Lovecraft!

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Lately I've been getting into Lovecraft, and the Cthulhu Mythos... argh calling it either bothers me because it's not just Lovecraft doing writing and Cthulhu really isn't THAT important to the mythos as a whole? But anyway, is there anyone else interested in that stuff?

It was August Derleth who coined the term "Cthulu Mythos," because he was attempting to organize it all into an overarching mythology, like Tolkien.

Lovecraft himself, who was much more loose and improvisatory about it, and encouraged other writers to take up the inspiration and just run with it, referred to the practice as "Yog-Sothothery."


Be sure you watch the documentary Lovecraft Bio-film "Fear of the Unknown."


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ1n8_yhhuU[/youtube]

It's still a horrible name.

I practice Yog-Sothothery myself... the specific Yog-Sothothery I'm working on is a high school au (I am so, so sorry).

Definitely gonna look at that, thanks!

What's your favorite of the stories?

I enjoy Lovecraft and like it when Lovecraft elements show up in other media.

Charles Stross and Larry Correia have written novels extensively using the Lovecraft elements without actually being wholly Lovecraft.

Also there is the RPG, Call of Cthulhu. My gaming group plays it every so often. Last game we played, I was an Ottoman Smuggler. I was the only one in my group who learned magic. Of course I went separate from the party. Got my body switched with someone else. Got it switched back. Ended up on a ghost train. Witnessed what the rest of the group jokingly refers to as poop-o-mancy(The poop was the only thing the surviving magician on the ghost train could use to draw magic symbols. It was also the poop after eating the previous occupants of the train before it went ghost. He ran out of blood and turned to poop as an alternative.). Got turned into a mindless ghoul. Almost floated off into null-space. Then turned back into normal human. Rescued, won a magic duel, passed out from it. Ghost train entered the real world. Crashed. I was rescued. Almost ran over by second train. Needless to say my chars sanity was about half of what it was when I had started.

I also like Robert E. Howard's stories. I found Kull and Solomon Kane better than Conan. Both of those touched on what would be Lovecraft elements. He also had a number of stand-alone stories that are quite good. From my understanding Howard and Lovecraft were friends and wrote to each other.

What does AU mean?

I completed a novel last year that borrows rather heavily from Lovecraftian imagery, regarding icthyan, amphibian and reptilian slitherers and human hybrids, as well as the notion of an evil source of vast and ancient origin, but no specific mention of any of Lovecraft's ancient deities or the spirits of the Necronomicon, though I'm working on a different story now involving some of the same baddies that probably will.



Hard to pick a favorite, but Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour Out of Space are two that have always remained visually vivid in my memory.

As my Dad had been a Lovecraft fan, he had gotten me hooked early on by recounting stories of the Whatelys, the Deep Ones, and the Great Old Ones. I had actually started reading Lovecraft's fiction in high school, and have been hooked since. Since learning that Lovecraft probably had had undiagnosed Asperger's has only helped me connect with him, and his fellow Weird Tales author, and probable Aspie, Robert E. Howard, all the more.
As far as which of Lovecraft's stories are my favorite, I would say - -
Nyarlathotep
The Dunwich Horror
The Dreams In The Witch House
The Hound
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Just to name a few.

Is this novel available to read?

I have only read The Color Out Of Space and The Call of Cthulhu and enjoyed both not only for their vivid detail, but also for how well-written they are.

If an opportunity comes along, I will try to read At The Mountains Of Madness, and like many, I do have high hopes that Guillermo Del Toro will eventually get his adaptation green-lit.

I'm going to be honest, I haven't really read anything from the Cthulhu mythos, but I think Cthulhu himself is awesome. I mean, he's this gigantic dragon-octopus thing who eats people and is more evil than Satan. Of course, that just goes to show how ignorant I am about the whole mythology, as I know that there's more to it than that, I'm just not really sure what.

Cthulhu is also quite literally a GOD, trapped in a death-like sleep in his undersea city of R'Lyeh, where he receives the worship of his insane, human sacrificing cultists in the dark places all over the globe, and from where he sends out nightmare images in dreams perceived by artists and writers everywhere. He awaits when the stars are right, so his worshipers can release him from his sleep to cause madness and destruction throughout the earth, as he and his fellow Great Old Ones make use of the planet for whatever cosmic nightmare they have dreamed up.

Sounds like fun!

I love it! I kept on reading and it taught me better English ^_^ (he used many words that aren't used -as much- anymore, and using Translate I learned quite a bit)

Intriguing and fascinating read.

Like a lot of Aspies, Lovecraft had a million dollar vocabulary.

Well, I'm pretty certain it's fun for Cthulhu and the other pre-ecludian gods.

I'm a big fan of Lovecraft and to a lesser extent other old weird fiction writers like Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith. I don't think HPL would win any awards for his prose style but he had a truly unique imagination (much copied since of course). I love the fact that you really don't know what will be on the next page - very few writers can manage that (Jack Vance being another IMHO).

What examples of "Lovecraftian" atmosphere have you come across in other media? For me the first "Alien" movie, the "Demon's Souls" and "Dark Souls" games and the first half of the movie "The Keep" spring to my mind (it goes downhill towards the end).