Hugo Negron's Blog - Posts Tagged "cthulhu"
H.P. Lovecraft
Being that we are in the Halloween season, I figured it would be the perfect time to talk about one of my favorite authors, since his work blends in perfectly with this time of year.
I am a huge Howard Phillips Lovecraft fan. I love his bizarre, creepy, macabre, and yes, very wordy writing. I came across his stories as a teen, and have enjoyed them ever since. Most of his stories usually revolved around a narrator who had researched or blundered into clues that led to discoveries of alien god-like entities too horrific for the mind to contemplate and their subservient creatures from other dimensions, attempting to break through to our own dimension with help from various worshippers and cults, (both human and non) hidden and secretive found throughout the world. The narrator usually ends up either in an asylum insane from these discoveries or being hunted down by these selfsame monsters and/or cults for knowing too much, although luckily a few of his protagonists do manage to save the day and escape more or less intact…
For those who haven’t had an opportunity to read his works (and you can obviously find better detailed biographies on the web), he was born in 1890, living most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. His life was not a happy one and probably fueled his imagination – youth spent as a sickly child, a father sent to a mental institute, had a brief respite when his grandfather helped raise him, inspiring him with stories of classic tales, until his grandfather passed away, impacting his family’s financial status. More tragedy followed - Lovecraft’s mother was also sent to a mental institute, he had a failed marriage, and eventually died in 1937 at the young age of 46 from stomach cancer. He basically lived off a paltry inheritance and from ghostwriting for hopeful writers, in addition to having some of his works published in the various pulp magazines of the time like Weird Tales.
Although not an extrovert by any stretch, he had a very active and engaged correspondence life with writers like August Derleth (who later helped to found Arkham Publishing to keep Lovecraft’s writings in print), Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and others. Many of these writers expanded on the mythologies and creatures Lovecraft had invented (I want to say it was Derleth who came up with the term, “Cthulhu mythos” which most of Lovecraft’s work became associated with).
Other famous writers have been inspired by him, from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman, and many horror movies have attempted to use some of his motifs – witness The Mouth of Madness, Evil Dead II, Dagon, From Beyond, and even the Thing has parallels to some of his concepts.
I luckily came across a group called the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society – a bunch of fans that came together and actually created some amazing works that follow HP Lovecraft’s stories more fully than anything else to date.
They have adapted some of his tales into radio dramas on CD as if they had been made back in the 1930’s. They’ve also created a bunch of props from his stories, from Cthulhu idols to Essential Saltes (which were used by a certain reincarnated warlock to summon dead beings into existence from their dusty remains to force knowledge from them). Who wouldn’t want some Saltes at their desk when reading horror tales or writing deep into the night??
Two of their products that I really have to trumpet are their movies – they have not been released beyond individual purchase, local film festivals, and select nationwide movie screenings. The first is a 45 minute silent B&W movie, The Call of Cthulhu (complete with caption cards and the occasional hair/string floating at the edge of the picture!), and a full B&W movie, The Whisperer in Darkness (with voice/sound), both filmed in the style of classic 1930’s movies like King Kong and Frankenstein.
It has been notoriously difficult to translate his tales into the big screen without completely modifying them, or adding copious amounts of gore and sex to compensate. His stories don’t really develop his characters or his supporting characters by growth or definition beyond their names, pedigree, and identified career. It was his style of writing that marks his genius – his blending of superb detail, of amazing description, yet never fully revealing the horrors his characters were confronting, leaving much to the imagination of the reader, his dreamscapes, and his mixture of real life events and his fiction that left you wondering what was real and what wasn’t (witness the belief held by many nowadays that the magical tome the Necronomicon which he created in his tales, amongst other books and translated versions of same, is actually real).
The HPLHS kept themselves faithful to his works for the most part (The Whisperer in Darkness does add some additional scenes and characters that were not in the original story as well as a tweaked ending) and I can only hope they produce more!
Here is their website, for those interested:
http://cthulhulives.org/
For a flavor of Lovecraft's work, try sampling these stories. Most are short stories, the rest being modest novel length:
The Dunwich Horror
The Call of Cthulhu
At The Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Whisperer in Darkness
For some of his ghostwriting efforts – here are a few that for all intents and purposes are mostly the work of HP Lovecraft:
The Horror in the Museum – collaboration with Hazel Heald
The Mound – collaboration with Zealia Bishop
Under the Pyramids – collaboration with Harry Houdini
Happy Halloween!!!
