H.P. Lovecraft: Master of the Weird Tale (and REH fan)

[deuce]

'Tis almost Yuletide, and thus it is time for The Festival. Lovecraft eZine has links to an illustrated PDF and an excellent audio reading by Rupert Degas:


lovecraftzine.com/2016/12/12/happy-holidays-heres-an-illustrated-pdf-of-the-festival-by-h-p-lovecraft/


It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten...

[ChrisLAdams]

Dec 15, 2016 19:35:53 GMT -5 deuce said:

'Tis almost Yuletide, and thus it is time for The Festival. Lovecraft eZine has links to an illustrated PDF and an excellent audio reading by Rupert Degas:


lovecraftzine.com/2016/12/12/happy-holidays-heres-an-illustrated-pdf-of-the-festival-by-h-p-lovecraft/


It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten...

Deuce,

Great post.
The Festival is one of my favorites by Lovecraft.  I just finished reading it not long ago in a new annotated edition.
Being a fan of word craft, I was once again stunned by HPL's gripping description in this line:

"Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse."

That's just pure wicked in my book!

[Ningauble]

The collected correspondence of Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith is now up for pre-order at www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/collected-letters/dawnward-spire-lonely-hill-the-letters-of-h.-p.-lovecraft-and-clark-ashton-smith

[deuce]

Now about the “terrible and forbidden books” — I am forced to say that most of them are purely imaginary. There never was any Abdul Alhazred or Necronomicon, for I invented these names myself. Robert Bloch devised the idea of Ludvig Prinn and his De Vermis Mysteriis, while the Book of Eibon is an invention of Clark Ashton Smith’s. Robert E. Howard is responsible for Friedrich von Junzt and his Unaussprechlichen Kulten…. As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, and supernatural themes — in all truth they don’t amount to much. That is why it’s more fun to invent mythical works like the Necronomicon and Book of Eibon.




-- HPL in a letter to Willis Conover (1936)

[deuce]

Pulp scholar, Will Murray, from 1986:



The fact is that the first story Lovecraft wrote which, when it reached

print, made readers of Weird Tales sit up, take notice, and sense that here

was something different and new and original, was "The Call of Cthulhu".



It's all there in "Call": the cosmic lore, brooding preterhuman entities,

inextricable blending of ancient history and forward-thinking science fic-

tional concepts, the cults, everything.



"The Call of Cthulhu" was the primal Cthulhu Mythos story. It was in

that short novella that concepts which had long been percolating in Love-

craft's mind first coalesced and took gigantic shape. It's possible that

even Lovecraft himself didn't realize that he was making a quantum leap for-

ward in the field of horror fiction in that one lean story.



The next story Lovecraft published was "The Colour out of Space". Many

discount this as a Mythos story, despite its inescapably cosmic theme. Per-

haps if the sentient gaseous being from the fallen Arkham meteor had been

given a Cthulhuvian name — say Phart — and had Lovecraft repeated that name

in a later story, then there would have been no question in any minds but

that "Colour" was a venture into the Mythos. But as it happened, Love-

craft was dealing with an unnamed, unspeaking entity, without any of the

supporting Necronomiconesque elements. So it's easy to dismiss.



But as I pointed out in my article, "Sources for 'The Colour out of

Space'" ( Crypt of Cthulhu #28, Yuletide 1984), there was a similar gaseous

intelligence, S'gnac, in two earlier Lovecraft stories, "Celephai's" and

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. This could easily, even probably, be

the same entity — or a related one — thus bringing "Colour" at least tenta-

tively into the Mythos for those who feel thematic evidence must be some-

thing one can spell, and not something one feels.

[deuce]

Cool post on the connections between HPL and Clifford D. Simak:


www.michaelmayadventureblog.com/2016/08/the-call-from-beyond-hp-lovecraft-and.html

[deuce]

A good article on how HPL has hijacked pop culture from the Hemingways and Fitzgeralds:


www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.02.97/cover/horror1-9701.html


There's also a big shoutout to REH.

[deuce]

A cool look at the theme of "devolution" in HPL's fiction:


lovecraftzine.com/2015/04/16/darwin-king-or-lovecraft-will-homo-sapiens-devolve-into-homo-canibalis/

[deuce]

A possible source for the name "R'lyeh":

tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2014/04/whence-rlyeh-part-two.html

[deuce]

The Virgil Finlay cover for Arkham House's The Outsider and Others.

[deuce]

Some pretty awesome datamining from this "Correlation of Lovecraftian Contents on the Web":



library.ucmo.edu/faculty/walker/limbonaut_10.html

[deuce]

Lovecraft's picks for the best in British and Irish horror (with links):



www.pornokitsch.com/2015/04/lovecraft-british-irish-horror-links.html

[deuce]

Feb 15, 2017 17:47:57 GMT -5 deuce said:

The Virgil Finlay cover for Arkham House's The Outsider and Others.

Andre Norton was wildly popular for decades. She treasured her copy of The Outsider. Who knew she was a Lovecraft fan?

"The biggest book shop in Cleveland also had a sales table, where they placed books that hadn't sold during the Christmas season. One book which I recognized right away was The Outsider and Others by H. P. Lovecraft, the first Arkham House book. It was priced at $1.50. I bought it, and still have it today."

The entire interview is here:

www.tangentonline.com/articles-columnsmenu-284/379-to-classic-days-of-wonder-a-conversation-with-andre-norton

[deuce]

Two good articles on Lovecraft and Irem:


unchartedruins.blogspot.com/2012/08/irem-of-thousand-columns.html


www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/exploring-iram-of-the-pillars-influence-on-lovecrafts-nameless-city

[deuce]

Mythos scholar, Chris Perridas, looks at HPL and James Blish here:


chrisperridas.blogspot.com/2011/02/james-blish-1937-eldritch-goo.html


Basically, Blish was a sci-fi fanboy who turned on HPL and the rest of the Circle in order to move up in SF fandom. Very sad.

Blish is mostly remembered now for novelizing Star Trek scripts. Who won that battle, Blishy Boy?