Brown Sauce

 

I was going to record a podcast about this, but when I first started writing it, my throat was suffering, was I, form a mysterious illness that I briefly thought may have been mono, but it didn't last nearly long enough to be that. I can't emphasize how pissed off I would've been to have mono, the Janice Soprano disease. Also, I realized I kind of don't want to do any sort of podcast again without someone to bounce riffs off of.

As fate would have it, I've been going through different mechanical keyboards. For those unaware (most of you, I'm guessing), I somewhat recently (August-ish?) acquired a tiny computer with integrated graphics and have been living the Linux lifestyle ever since. I figured it was time to embrace being a pervert for the computer in a way that isn't doesn't embrace fascism, steals from artists, or holds up the entirety of the economy of the racist, collapsing empire of America. In that sense, I decided it was time to go full annoying asshole and get a weird keyboard and a trackball mouse. If you're wondering, I'm using a Keychron Q9 keyboard that I'm awaiting new caps for. I'm sorry to disappoint everyone and say I'm not using the Inland 47 ortholinear keyboard from Micro Center which I'm planning on either returning or buying more keycaps with different punctuation on it.

Of course, comparing keyboards wasn't the only thing I've been getting up to since getting sick with The Malaise®. I've been reading a big collection of all of Lovecraft's fiction as published by Barnes & Noble since September and I finally got a chance to finish it all. Okay, maybe that' a little disingenuous. I did skip past a few things, mostly things that were originally written in letters or were pilfered from his study after his prolonged and painful death. I assume it was painful.

And of course, being the sensitive, thoughtful genius that I am, I have a lot of thoughts about The Weird Fiction Guy. The book is collected in chronological order and gives a decent amount of insight into how he developed as a creative and how his approach to horror changed. Sure, I suppose I could just consult the overwhelming amount of nonfiction essays and letters that he wrote through his lifetime that say, in concrete terms, what he thinks about fiction, but I find most writers reveal their true thoughts and feeling, intentionally or no, through their fiction works. My true thoughts are all hidden in my novel that's still available for free on itch.io. This non-fiction crap is a smokescreen for my real thoughts and opinions which you can only find in the PDF of my book on itch.io (feel free to pay what you think it's worth, perhaps after reading it and sharing it with your friends and family and nominating it for several rewards, cash prizes, and publishing contracts).

There's no doubt that Lovecraft was brilliant. He didn't invent weird fiction, but his influence stretches all over the whole of horror. It's hard to find a modern horror movie with a supernatural element doesn't owe something to Ol' Howie whether they know it or not. And if you're lucky, they didn't just take the racism.

Look, there's no getting past this: Lovecraft was a racist. Like, even for the time. That's right, he's canceled, sis. And that's tea. And if it was just his overtly racist stuff like "The Street" it would be one thing, but it pops up all over the place. "Herbert West—ReAnimator" is a fun, campy story that is dragged down by a solid paragraph about about black people that's so racist, you would only be able to find it on quote-tweets of Serena Williams on twitter. There is a certain point in his writing where the surface racism fades away, but there's an (accurate) argument to be made that all of his work is predicated on a form of racism and xenophobia which takes many, many forms. Sure, there are no real-world ethnic minorities in "The Shadow over Innsmouth," but you don't have to look at it too deeply to see any potentially anti-miscegenation reading. This might seem unfair, but when you see the stuff he wrote, it's hard to take the benefit of the doubt with this stuff. Plus, he's dead, he's not gonna care. S.T. Joshi, might, but that's a different story entirely.

And yeah, I've heard about his life story. He married a Jewish woman, cooled it a bit with the racism, and became a socialist. This would all be a face-turn in a normal biography, but after all this Lovecraft was supposedly a big fan of Hitler for a while and his marriage fizzled out. I don't know what Lovecraft's relationship was like, but I can infer, especially from "The Thing on the Doorstep" (we'll get there) that it he didn't look on it favorably, at least in retrospect. My point is: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a land of contrasts.

Of course, you might all know this through ambient knowledge of being alive and connected to the internet in some capacity. It's hard to not know anything about Lovecraft, especially if you're someone who enjoys horror movies, reading, or the rare breed that enjoys both. That's supposed to be kind of a joke, but in a larger sense it very much isn't. I'm suddenly thinking of that tweet where someone said they were excited for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey movie, inferring that they only knew what The Odyssey was because they got an AI summary from a google search.

If you're like me (I'm so sorry), your first exposure to Lovecraft wasn't going around to the library and finding a weird paperback, but through the incessant invocation of the Cthulu mythos by the most insufferable nerds online. How many Cthulu illustrations have you seen in the style of Bill Watterson? More than you want, I can almost guarantee that. What if there was a Cthulu plush toy? What if he saved Christmas? LOL, LMAO, and dare I say ROFLCOPTER. And I'm sure you've encountered snickering nerds saying you should google Lovecraft's cat's name in-between Monty Python quotes.

Honestly, that may be the thing that kept from reading Lovecraft for so long. I didn't really read much in general during my formative years aside from Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog series until I was in fifth grade before pivoting various manga series (and the occasional poorly-translated .hack// light novel (no, it wasn't a fan translation, Tokyopop just has never been anything but sloppy in every single aspect of its existence)) from sixth grade to senior year. Besides, what's there to know?. Racism, tentacles, and things that drive you mad when you look at them: I pretty much get it.

It wasn't until this year (or possibly late last year) that I read any of his work. I picked up an old copy of The Doom That Came to Sarnath and Other Stories at a bookstore in Milwaukee. The odd thing about this collection is that it mostly collects the Dream Cycle, not the Cthulu Mythos. I didn't know Lovecraft did any other big series aside from the Cthulu mythos, and I found it fascinating.

It wasn't the "a guy finds a book and goes insane" that I was expecting, but instead romantic journeys through fantastical lands with the occasional scary monster or super creep hiding around the corners. Maybe there was a whole lot more to this fellow than racism and tentacles! Which of course lead me to the big blue (purple) tome that sits next to me as I write this. And it changed my ideas on Lovecraft as a writer entirely.

First off, there are tentacles, but the word not as often as you think. At least not as often as the word "Cyclopean." Jesus Christ, you WASPy weirdo, find a new word. I was also lead to believe that many of the stories revolved a protagonist who would start his story in an asylum after being driven mad by the object or creature that, on sight, drove him completely insane. And frankly, that's more the exception than the rule. It's not that there aren't characters who are insane/driven insane by forbidden knowledge or whatever, but they're often not the ones narrating the story. There are a good amount of times a narrator will allude to the idea that he is on the cusp of being driven mad and that he questions what he might've seen, but outright "I saw an indescribable thing and now I'm in the asylum for the rest of my life," isn't quite as common as I thought it would be.

And as far as racism goes, I would say that Lovecraft seems more like he hates and fears everybody. The same could be said of all racists, that they truly just hate the human race more than the people who call them misanthropists ever could, but focus it in one specific group for the sake of convenience. Lovecraft, the weird shut-in, seems to distrust anything or anybody that he doesn't already know, and part of what accounts for so much of the terror in the book (and in plenty of horror stories) is the idea that something is unknowable in the first place.

Part of the horror of the unknown is not just the fact that there are other people out there who do know about these things. They're from different countries or different cultures (infamously, the Necronomicon is written by a man with the epithet "The Mad Arab"), but they know the about these things that white people have never encountered before, whether they're the Arabs or the Appalachian, they know things that others don't.

