales veiled by lurid descriptions to appeal to the superstitious masses. The most obvious is The Whisperer in the Darkness--maybe all these weird creatures from out of time and space are really like disobedient underlings in a Star Trek universe who are blatantly ignoring their version of the Prime Directive. The most famous story in the collection is The Call of Cthulhu which didn't strike me as significantly better or worse than the other stories but was indirectly responsible for introducing me to Lovecraft in the first place. A couple years ago, a friend of mine had tried (unsuccessfully) to draw me into the addictive world of role-playing, particularly the game Call of Cthulhu which was based on the Lovecraft cannon a.k.a. the Cthulhu Mythos. Rolling die and obsessing about character stats didn't interest me at all, but the stories themselves really struck a chord. I'm not much a fan for blood, gore, and ugly monsters, but the horror genre (especially perfected by Lovecraft) is an incredibly good vehicle for exploring those parts of humanity that we would rather ignore. Interested in reading some Lovecraft? The majority of his fiction is located online here. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 4:56 PM : ]
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