Cthulhu Mythos (or How I Learned To Love the Yuggoth)

1920's

HP Lovecraft: Tales

H.P. Lovecraft! YES! I had no familiarity with this man's writings beyond knowing that he was an under-appreciated horror writer, friend of the guy who created Conan, and had a primary monster, Cthulhu, which I was hard pressed to get much information about online.

And there's the beauty of Lovecraft. To learn about the forbidden mysteries of his universe will leave you a wrecked, insane man. Turns out our world is teeming with all sorts of alien, inter-dimensional, ancient magical monsters and under-world gods who are biding their time to take our brains into outer space, turn our children into giant retards, subjugate mankind into subservience and just generally creep us out. But you rarely get to see these guys! Mostly you just hear their names in ancient forbidden texts, hear some scraping sounds, have the eerie feeling that you're being watched in your sleep, and then you find out your professor friend who had been studying the Necronomicon has disappeared leaving nothing behind but some spongy green footprints on his rug. It's the fact that Lovecraft leaves the best parts of his creations to the imagination which has helped fuel both his popularity, as well as the popular conceit that his wild and ficticious tales are, in fact, a way of covering up very real events and creatures.

The sad part of Lovecraft's legacy is the lack of movie adaptations- a lack both in quantity and quality. I recently tried watching the movie In Search of Lovecraft and was horribly bored and disinterested by the home-movie quality of it; I'm sure it was just about to get interesting, too. To be honest, I haven't checked out everything there is on DVD, I think there is a documentary that ought to be worthwhile. The stiff writing style, heavy focus on scientific pondering over action, and overall trend toward UNHAPPY ENDINGS makes Lovecraft very hard to adapt. In a suprising twist of timeliness, the recent big budget adaptation of Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of Madness' by Guillermo del Toro has just been cancelled, or at least put on hold. Why? Because del Toro wants an R rating. I guess I understand the concept that adult movies bring in less money than Toy Story, but would anyone question making a Saw movie or Stephen King movie R rated? It's HORROR, people. Making a Lovecraft film family-friendly would assure low profits- because it would SUCK. Sure, the bulk of the movie may be scientists struggling to survive in the artic and then exploring a deserted alien city... but it wouldn't be Lovecraft if they didn't eventually stumble upon something that would make the audience scream and then throw up all that popcorn they ate.


Book review-wise, it's hard to recommend Lovecraft even when you love him. Aside from a stiff 1920's writing style, a lot of his stories involve some doctor-type finding an old dusty journal that belonged to some old doctor-type who has written detailed notes on his research. After reading that type of turn of the century prose long enough to nearly fall asleep ten times, someone gets their brain removed or turns into a monster and you're wondering WTF. So the truth is it's a lot of work to read, and the overall theme that the protagonists generally wish themselves dead after gaining knowledge of the universe around them makes Lovecraft hard to feel warm and fuzzy about. But nonetheless, it is awesome.

Given Lovecraft's moderate success, he would probably have not imagined the inspiration most modern horror writers attribute to him now. For a guy like me who gets off on esoteric references and crossover, Lovecraft's world is a playland of multidimensional and magical possibilities. Some of his creations were featured in the first two editions of the D&D Dieties and Demigods handbooks. There is a Call of Cthulhu Lovecraft RPG game where the only way to win is to gain knowledge of the unknown, and consequently all player characters go insane upon winning the game. I could go on and on. But as far as crossovers go, let's just say that it's no coincidence that Batman's local asylum is named after a town in Lovecraft's books that hosts quite a few bizarre inhabitants. And if memory serves, Lovecraft was fond of inserting sly references to the Hyborian Age of Conan, as much as Howard slyly inserted dark gods from the netherworld into his writings, and actually wrote a few Cthulhu stories himself.
The book series I am currently reading, The Illuminatis! Trilogy, contains heavy Lovecraft referencing, as well as references to a lot of my other blog content as part of- well, I'll save that for another post.

In conclusion- while HP Lovecraft may not fit the fancy of readers of contemporary pop horror, or fans of slasher flicks and torture-porn, true devotees of the occult and things that go bump in the middle of the night need to get schooled on the master.