He's very effective at leveraging this guiding principle of folk horror. Sure, there's the folk horror that's mostly about the folks themselves, but the more engaging (in my eyes, anyway) is folk horror that's less about them, but what they know. In Noroi: The Curse, there's an ancient ritual that, for centuries, has kept kagutaba at bay, but all the knowledge of what they needed to do and how it worked is lost, and perhaps the second part was never really known in the first place. To quote my favorite line in Wolfen: "Don't even thinking about believing this shit. It's the twentieth century." I'm not saying Lovecraft invented folk horror, that's idiotic, but I think it's an under-discussed aspect of his work.

The only people Lovecraft seems to actually like are the academics. Most of Lovecraft's protagonists are academics or at least highly educated men. Almost all of his protagonists are highly-educated men, implying they're the only ones with the mental fortitude to pursue these forbidden things or behold forbidden rights without outright losing their minds (and sometimes they do anyway).

When it comes to the fear of the unknown, one of the things that I rarely seen brought up in regards to Lovecraft is the fear of time that shows up persistently. It's not unusual for reactionaries to fear for the future of their civilization and most of Lovecraft's stories, especially some of the more haunting ones imply there are some horrifying things that will come to destroy civilization after the horrors of the story are established and mostly finished with. On top of that is a fear of what has been. The horrible secrets of the past making a raging comeback. A good amount of Lovecraft's work deals with those trying to find the secrets of the past and being consumed by them, but perhaps the best example is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I'm not saying that this fear of the past is entirely progressive, it's just as reactionary, but not rarely as concretely expressed. It's less that civilization will regress, but more that other cultures that we've conquered and put squarely into the history books will come roaring back to take their rightful place of dominance in the world.

Hell, even in the more metaphysical stories with quantum mechanical elements where time is expressly said to be a series of points all happening at once only to be perceived linearly by our human sensibilities, there';s a large undercurrent of menace under the idea. There's nothing more terrifying, to Lovecraft, than the idea that for as much as we know about the modern world, there is still so much that will likely be unknowable forever.

I could go on about this, but the easiest way to express my thoughts are through examining each individual works with my different thoughts on each one. So, without further ado:

The Beast in the Cave

The first Lovecraft story in this collection feels amateur, and to be fair this before Lovecraft became a known quantity. There is a weird sort of mythologizing when it comes to his career that he was virtually unknown in his lifetime, but that's not really accurate, and I think most of that mythologizing comes form the wholesale ransacking of this personal affairs after his death, discovering unpublished and unfinished stories along with the amount of correspondence that has been published after his death. It's important to remember that he was a was a working pulp horror writer; he was paid for his work during his lifetime. Not paid enough, obviously, but he was a known quantity at a certain point in his life, with a distinct circle of fans and peers that knew his work well. But this story is definitively before his career began and whatever sort of reputation he would have as a writer would solidify.

Anyway, a guy goes caving with a group and wanders off, soon to be pursued by some thing. After shooting it in the dark, he finds his way to a guide and they go back to examine the ape-like creature, only to find IT WAS A MAN. The last line is literally in all caps like a creepypasta written by a fifteen year-old would be today. It hints at a civilization of Cave Humans who evolved in the same way other creatures who don't live in the light would.

Devolution is a recurring theme in Lovecraft's work. this is likely what leads to so much of his fears of miscegenation. I'm not sure how much Lovecraft was familiar with the backwards and disproven race science of the 1800s (that upsettingly seems to be gaining more a foothold with American conservatives today), but I'm guessing he had read a thing or two that painted his perception for a longtime.

The Alchemist

What if a magical asshole lived forever to ruin your life. HP had a real "let's just copy Poe" phase of his writing career to mixed results. Once again, the evils of the past come back to haunt our protagonist until he confronts it and vanquishes that evil forever. The sins of the father are the cause of our protagonist's woe. Mostly, I just kind of find it funny.

The Tomb

I feel like this is the first real case of a "Lovecraft protagonist." Antiquarians seem to hold a special place in Lovecraft's heart, often being the center of different stories for better or worse, and often ending up being consumed by their obsession the way this character is. There's a sympathy with the protagonist despite his weird determination to seemingly alienate everyone in his life and spend all of his time in a tomb communing with the spirits of his ancestors and learning their secrets. A living man who can't help but want to escape into the past and take part in the extravagance within.

From what I understand of Lovecraft's life, he was a sheltered, sickly child that was kept at home for most of his formative years, staying away from people. I'm not psychographer, but I would bet that this sheltered upbringing is why so many of his earlier stories are about escaping from the current reality, whether going into the past or into the world of dreams (which is, let's be real, what most of the Dream Cycle stuff is about). I can certainly relate to that, I think most people can. It's honestly kind of surprising to me how often these stories are ignored in Lovecraft's canon, but there are other, more appealing fantasies in [derisively] Young Adult fantasy series, and it's not quite as unique as all the weird madness-inducing monsters.

Dagon

The first real story in the Cthulu mythos (before the Big Green Bitch himself even showed up), with a mysterious sunken Cyclopean (sorry, but this is Lovecraft and I'm not going to use that word nearly as often as he does) statue and a narrator witnessing a gigantic monster that, while he escapes from it, haunts him until his untimely suicide. It's teeing up what would be Lovecraft's calling cards: mysterious pre-human civilization, a horrible terror that drives the protagonist crazy, and an ending that hints that there is something terrible on this very earth that's biding its time waiting to come up and retake the world.

That last part is what I mean when I say he has a deep fear of both the future and the past. It's not just that The Deep Ones are going to come up and take over humankind eventually, but the fact that they've been around forever and taking us back to before we were the dominant species. Again, I would say that a fear of people trying to revive the past is somewhat common, just in different ways. I'm afraid that the ruling class will try and take all of our rights back to the fifties, whereas they're afraid that the great kingdoms of Africa will rise again (which, to be clear, I am very much in favor of).

A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnsons

This is one of those weird "comedy" pieces that are peppered throughout Lovecraft's writing career and not a particularly interesting one. It reads as a parody of the pompous upper-crust people who like to brag about their connections, I guess? I don't remember it too well, why would I? It seems mostly like it was made to make Lovecraft and his fellow academics laugh about the pseudo-intellectuals who think they're upbringing and connections make them smart or interesting. IDK, it's pretty boring.

Polaris

A proto-Dream Cycle story about a man who is haunted by dreams of living in a city under siege and his wish to stay asleep so that he may defend it, only to be awoken every morning and brought away from the beloved city that he is helpless to save. Yet another story of the wish to escape reality, but this one has the distinct sense that Lovecraft had a wish to have more of a real purpose or be able to contribute to the world in a way that he felt like he couldn't. Again, something that most people wish they had. Part of what's appealing to so many YA fantasy novels is the idea that, not only can you escape to a dreamworld, but that you belonged there the entire time and your purpose in the world has already been clearly defined, usually as that of a hero. This doesn't quite go that far with the concept, but the idea is similar and much sadder to read here.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Whom amongst us wouldn't want to be a godlike entity burning our path through the universe on a quest for vengeance? I really like this story, even though the reliance on "backwards hillpeople" rubs me the wrong way. There's so much insistence that the man who's housing the cosmic entity is far too simple to have any understanding of his actual situation.

