A Lovecraft-in
Since this is apparenlty the lunch of posting updates I've been meaning to post for a while...
Lovecraft!
As part of my great classic sci fi reading campaign, I finally read some H. P. Lovecraft. I mean, you can only see so much Cthulhu related merchandise and play Cthulhu related games without actually reading a few of the stories. I read "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Call of Cthulhu," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
"At the Mountains of Madness" - Not to put too fine a point on it, but "At the Mountains of Madness" suuuuuucked. It's written to be a combination of geological treatise and dire warning to future travelers. So it breaks down basically like this:
1/3 geological technobabble
1/3 architectural technobabble
1/3 infodump
Then some running and screaming at the end.
He clearly deliberately chose to write this in as dry a manner as possible, but jesus, why would you do that to the poor readers. He spends an awful lot of the thing telling us either that we must have already read about something that he's not going to tell us, or there's this thing that he's going to tell us--and he's going to tell us about it, did he mention--and any day now he's going to tell us.
I can see why it's an important novella for the Lovecraft mythos, because it basically lays out the entirety of his worldbuilding in one great, improbable narrative. I say improbable because our narrator spent a few hours wandering around a five-million-year-old city--continuously occupied for most of that time--with a couple of rolls of film and a sketchbook, and somehow, from the murals, was able to reconstruct a complete and intact history of the people. Now if he just wanted to handwave and say he knows this cause magic, fine, but the whole conceit of the story is that this is all very scientific. And I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous.
The closest thing in real archeological terms is something like the Temple of Karnak, which was continuously in use for thousands of years and is covered in inscriptions. Even if it were completely intact, and you had a whole year to study it, you'd never be able to get such a complete, linear narrative.
So I spent this whole infodump going, and you can tell from the murals that the shogoths immitated their whistling "over a wide range" how? Had I stopped reading Lovecraft here, I would have concluded that he was a terrible writer with no real redeeming qualities.
"Call of Cthulhu" - It's a little odd to read this story, since I've played the RPG based on it. So, yes, it goes exactly along the lines that I expect it to.
Lovecraft's prose is a touch purple, but he does a very good job of ratcheting up tension, and, at least in this case, using the frame of someone trying to relate the facts to accentuate the horror of the tale. It is a touch, though, horrifyingly racist. I mean, you've got sentences like, "men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type," or refer to people as "foreign mongrels." Or there's the whole part where the Cthulhu cult is all over the world--in all the parts of the world that Europeans of the time viewed as "primitive" and therefore lumped together. So there's that.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - This is really quite a good story, mixing horror with straight-up action, and managing to capture the slowly dawning realization of the main character that he is completely isolated in a small town and at the mercy of the locals. I mean, this is an idea that has been riffed on over and over in TV shows and movies.
Though this one doesn't call anyone primitive mongrels, the whole basis of the horror in the story is miscegenation. I mean, it's kind of saying that finding out you have mixed blood is like finding out your grandmother fucked a frog demon. So there's still that horrifying racism. But if you can get past that...
Lovecraft!
As part of my great classic sci fi reading campaign, I finally read some H. P. Lovecraft. I mean, you can only see so much Cthulhu related merchandise and play Cthulhu related games without actually reading a few of the stories. I read "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Call of Cthulhu," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."
"At the Mountains of Madness" - Not to put too fine a point on it, but "At the Mountains of Madness" suuuuuucked. It's written to be a combination of geological treatise and dire warning to future travelers. So it breaks down basically like this:
1/3 geological technobabble
1/3 architectural technobabble
1/3 infodump
Then some running and screaming at the end.
He clearly deliberately chose to write this in as dry a manner as possible, but jesus, why would you do that to the poor readers. He spends an awful lot of the thing telling us either that we must have already read about something that he's not going to tell us, or there's this thing that he's going to tell us--and he's going to tell us about it, did he mention--and any day now he's going to tell us.
I can see why it's an important novella for the Lovecraft mythos, because it basically lays out the entirety of his worldbuilding in one great, improbable narrative. I say improbable because our narrator spent a few hours wandering around a five-million-year-old city--continuously occupied for most of that time--with a couple of rolls of film and a sketchbook, and somehow, from the murals, was able to reconstruct a complete and intact history of the people. Now if he just wanted to handwave and say he knows this cause magic, fine, but the whole conceit of the story is that this is all very scientific. And I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous.
The closest thing in real archeological terms is something like the Temple of Karnak, which was continuously in use for thousands of years and is covered in inscriptions. Even if it were completely intact, and you had a whole year to study it, you'd never be able to get such a complete, linear narrative.
So I spent this whole infodump going, and you can tell from the murals that the shogoths immitated their whistling "over a wide range" how? Had I stopped reading Lovecraft here, I would have concluded that he was a terrible writer with no real redeeming qualities.
"Call of Cthulhu" - It's a little odd to read this story, since I've played the RPG based on it. So, yes, it goes exactly along the lines that I expect it to.
Lovecraft's prose is a touch purple, but he does a very good job of ratcheting up tension, and, at least in this case, using the frame of someone trying to relate the facts to accentuate the horror of the tale. It is a touch, though, horrifyingly racist. I mean, you've got sentences like, "men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type," or refer to people as "foreign mongrels." Or there's the whole part where the Cthulhu cult is all over the world--in all the parts of the world that Europeans of the time viewed as "primitive" and therefore lumped together. So there's that.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - This is really quite a good story, mixing horror with straight-up action, and managing to capture the slowly dawning realization of the main character that he is completely isolated in a small town and at the mercy of the locals. I mean, this is an idea that has been riffed on over and over in TV shows and movies.
Though this one doesn't call anyone primitive mongrels, the whole basis of the horror in the story is miscegenation. I mean, it's kind of saying that finding out you have mixed blood is like finding out your grandmother fucked a frog demon. So there's still that horrifying racism. But if you can get past that...