I am a huge Howard Phillips Lovecraft fan. I love his bizarre, creepy, macabre, and yes, very wordy writing. I came across his stories as a teen, and have enjoyed them ever since. Most of his stories usually revolved around a narrator who had researched or blundered into clues that led to discoveries of alien god-like entities too horrific for the mind to contemplate and their subservient creatures from other dimensions, attempting to break through to our own dimension with help from various worshippers and cults, (both human and non) hidden and secretive found throughout the world. The narrator usually ends up either in an asylum insane from these discoveries or being hunted down by these selfsame monsters and/or cults for knowing too much, although luckily a few of his protagonists do manage to save the day and escape more or less intact…
For those who haven’t had an opportunity to read his works (and you can obviously find better detailed biographies on the web), he was born in 1890, living most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. His life was not a happy one and probably fueled his imagination – youth spent as a sickly child, a father sent to a mental institute, had a brief respite when his grandfather helped raise him, inspiring him with stories of classic tales, until his grandfather passed away, impacting his family’s financial status. More tragedy followed - Lovecraft’s mother was also sent to a mental institute, he had a failed marriage, and eventually died in 1937 at the young age of 46 from stomach cancer. He basically lived off a paltry inheritance and from ghostwriting for hopeful writers, in addition to having some of his works published in the various pulp magazines of the time like Weird Tales.
Although not an extrovert by any stretch, he had a very active and engaged correspondence life with writers like August Derleth (who later helped to found Arkham Publishing to keep Lovecraft’s writings in print), Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and others. Many of these writers expanded on the mythologies and creatures Lovecraft had invented (I want to say it was Derleth who came up with the term, “Cthulhu mythos” which most of Lovecraft’s work became associated with).
Other famous writers have been inspired by him, from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman, and many horror movies have attempted to use some of his motifs – witness The Mouth of Madness, Evil Dead II, Dagon, From Beyond, and even the Thing has parallels to some of his concepts.
I luckily came across a group called the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society – a bunch of fans that came together and actually created some amazing works that follow HP Lovecraft’s stories more fully than anything else to date.
They have adapted some of his tales into radio dramas on CD as if they had been made back in the 1930’s. They’ve also created a bunch of props from his stories, from Cthulhu idols to Essential Saltes (which were used by a certain reincarnated warlock to summon dead beings into existence from their dusty remains to force knowledge from them). Who wouldn’t want some Saltes at their desk when reading horror tales or writing deep into the night??
Two of their products that I really have to trumpet are their movies – they have not been released beyond individual purchase, local film festivals, and select nationwide movie screenings. The first is a 45 minute silent B&W movie, The Call of Cthulhu (complete with caption cards and the occasional hair/string floating at the edge of the picture!), and a full B&W movie, The Whisperer in Darkness (with voice/sound), both filmed in the style of classic 1930’s movies like King Kong and Frankenstein.
It has been notoriously difficult to translate his tales into the big screen without completely modifying them, or adding copious amounts of gore and sex to compensate. His stories don’t really develop his characters or his supporting characters by growth or definition beyond their names, pedigree, and identified career. It was his style of writing that marks his genius – his blending of superb detail, of amazing description, yet never fully revealing the horrors his characters were confronting, leaving much to the imagination of the reader, his dreamscapes, and his mixture of real life events and his fiction that left you wondering what was real and what wasn’t (witness the belief held by many nowadays that the magical tome the Necronomicon which he created in his tales, amongst other books and translated versions of same, is actually real).
The HPLHS kept themselves faithful to his works for the most part (The Whisperer in Darkness does add some additional scenes and characters that were not in the original story as well as a tweaked ending) and I can only hope they produce more!
Here is their website, for those interested:
http://cthulhulives.org/
For a flavor of Lovecraft's work, try sampling these stories. Most are short stories, the rest being modest novel length:
The Dunwich Horror
The Call of Cthulhu
At The Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Whisperer in Darkness
For some of his ghostwriting efforts – here are a few that for all intents and purposes are mostly the work of HP Lovecraft:
The Horror in the Museum – collaboration with Hazel Heald
The Mound – collaboration with Zealia Bishop
Under the Pyramids – collaboration with Harry Houdini
Happy Halloween!!!