The doctor gets the chance to glimpse the dreamworld, to, at one point, become the powerful deity that he sees through the eyes of his nearly-comatose patient and sees a fantastic piece of the masquerade and it's one of the few times that Lovecraft doesn't portray something like that as incredibly terrifying. Again, I think the man was pretty scared of anything he was unfamiliar with, but was much more willing to indulge in fantasy in a much more positive light.

Memory

I don't know, it's fine. I'm pretty unfamiliar with Lovecraft's more poetic tendencies, but this prose-poem doesn't thrill me. Other than tapping into Lovecraft's overarching tendency to talk about the end of the human race, there's not much to say. This is the first of his pieces that I've seen where the human beings have definitively been wiped instead of just hinting that it will happen in the future, which is something I guess.

Old Bugs: An Extemporaneous Sob Story by Marcus Lollius, Proconsul of Gauls

Embarrassing. Lovecraft was a straight-edge dork with zero chill, literally going out of his way to write a story about some guy ruining his life with alcohol because someone he knew said he wanted to know what it was like before prohibition went into effect. Really feels like this wasn't supposed to see the light of day, but the posthumous plundering of Lovecraft's work ends up with this stuff in print when it maybe shouldn't have been.

I'm of two minds about this sort of thing. One hand, without stealing people's work when they die, we wouldn't have almost any Kafka. On the other hand: this.

The Transition of Juan Romero

To reuse a bad joke: this story, disappointingly, has nothing to do with being trans or Doom II in Spain Only. It's about working in the mines in Arizona and, of course, they dig too deep. They always dig too deep. Something in the endless chasm is calling out to the people above and Juan Romero is uniquely susceptible, because… he's Mexican, I guess? He wanders out into the middle of the night and joins with whatever's down there and… well, that's kind of it. I don't really remember what happens, if I'm being completely honest, it wasn't all that good. This was published posthumously, so I'm guessing it may not have been as polished as it could be. When it comes to the continental United States, I feel like Lovecraft is kind of lost when he's not setting a story in New England. The American Southwest has a distinct flavor of beans, pork, rice, and other spices that simply never made it to Rhode Island. I assume.

The White Ship

Another Dream Cycle story about reaching paradise, sailing right past it and never being able to go back. I don't remember this one too well. Maybe there's a fable about human instinct to keep searching for something better even when in an ideal situation or some shit like that. IDK, after "Old Bugs" I can imagine Lovecraft being prone to lecturing people about how to live their lives despite never really living his own for a very long time.

The Street

Unforgivable. Look, when I heard about Lovecraft being racist, I thought it was mostly in the way he employed metaphor in his stories as opposed to just open bigotry. There's a lot to be gained from reading Lovecraft, but if you didn't want to interact with his work due to the racism, I think that's completely valid, and this story is uniquely indefensible.

If you don't know, this is less of a story and more of a racist screed against any people who lived on a fictional street aside from Anglo-Saxons. It's truly despicable, and while it seems like Lovecraft wouldn't write something like this in later years, it's not like he disowned it later in life. It is a story I'm surprised to see collected anywhere, but I guess if you wanted to say you have all of Lovecraft's fiction in one book, than you really do have to have all of the fiction. Still not a great call, B+N.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

Weirdly, this could be seen as an analogy warning against colonialism, but given who it's written by, it seems unlikely. I think this is one of the first "official" Dream Cycle stories, but all the other geography wouldn't really be established until later. I like the idea of it, a grand city filled with people who killed everyone in the neighboring city for being gross only to be struck down by that city's god in revenge a thousand years later. If there's any sort of lesson to be gleamed it's perhaps to remember the atrocities that built your cities lest the people you wiped out get their revenge? Very confusing. Like I said, the ghosts of the conquered getting their revenge seems like it's more anti-colonialist, but I think this is his pre-wife period.

The Statement of Randolph Carter

This introduces Lovecraft's main recurring protagonist Randy Carter, though to say that this story is actually "about" him would be a mistake. It does establish him as an adventurous person trying to probe the depths of the unknown, even when he's just sort hanging around the unknown waiting for the depths to be probed on his behalf. This is also long before Randolph Carter wore out his welcome. There's a reason that I refer to him as Lovecraft's John Cena, but specifically John Cena before he became a full-time actor. I'm sorry if you understand that analogy. I wish I didn't either, but here we are. I think Lovecraft gets away with the unseen monstrosity this time considering the only horror is heard over a telephone wire and not seen directly by ol' Randy Cena.

The Terrible Old Man

A pretty typical haunted house story that you've definitely seen elsewhere. There's an unnaturally old man that clearly has a bunch of riches and rumors swirling about the dark magic he can inflict on people that cross him. No one would dare try to sneak into his house and rob him, possibly killing him in the process, except some of those untrustworthy foreigners. Sorry, I'm trying to convey what Lovecraft might've been trying to say with his story here. It's not as nakedly xenophobic as it could be, but there's certainly some of it in the naming convention of the conspirators against the old man. It's very weird that the Terrible Old Man makes another, much more benign appearance in a later Lovecraft work.

The Tree

Lovecraft is going full Poe mode here and I don't love it. Two sculptors in ancient Rome are the best there ever were and are also great friends, though one secretly hates the other and never says it out loud. I'm perhaps reading into this a little too closely. Anyway, the guy who hates the other one dies of The Sickness but uses ancient rituals to make sure his ghost grows into a tree specifically so that it can fall on the other sculptor's house and send him straight to hell… Y'know, I think, anyway. A real run-of-the-mill gothic horror story for better or worse. Lovecraft still quite hasn't hit his stride yet, but there's still flashes of brilliance in most of hist stories. Not this one..

The Cats of Ulthar

A lot of people think that Lovecraft was gay, but I know for a fact that he was a fiend for pussy. You know the name of that one cat of his? Of course you do, you've met nerds.

On the subject of gay Lovecraft, I can't really say one way or the other. I also don't care that much, but I'll at least try and figure it out for my horrible readers. I know his marriage didn't last long and he doesn't feature many women in his work, especially not in sexual relationships. There's some talk of horrible mating between monsters and humans, but there's no eroticism in the process. If I were to really take a stab at it, I would say that Lovecraft might've been asexual, but they didn't really know what that was yet. All I know is that if you really wanted to piss people off, you can post a FaceApp version of Lovecraft as a woman with a big smile with the text "transitioning would've saved her." And then you can yassify the photo, just for fun, y'know? People don't yassify photos as much as they used to, but it's still always funny to me.

Anyway, the story, right? It takes place in one of those dream lands where the old evil people of the village trap and eat all the cats and then eat one that belongs to a traveler and gets cursed to have all the cats in Ulthar eat them. The hidden meaning behind the story? Lovecraft loved kitty cats. Seriously, it's hard for me to read too much further into it.

The Temple

This is where Lovecraft starts really feeling himself, I think. It doesn't make a ton of sense, but there's evil Cyclopean ruins under the sea, a totem that brings madness, and a lot of mysterious deaths where it's unclear whether or not people are killing themselves or being killed by some other malevolent beings. I love the setting here: a submarine is a perfect place for people to be trapped, go insane, and be stalked by some unseen horror. Y'know, it's a lot like Alien or Dracula Boat (I don't know the name of that movie).

A funny little thing is about the main character who is constantly talking about how amazingly German he is and attributes his Germaness to keeping him sane. I'm pretty sure Lovecraft is making a joke here. This is may be the nicest way he's ever poked fun at a foreigner, but since it's not someone theoretically moving into his neighborhood, he may have felt a little more lenient.

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family

Another one of those stories about someone discovering his bloodline is "unclean" and killing himself. Yeah, it's pretty much a story against miscegenation. Again. This is a premise that I feel would play very differently today, as I know a fair amount of people OnLine® who would be psyched to be an Ape fursona. They would react to the reveal of the mummy and the realization with "hell yeah, that's badass" instead of running away and lighting themselves on fire like a little bitch.

Celephaïs

Another Dream Cycle story about a dude who encounters the most beautiful city he ever did see and goes out of his way to find it again, choosing to sleep himself to death so that he may reign over it forever. Again, I think Lovecraft really seeks to escape reality and find a place that he can reign over. At least, at this point in his life. There's a certain point where he really turns against the idea and when the city comes up again later, it's not seen as nearly as magical as it was in this original story.

From Beyond

Look, yes, the Stuart Gordon movie is better, okay? The premise is largely the same: a professor makes a machine that lets you see the dimension full of monsters that secretly exists on top of our own. It's pretty interesting, all about finding that "Forbidden knowledge" that Lovecraft is a big fan of, but it doesn't have the sexual subtext (or straight up text at some points) of the film or Jeffery Combs sucking the eyeball out of someone, so what's really the point?

Nyarlathotep

Here we are, the introduction of a staple of Lovecraft's fiction, Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Outer Gods, sometimes known as the Crawling Chaos, and the Black Man. Here he appears in the more common visage of an Egyptian man. I bring up Lovecraft being racist, but come on, a swarthy brown man being the secret messenger and disseminator of madness and evil is pretty bad, isn't it?

I do like Nyarlathotep as a presence. Who is he? What is he? He's not a god himself, but he's an evil presence: something that perhaps was a man at one point but no longer is. He's just a really compelling villainous character that you can squeeze a lot out of if you play it the right way. I don't know if he's been in much other Lovecraft media, but I can see doing a series about him sort of like they did with DC Comic's Lucifer. Maybe not written by a sexual predator if it can be at all helped.

The Picture in the House

Kind of funny. This is another one of those ones about a guy being terrified by hillpeople. A guy on his way to one of those Lovecraft cities, coming from one of those Lovecraft cities (doesn't matter which ones, pick your favorite), stops into a house to get out of the rain, sees a bunch of weird old books including one that features illustrations of African cannibals eating flesh. The owner of the house comes to greet him, and seems to be extremely old and says some stuff about how he heard eating human flesh lets you live forever (see also: the documentary feature Ravenous). There's some blood that seeps from the ceiling and then, in the funniest ending ever, lightning strikes the house and destroys everything and everyone in it aside from the protagonist in what is maybe the dumbest stroke of luck ever put into writing.

Ex Oblivione

Y'ever think that Lovecraft really wanted to kill himself? It's the only conclusion I can make from a story all about taking a drug to make sure you go into a secret place in your dreams and joyfully, dissolving into the void. I should mention, I'm no psychologist, but again, it really feels like Lovecraft had a really deep need to escape from the reality he lives in.

Sweet Ermengarde; Or, the Heart of a Country Girl By Percy Simple

This is a real curveball coming from ol' HP, not gonna lie. This is probably the only one of his "funny" stories that I think is actually decent. It's a parody of popular melodramas, portraying all the usual characters with their deepest, ugliest thoughts floating to the surface. It speaks to how much he seemed to loath the modern popular fiction of the day. In some ways it is a declaration against doing anything other than horror stories, which I can respect. I can respect a true hater. Of certain pieces of media, not so much other races, I can't respect that. So, half props to HPL.

The Nameless City

Well, shit, it looks live Lovecraft is firing on all cylinders here, isn't he? A man seeking an ancient lost city using only the Necronomicon as his guide? An unending descent into a hellish underworld and nearly coming face-to-face with some sort of nameless horror (that is described in detail despite the narrator saying that it's too horrible to describe)? Yeah, that's the stuff pal.

One of those ideas that doesn't seem all that shocking to me and, I'm guessing, most modern audiences is the that there was a dominant species that ruled the Earth before humans came to prominence. I assume this was seen as some sort of terrifying upheaval of conventional truth or something in Lovecraft's time, seeing as how often he put it in his work. It also makes sense with how much the narrator talks about seeing all the murals clearly depicting this ancient inhuman civilization and kept going "well, that's probably just a weird metaphor or something." Of course, the big, real horror of the angler-fish people (I don't know if they have any name in any extended mythos or whatever) is the idea that they may come back to conquer the human race as is the case with most of the fucked-up monsters that these old-timey freaks keep encountering.

The Quest of Iranon

I would probably be pretty annoyed by Iranon, I'm not gonna lie. Unless he was playing a 909 or a 303 instead of a damn lute or whatever the hell. A Dream Cycle parable of trying to find the place you belong, only to realize that it never existed in the first place and was just a fantasia you told yourself and now have to live with the reality of things as they are, growing up in the process… I mean, it does kind of hit hard from that perspective, but I think it's kind of corny and I just don't care for Iranon as a character.

The Moon-Bog

And you thought that Lovecraft was just afraid of the people that were colonized in America, didn't you? I wouldn't say it's exactly anti-Irish, but it does paint these pagan rituals as a terror that we are relieved of in the modern age. Not gonna lie, this one kind of sucks.

The Outsider

The story of a character I could only describe as a real Castle Freak. Perhaps a bit of an autobiographical tale. Not literally, I don't mean that Lovecraft was a ghoul in an underground castle, but I'm sure he felt like a real Castle Freak from time to time. And hey, I hated my reflection for most of my life, I can relate. Don't worry, I've gotten over it. I think. Let's not push it, shall we?

The Other Gods

Another Dream Cycle story, though it easily ties into the larger Cthulu Mythos with a God hierarchy thing going on. The story of a priest going to find the gods of the world only to be smote by the outer gods who protect them. It is generally unwise to seek out the secret rulers of the universe, as it turns out, unless you want to get… dissolved or whatever.

The Music of Erich Zann

Another banger of a short story here. A guy rents an apartment in a Brigadoon-ish part of Paris and the guy above him is secretly making noise music on his viol every night but won't admit it. The idea that Erich is forced to play to keep the unknowable horror outside of his window away is arresting and creepy. He only seems dimly aware that he's doing it all and very clearly doesn't want to keep going. but it compelled less the neighborhood sink beneath the lake for another hundred years. I don't know why you wouldn't like this one. It even inspired one of those guys who released an album on Ghost Box. Yes, I am annoying.

This is definitely one of the more folk horror adjacent stories. Erich Zann has discovered this ritual that but I'm sure he doesn't understand why it works, only that if (when, as it turns out) he stops it's going to consume him and everyone around. I could see another, much worse version of this with a bunch of townsfolk who gravely warn the narrator about not trying to stop Erich Zann from playing the viol and that while they all hate his noise music and wish he would go on tour with Merzbow, it would be more grave if he stopped playing in his apartment.

Herbert West—Reanimator

Kind of a weird outlier for Lovecraft. From what i understand this was purely a paid job: a serialization largely dictated by an editor. It's so much more campy than the usual Lovecraft tale, where he usually approaches the idea of pursuing forbidden knowledge, here it's done to comical effect. As much as it may differ from the source material the Stuart Gordon movie was basically a perfect adaptation, with a perfectly cast Herbert West. Okay, so Jeffery Combs doesn't have blonde hair, but in every other respect, it's perfect. Amazing, even. It's super camp and a ton of fun, with one major caveat.

I've already brought up the more subtle racism in Lovecraft's work, but this is way, way, way worse. It's egregious, really. In the middle of this story, there is suddenly a paragraph about a black boxer that is some of the most racist stuff that I've ever read in print. As much as I'd like to recommend the story, this one paragraph brings the whole thing so far down. There are times in his other work where I can say that the racism is just metaphorical, but Jesus Christ, this is horrific.

Hypnos, to S.L.

Two gay guys figure out just the right amount of poppers to intrude upon the realm of the gods and are punished by becoming old every time they sleep and being constantly pursued by some sort of horrific entity, eventually killing one of the guys. Okay, so I read into it a little bit. Not much to it, really, another story of pursuing the secrets of the universe gone wrong, you know how it is.

What the Moon Brings

Okay, so this guy ends up in a Lovecraftian horror situation for no reason whatsoever? Like a fucking schmuck? What the heck, dude?

Azathoth

It's hard to have much of an opinion on this, it's just a fragment. Again, it's kind of hard to figure out if some of this stuff ever meant to see the light of day. It seems like a prelude to some Randolph Carter stuff, but I can't say for sure.

The Hound

Sick as hell, dude. Grave robbers steal a cursed amulet and are then pursued by a ghost dog that ends up killing one of them. He tries to to return the amulet to find the corpse has been getting it flesh back from the Forrest Whitaker attacks. It's like a campfire story in the best way possible. Also, the Necronomicon is thrown in there, because of course it is.

The Necronomicon quickly becomes a good shorthand for forbidden knowledge that is often dismissed. It's perhaps Lovecraft's most enduring fictional construct, narrowly outpacing Cthulu if only for how central it is to the Evil Dead franchise. The one thing that people tend to gloss over is the amount of other dark, weird books of knowledge that start showing up in some of the last of Lovecraft's work. There's a decent possibility that he took those books from other weird fiction authors as he was famously pretty cool with other people writing Cthulu mythos crap. I assume that relationship went both ways. Still, the spooky-ass book is ever-present in so many of his stories, and the fact that the actual content is never really brought up is probably for the best. Again, I was lead to think that it was reading the book itself that drove you mad, but that doesn't ever seem to be the case. People are disturbed by it, but that's kind of it.

The Lurking Fear

I honestly kind of forget what happens in this one. A family of rich hillbillies inbred until they became ghouls or something? I remember finding it a bit tedious, if I'm being honest, but the ending of "they blew up a fucking mountain" is kind of funny. It feels like more of a cop-out and I tend to prefer the "it's defeated, but for how long?" style of ending that Lovecraft is generally much better at writing.

Again, he was a pulp writer and any chance to maker sure he could bring back any of his horrors on short notice probably worked more in his favor. I get the feeling he ends stories like that when he is absolutely done with the story and wants to make sure he'll never have to revisit it.

The Rats in the Walls

One again, we have a story about horrifying secret ancestry, only this doesn't appear to be a stand-in for a race-mixing and is more about the rich will literally kill and eat you given half the chance. I actually like this story quite a bit, and it features a protagonist already in an insane asylum recounting his story, something which I had been lead to believe is the majority of Lovecraft's stories.

The one thing that would keep me from recommending it is the cat in the story. It shares a name with a cat that Lovecraft had when he was younger and it is omnipresent throughout the story. You'll be reading a normal paragraph and then encounter "and N***** Man also went with them" and it's like, dude, you can't say that. Even back then, I think.

The Unnameable

Ol' Randy C. is back in action as a Lovecraft surrogate this time. I do like the beginning of the story where one of his peers is lambasting him for making stories about unnameable and unknowable things that can't be described before describing them in detail, calling out Lovecraft on his whole shit. It then turns into somewhat of a rebuttal before transitioning into both retelling and reliving an urban legend which is somehow much less interesting.

The Festival

Some good-ass stuff in this one. I had first encountered this story in The Dome That Came to Sarnath and Other Stories, and it stood out as a far more Cthulu-style story than the rest of that collection. I think that the protagonist of the story is a Native American, which is unusual for Lovecraft. I only assume that because the narrator makes references to his people holding their festival there for centuries before it was outlawed which implies that reading to me. I don't know, maybe there's some weird shit I'm unaware of when it comes to Lovecraft, but when it comes to Native Americans, he doesn't seem to have that much animosity, though he does seem to have been in favor of colonization in a broad sense, so it's sort of a wash.

I also think it's great to think of the character as a Native American who lost touch with his roots and in his desperation to get back to them accidentally gets lead into a dark, evil ritual by undead creatures, only figuring out right before being roped in deeper into the madness, the ritual having been co-opted by an invading force. I think there's a rich allegory that can be mined there that I'm unqualified to speak on as a filthy white boy with heart of gold.

Under the Pyramids (with Harry Houdini)

Okay, yeah, there's the part about entering a secret, evil underworld and the horrible gods and monsters within, but there's not much else about this story that reads as particularly Lovecraft-y. Houdini's not much of a Lovecraft protagonist, being much more of a rugged adventurer. Even when he's being subdued, there's a long passage detailing his feat of escapology. Even the most active Lovecraft protagonist, Randolph Carter, doesn't tend to go nearly as gung-ho as Ol' Punch-stomach. I wouldn't say the story is bad, just unmemorable.

The Shunned House

Pretty good story about an evil vampiric entity living in the dirt in the basement of a long-standing family house. A casual little detail in here about how the family would rent the house out to immigrants because they didn't know about the evil history of the house seems like a humorously cruel detail about the realities of the housing market and the rich people who've lived in this country for far too fucking long. I think it probably seemed like a natural solution to the problem, at least in Lovecraft's eyes, but I still think it's a funny little detail. I'm doubt he meant it the way I'm taking it, but he's dead, so who cares?

The Horror at Red Hook

Did I mention that Lovecraft was racist yet? Okay, to be more specific, "xenophobic" would be the right term in this case, but it's all part of the same thing, isn't it? There's a sort of implication in this story that one of the things that makes the villain evil in this —even before you find out the finer details of what he was up to— is the fact that he spends times with all the foreigners down in Brooklyn. Apparently helping them illegally emigrate with the help of an underground river system? But they dug too deep, those immigrants! How could they?

You ever see a post on internet where a conservative talks about how much he hates and fears New York City? Yeah, it turns out racists have just kinda always been that way.

He

Another story about the horrors of living in New York, finding an Ancient Man (like before humans existed, or technology) who shows him his magic window that he can use to see through time. The Narrator violates the masquerade by seeing into the Jetsons-style future and being horrified by it at which point the ancient man tries to kill him before being killed himself by the native americans that made a pact with him. I don't really know what to make of this? I've touched on Lovecraft's fear of the future before and this is far more concrete than any sort of lingering implication of horror that usually ends his most horror stories. Also, I get the feeling he really, really hated living in New York.

In the Vault

An amusing story about why you shouldn't stiff a stiff. An eye for an eye, an ankle for an ankle.

Cool Air

How terrifying it must be to witness the birth of air conditioning as we know it. It sort of feels like Lovecraft wanted to take another go at the idea behind Reanimator, putting his own special spin on the whole thing. There's something about immortality that seems to really rub Lovecraft the wrong way, like the only people who would ever seek it out are the most evil of monsters. Which isn't exactly wrong, just look at that Bryan Johnson guy. The tech billionaire or the Liver King, take your pick. Anyway, this is one of those times where I can see why Lovecraft is so often drawn to academics and the highly educated, as they're the only people who would still be helping Mr. Freeze after, like, the first week or so.

The Call of Cthulu

The story so iconic, it caused the birth of Tabeltop Franchise, two point-and-click adventure games (that don't really feature Cthulu), and two other games that are adaptations of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for some reason. Cthulu is The Brand® for better or worse. Oh sure, he does get some mention in other stories, but this is the only one where ol' tentacleface actually shows up.

And to be fair, it's a pretty good story and a great encapsulation of Lovecraft's whole thing. Eldritch abominations, academic research, mysterious cults, the fucking Necronomicon, and of course multiple people going mad due to what they've seen. I think there's a conception that Lovecraft's characters go insane just because of some sort of weird aura or supernatural power exuded by these creatures, but I think he makes it clear that's it's more the revelation of what's really out there and the doom that will come because of it. It is a strangely logical thing to go insane from. Oh sure, there are those with weaker minds who succumb to complete madness for reasons they can't convey, but not Lovecraft's beloved University boyz. To use an example that doesn't really adapt Lovecraft, the guy brandishing the ax in the diner in In the Mouth of Madness is driven crazy just by the presence of Jurgen Prochnow, but Sam Neill has a perfectly logical reasons to fear what's coming.

Dreams have been a recurring element in Lovecraft's work for a long time, but in his early stories they usually symbolize escape to fantasy and transcendence, where this starts to mark the turn towards horrors of the unknown. With some exceptions, the idea of escape is mostly replaced with the idea of being swept into somewhere against his will. Did I mention it seems like Lovecraft really hated living in New York? It seems like after seeing the world and getting the chance to experience he wholly rejected the idea that there could be anything better than Providence.

It's not that I pride myself in playing Armchair Psychiatrist, but what else can you do? Besides, he's dead, you can't libel the dead. Maybe I'll be the first…

Pickman's Model

Having spent time with art students and having been one myself, I understand the instinct to think that they are inherently evil. To give Lovecraft some credit, he's at least using a different kind of academic seeking a different kind of knowledge that eventually leads to the descent into horror. I also feel like it's somewhat accurate in that the artists of today who discovered a secret underground colony of flesh-eating monsters would abandon humanity to join them, though it would be for more explicitly sexual reasons than… I don't know, the evil that lives in the hearts of men everywhere?

The Silver Key

This is where Randolph Carter really starts to test my patience in what can be seen as Lovecraft's "I've Never Been to Me." There's a certain idea that it's fruitless to try and recapture your childhood joys and dreams because you can't revert back to childhood. Undercut somewhat by the fat that Randolph actually succeeds in doing exactly that. On the whole, it can be seen as a more mature and interesting version of "The Quest of Iranon," but with perhaps a more hopeful ending. Maybe we can recapture our dreams if we try hard enough or reframe our idea of what we're going for or something? I don't know, I'm not an expert and I was less than moved.

The Strange High House in the Mist

There are places in every city and every town that are completely mysterious, but you know better than to really interrogate. Maybe it's just me, but I'm not just talking about the places there are tons of rumors about, but the places you find yourself, that you know have some purpose (or did at some point) but cannot explain. This is the story about the draw of such a place, and the sort of transcendent magic that might occur when you cross the threshold into one of the many forbidden places of the world. The allegory of someone discovering the hidden truth of the world and their spirit staying there while an empty shell returns to wander the town below is powerful.

How many of us have traveled the world, or even just our country to find what wonders lie out there and the wonder they could live only to return to their hometown while their spirit still rides the subways around New York getting lamb over rice much more regularly than is advised for a man of his age. Perhaps I've said too much.

The other thing that I think is funny here, and something that recurs throughout Lovecraft's work, is the idea that this sort of transcendence of human form and into a much more enlightened existence is absolutely terrifying.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

If "The Silver Key" was where I started getting sick of Randy C, Dream-Quest is the moment where I never wanted to see him again. Perhaps the most notable thing about this novella (that I believe was unpublished during Lovecraft's lifetime) is the swan song of the Dreamlands, connecting the world of the Dream Cycle much more explicitly with the Cthulu Mythos than he ever did before, all but leaving behind the Dream Lands, never to delve into the more beautiful and wondrous parts of this mythical world.

Even Celephaïs has lost some of its luster, with Kuranes retrofitting his kingdom to look more like Cornwall, being wistful for his youth. Again, it's hard not see Lovecraft's New York and his new bitterness to the world outside of Providence bleeding through.

A lot of the charm of Dream-Quest comes from the description of the different lands in the dream world, with rich details painting each one in luscious detail. The descriptions of the actual people and the things they do ar far less charming, with some of that Fantasy Racism that you might find in some more low-rent works like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars.

The parts I really don't like are when Randolph Carter is in some sort of peril or strange situation and then pulls out his ability to talk speak with cats or talk like a ghoul out of nowhere. Pickman, from "Pickman's Model" weirdly makes a comeback, leading the ghouls and aiding Carter on his quest to meet with the gods outside of Kadath to find dream city of his youth. Weirdly, this is set before "The Silver Key" but I think there's a reason that one made it to publication during Lovecraft's life whereas this one didn't.

I don't care much for how self-referential this all is, touching on so many of Lovecraft's different stories and bringing in so many of his characters. It's exhausting. It makes perfect sense why this wasn't published, especially in the pulp magazines that Lovecraft was usually seen in. I wouldn't be surprised if Lovecraft decided to write it just for himself, killing the idea of the Dream Cycle because it was holding him back from exploring horror he wanted to dedicate himself to.

Of course, there are still sly nods and winks to other Lovecraft stories in his later works for those in the know, but they don't rely as much as you having actually read those story. It may all be an interconnected mythos, but you don't have to read all of it to get the story that you're in the middle of. I'm sure Lovecraft didn't invent this, but I'm sure he helped popularize with his cadre of nerds that he constantly exchanged correspondence with.

Also, the ending to this sucks. Randolph remembers he's in a dream and just chooses to wake up. Lame shit! I guess it's a level above "it was all just a dream" because that's stated in the outset, but that really sucks.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

I'm not going to lie, some of this pretty predictable, but when you start the story off with the narrator talking about how he killed the title character, you're going to make some conclusions before they're outright told to you. Not only is this is a story about forbidden knowledge leading to ruination, it's combined with the sort of evil ancestry that so many of this stories are based on, but without the weird racial components that seem to usually carry.

Speaking of race, this is hardly as racist as it could be. Lovecraft's cat makes a comeback, but it shortened to just the first three letters. Which is still not good, and I'm not going to type it out here or ever say it out loud, but it's something like progress. Also, a black family makes an appearance and Lovecraft doesn't say anything about them. That's progress, I guess.

I really enjoyed all the descriptions of research that tumblr sexyman Charles Dexter Ward goes through to find out all about his evil ancestor and the narrator's journey into the weird underground tunnels. I have to admit though, the ending is a bit unsatisfying, another "they blew it all up and the evil was defeated forever"-style one. I suppose there's a hint that there may still be some evil out there, but it's more or less definitive.

The Colour out of Space

Of Lovecraft's work, I think this one is one of the creepiest works while also being, by far, the saddest one he's ever written. A meteor from space crashes down onto a farmstead and slowly saps the life out of everything and everyone there, turning it into a gray mess and devolving the people on the land until they wither into nothing. It is the best story I've read about things decaying and falling apart. By the end of the story, the alien lifeforms, which still haven't really been seen, have shot up into the sky and things have gone back to normal, but the old farmstead is still lifeless and spreading just a little very year. While the narrator assures them that the area is going to be flooded by the dam going up, there's a distinct lack of confidence in the way it's relayed.

I'm skeptical that the Richard Stanley movie reflects the mood of the story nearly as well, especially given how it sold on the star turn of Nicholas Cage.

The Descendant

This is another one of those unfinished stories where you wonder if it was ever supposed to really be published or not. I honestly don't remember this one, I think I may have skipped it but I couldn't tell you why.

I think at this point in the book, I was just very tired of having to finish this gigantic book and didn't want to spend the time reading something that was never meant for public consumption.

History of the Necronomicon

This is pretty much nothing. Something that no one needed, written for no one's benefit, but hey, it's short.

The Very Old Folk

Didn't get too far into this one before skipping over it. I think publishing Lovecraft's dreams that he wrote in a letter is weird and I don't care about them. I would like to see something that he actively worked on more than something that just sort of happened at him.

Ibid

This is supposed to be funny. You know how in footnotes, if you have something that's citing the same source as a previous footnote as "Ibid?" What if you treated that it was an actual guy? Wouldn't that be funny? No.

The Dunwich Horror

An old woman has some kids that are strange. One is much more of a problem than the other one. I think one of Lovecraft's strengths is creating and recounting a fictional history of an area or a family. Wilbur Whateley is a fantastic character, exuding a quiet menace despite being just a little boy trying to care for his brother. There are numerous stories about women having children with the devil, but this is a nice twist on a old formula. And of course, the devil isn't in the Necronomicon. Strictly speaking, anyway.

Also, while The Omen franchise hints more at the destruction Damien will bring, it doesn't ever bring the fire and let the demons loose on the populace like Lovecraft does. It's interesting to see just how much of Dunwich the titular horror destroys. My takeaway is that family can be a real burden and if you let it, it will destroy the entire world. That might be kind of extreme.

The Whisperer in the Darkness

Okay, so I'm not entirely sure about the idea that Vermont is the nesting ground for intergalactic evil, but what do I know, I'm no expert on all this Eldritch nonsense. This seems somewhat outdated, as I feel like a story about cryptids from outer space written for the modern audience would end with the main character having sex with them. I like all the details from the letters about the way Akeley is being terrorized by the aliens, and how, even after he's done meddling, they won't let him escape. I bet he would've had a good time living with his son in California.

This is another shift towards science fiction, with aliens and intergalactic travel of it all. I like the fact that Pluto is apparently the seat of a race of this weird evil beings that want to take control of the Earth. It feels ripped from the headlines. Very silly stuff, but there was a long time where people though there were rivers all over Mars, largely leading to so many people assuming there must be some sort of civilization or John Carter residing there.

At the Mountains of Madness

This is probably my favorite piece of Lovecraft's. Antarctica is fantastic setting that was underutilized in this point in time, as far as I know. Was "Who Goes There?" published yet? Doesn't matter, no matter what you'll end up thinking of The Thing. Or Alien Vs. Predator, if you're a particular type of guy. Even knowing that there are no more unmapped places in Antarctica, there's still some menace to be found under the ice today.

I also love the fact that so much of this is about exploring some abandoned ruins. Some of my favorite stuff is all about that. There's something so enticing about a place that's been lost to time and that you feel like you're the first person to see it in centuries. What was it that drove the old one's out of the city they loved so much? Well, there's an answer for that, actually. I like how the characters figure everything out about the civilization through the murals, coming to the mostly correct conclusions, relaying all this fictional history directly to the reader.

Some of is a bit predictable, especially the massacre at Professor Lake's camp. I'm sorry, but the second they radio about how "the creatures seem to become more pliable in the sunlight" I knew what was going to happen. And while the old ones are clearly horrifying monsters, I like how much respect Lovecraft has for them. It's kind of silly, but it makes sense that scientists recognize and respect their peers.

And I'll be honest, while I said it was predictable, I still wasn't quite sure what was going to happen when they went deep underground. I had a feeling, but didn't quite expect the terror within to be what it is. And I'm not talking about the six-foot tall albino penguins. It is funny how often Lovecraft talks about Penguins as if they were obviously the some of the most disgusting and loathsome creatures that have ever existed. Did they not have pictures of penguins? Or even detailed sketches? What the hell was going on there? Lovecraft would be outraged by both Happy Feet and Surf's Up. To say nothing of Surf's Up: Wavemania. I'm just going to go out on a limb and assume that he would find the idea of professional wrestling uncouth. I assume this is from that weird time in history where people assumed working on your body for any reason was weirdly abhorrent.

And of course, while our protagonists survive the encounter, there's a hint that the Shuggoths are still waiting in Antarctica to get the human race if, god forbid, the ice on the antarctic starts to melt. Good thing that will never happen? Hey, do you know there's some weird, ancient bacteria that mankind has never encountered encased in the (somewhat-now-ironically named) permafrost in the Canadian tundra? Just bringing that up for no reason whatsoever.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

For some reason this is Lovecraft's most influential work? I'm not saying that because it's good, but there's been about three different video game adaptations of it (for some reason, two of them are called "Call of Cthulu"), and at least four different movies (direct-to-video still counts and I'm guessing even the few I've gleamed form Wikipedia is an incomplete list), and who knows how much different fiction there is. Why this is the one that has captured so many hearts and minds is beyond me, but there's definitely something to the idea of being in a town where you're being hunted and you need to evade capture. I can see why that would be a good video game and if they ever make it, we can find out for sure.

Again, you can read this all as a warning against miscegenation and letting foreigners into your cities, but it's hard to say how intentional it all was on the part of Lovecraft. The set-up, and especially the ending, seems primed for a modern YA re-imagining about a kid who leaves his normal life behind to save Atlantis (or whatever the underwater city is called, not gonna lie, I wasn't paying attention to the finer points). This is part of what makes Young Adult novels so awful.

Anyway, I pretty quickly lose any sympathy for the protagonist of the story once he reveals he's on a weird backpacking tour of New England to get in touch with his ancestral roots. Sorry, but unless you're adopted, that stuff doesn't matte and is more boring than anything else. I can understand the appeal of going to a city people think is repellent. It's one the things i would certainly look for when traveling around the country and of course the long history of the place that's relayed by the town drunk is riveting.

Of course, the best part of the story is when the Innsmouth people are coming after our protagonist trying to get him for reasons that are beyond his understanding (and they might not have full understanding of who he is in the first place). There's a lot of tension,even after he starts traveling down the abandoned railway out of town, fainting once he sees all the fishpeople because he's a soft white bitch. I call 'em like I see 'em, don't hold it against me.

While this hasn't grabbed me in the same way it has for so many people, I do love the ending. I didn't know that twist was waiting for me at the end of the story at all and there's a lingering, foreboding creepiness to the whole thing. That being said, I'm happy for him, regardless of how it affects everyone else. To be fair, there's a similar twist at the end of Call of Cthulu: The Dark Corners of the Earth, but for some reason it's a reference to The Shadow out of Time. Which is fine, I really like The Shadow out of Time, but that's such a weird decision.

But like I said, it didn't grab me. I think there's a certain cosmic grandeur that 's missing from it all. It ties into the larger mythos just fine, but just doesn't quite hold the same weight that the other stories that I've read up until this point and afterwards.

The Dreams in the Witch House

Honestly, I wasn't expecting to see any fiction concerning the fourth dimension in Lovcraft's work. Oddly, I find that the more that he wrote, the more that he incorporated more theoretical science into his work. I like the idea that ancient witchcraft was actually the people who figured out advanced science before everyone else. I don't like Brown Jenkin. A gigantic monster of writhing tentacles I can get down with, but the second you make these little tiny ratty monsters that want to kill you (unlike normal rats, who simply want to be our friends while accidentally spreading the Black Plague) is a just so much creepier. I also appreciate the fact that the protagonist defeats the evil but not without losing his life in the process. It's a big step above the "lightning struck the house and destroyed it forever" ending.

Despite the science and the complicated ending, this story does feel like a throwback to an earlier time in Lovecraft's career, especially with the more mythical aspects like witches, familiars, and Nyarlathotep showing up as The Black Man. Again, probably racist, but not explicitly so, which weirdly does show some growth from ol' Hot Pants.

Through the Gates of the Silver Key (with E. Hoffman Price)

Even after leaving the corporal world behind, Randolph Carter still has to haunt Lovecraft's work. What a jerk! This feels sort of like retroactively screwing with the Dream Cycle in favor of making Randolph Carter's quest past the gates into a straight-up Cthulu mythos story with a heavy amount of metaphysics on top of it. It's a lot less annoying than Dream-Quest in a few respects, though it does fall for the trap of making Randolph Carter the most important being that ever lived. I think that's part of the reason I don't care much for Randolph Carter, he seems capable of dealing with literally any situation that's thrown his way. At least, until this story.

I think at this point in his career, Lovecraft felt like he had outgrown a protagonist like Randolph Carter. Where once he may have stood in for Lovecraft, I get the feeling Lovecraft couldn't identify with him anymore. I think that he wouldn't have written this story at all if it weren't E. Hoffman Price trying to write it first and Lovecraft coming in to fix it up and take Randy C. down a peg. Randolph Carter is still far too capable for his own good, but by the end o f the story, he's stuck in a situation that he doesn't have quite a handle on despite him thinking otherwise.

The most arresting part of the story is when Randolph enters the ultimate gate and is hit with the knowledge of all the alternate lives in alternate times, on alternate planets, as alternate species, and in alternate universes, understanding all of them at every point in time at once. I would say he goes full Dr. Manhattan, but he goes far past it. Again, this is seen as mostly horrifying instead of transcendent. I get the feeling Lovecraft would view the idea of enlightenment as more of a horror than anything else.

The Thing on the Doorstep

This whole story feels like a throwback to Lovecraft's work and not in a charming way. I think the protagonist is a little too active in solving the problem and the story is far too connected to The Shadow over Innsmouth for my liking.

I know I've been playing amateur psychologist during this whole piece, but I fear this is where it's going to come out way more than it would otherwise. Specifically: Edward Pickman Derby seems like a self-deprecating self-insert for Lovecraft himself. He's a doughy, intellectual who grew up sheltered and sickly, finding relief only in his writing. He then marries a woman of indeterminate ethnic background and she proceeds to ruin his life making him take part in adventurous and frightening tasks, taking over his life in the most literal sense possible.

I haven't heard much about Lovecraft's marriage other than "it happened," and I certainly don't know how she felt about everything, but I feel like the whole thing fostered some bitterness in him, seeing the whole thing as a pointless endeavor that drained him more than anything else. If Lovecraft's thoughts were any less abstracted, they would be in an issue of Cerebus.

The Evil Clergyman

Skipped right past this. I don't need another stupid fucking dream. I know too much about Lovecraft already.

The Book

Another fragmentary story that was never finished. It reads more like a rough outline to be fleshed out later, and in fact probably was. There's a hint of a man coming to terms with infinity and forbidden books, both staples of Lovecraft's work, especially the later stuff. Hard to know what this would've been had it been finished, but we'll never know. I say that but I'm sure there are a more than a few people who've taken it upon themselves to finish this unfinished work and more than a few dickheads who plugged it into generative AI to make some of the most mid writing you'll ever read in your life.

The Shadow out of Time

I would consider this Lovecraft's last great work, though you're free to disagree, you dirty bitch. I may not be a professional literary critic, but I know a bitch when I see one!

The set-up is initially kind of terrifying, the idea that an alien consciousness hijacks your body for six years, alienating all your friends and loved ones, and then puts you back to pick up the pieces. And your bitch wife won't even take you back after you get back to normal! Again, I don't think Lovecraft had a high opinion of the institution of marriage, considering how he treats the one woman character in this story.

And yet, as terrifying as this idea is, it also presents a transcendent moment for our protagonist as well, getting to experience something that few humans ever get to do. Slowly, memories of where our protagonist's brain was start coming back to him in his dreams and he realizes he was in the body of the alien species that dominated the Earth millions of years ago and have knowledge of the entirety of history, human and otherwise. As strange as the situation is, it gives him the opportunity to find out things no human has known before and talking with people all across time and getting insights and knowledge into what they're like. Lovecraft paints this almost more terrifying than anything else. I know that there's a narrative that he became less racist in his later life, but the fact that cultural exchange seems abhorrent to him doesn't put him in a good light.

In a lot of respects this feels like a companion piece to At the Mountains of Madness, with both men ending up exploring the ancient ruins of a far more advanced race in a desert environment (though I'm not sure how common the knowledge that Antarctica was a desert was at that point in time), ending in being chased out of the ruins, possibly by the exact same race of beings as the other story. It's more of the same in that way, but all the stuff surrounding it gives it a unique flavor that makes it stick out from Mountains. If there were decent movies adaptations of both novellas, they'd make for a hell of a double feature.

While there was more work from Lovecraft after this, including some collaborations with other writers, I think of this as his swan song in the world of fiction more than anything that came after it.

The Haunter of the Dark

And here we come to the end of this book, not entirely of his career, but his last solo effort. It's a another Classic Cthulu Crazytale of a guy entering a forbidden church at the end of town, staring into a forbidden item, some forbidden paintings, and releasing a horrifying monster, the fright of which kills him. I have no real strong feelings about it one way or the other, it's fine, i guess. I guess it stands out from his earlier work as there doesn't seem to be an outright hatred of the Italian people in the town that this takes place in, which is something, I guess.

And that's it. There's more to Lovecraft, and especially way more adaptations and things that are woefully inspired by his work but that's all my thoughts on HPL. And guess what, now I can consider myself an expert, so I can call anything I want "Lovecraftian" and no one can stop me, bitch.