"Is H P Lovecraft scary?" Topic

Sorry, people. Every story I read just cracked me up at how wordy and overblown they are.
It's fairly obvious that he was being paid $.05 USD/word.
Obviously, I am a NO.

Options:
YES
NO
(Whatever responders come up with…)

I saw a film of one story, and it freaked me out a bit, but I doubt it would now, it just seems overblown! – and rather silly!

If you are in the right mood.

Grelber

I think some were. "Rats in the wall" was the scariest that I recall.

I know, OFM: everyone should write like Hemingway--except that Hemingway was imitating Kipling. And matters of taste are not the basis for rational argument.

Lovecraft had the most frightening worldview ever. He said himself that the rational response would be suicide. And at his best, he made it work. I'd say "Shadow over Innsmouth" "The Rats in the Walls" "Call of Cthulhu" "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Dunwich Horror" are peak HPL, focusing on scholarship, inbred backwoods New England and a fear of genetic betrayal, layered on top his basic bleak atheism. He suffers, I think, from undiscriminating fans and having every speck of his writing in print. Horror is not my preferred genre, but I'll back him against your typical ghost story or serial killer saga any day of the week.

And I doubt HPL ever got up to five cents a word. You really have no idea of the world of the pulps, do you?

Not sure about scary, more intriguing.

Still quite enjoyable.

Only played the RPG once with my old D&D group, but I do like the figures.

No. Not even if you're a kid.

What Horror Writer does scary you John?

Yes – if you take the time to picture what he is trying to convey. The Whisperer in the Darkness is probably the best place to start.

It's somewhat difficult because of all the piling on and the popularising through rpgs and endless spin off games – and the cthulhu cuddly toys.

Hemingway is way overrated.

According to Le Sprague in his biography of Lovecraft, Weird Tales paid 0.5cents per word to complete newcomers, and the top writers got 1.5cents per word. Lovecraft got top rate from 1927.

Scary? Not really. But atmospheric? You bet! "Shadow Over Innsmouth" is by far my favorite short story; nothing even close. You can almost smell the decay and rot as you read. Eldritch shadows…gambrel roofs…

I have a nice collection of Lovecraft anthologies, and some from other writers in the "Lovecraft School," including those of August Derleth. They have provided many enjoyable hours of spooky, late night reading.

I forgot "Whisperer."

20th, even Hemingway had his moments. I keep a copy of "The Undefeated" and a copy of Death in the Afternoon to help me understand it. And "The Denunciation" and "The Butterfly and the Tank" of his Spanish Civil War stuff. That's 3" of precious shelf space, by the time I buy the collection to get the story or two. I'll grant you that he never worked on the level of Kipling or Saki, but some of his short stories will have long lives--just not the ones the English Lit departments push.

I'd read some more Lovecraft, but I can't get past his florid, purple prose. I don't find his mythos at all scary, because I don't find it plausible. But maybe his actual works differ?

The scariest stories to me are the ones on the thin edge of plausibility; close enough to reality to make you glimpse over your shoulder for things that are not there.

Scariest book I've ever read? Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents. Yes, it's outrageously funny, but then you get to the "dungeon crawl" featuring the titular rodents and the great hidden danger under the town… and brrrr… you'll be looking over your shoulder, holding your breath over the fate of some talking rats.

Honestly, Tolkien's Black Riders in the early chapters of LotR scared me more than any Lovecraft creation. Of course, I was 11 at the time…

I think I tried reasonably hard with Hemingway but after ending three novels thinking "Graham Greene would have done that better" I decided I might as well not spend anymore precious reading time on him.

I came expecting so much…I just didn't find it.

And I doubt HPL ever got up to five cents a word. You really have no idea of the world of the pulps, do you?

I wrote it wrong. I meant a half cent per word. 😄
Oh, yeah. I knew about the pulps. I simply didn't have enough zeros after the decimal point. 👎

But in todays money, that might have been on the low side of decent.

You read his NOVELS 20th? No. Never read a Hemingway novel. But in short stories, he sometimes did good work. Same with Faulkner, I think. At least the only book of his on my shelves is a collection of his detective fiction. For that matter, I'd cheerfully swap out every Heinlein novel later than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the maybe six "stories never written" from his Future History. There is a persistent problem that novels seem to pay better than short stories or novellas for the number of author-days they require, but many authors do better work in shorter stories.

Parzival, actual HPL is almost always better than Mythos, probably at least as often as authentic Arthur Conan Doyle is better than pastiche Holmes. But my recommendation doesn't extend beyond the six short stories mentioned above.

And he's an unfashionable style today. I've been reading a bit of Hergesheimer's Java Head. It's a very popular "mainstream" novel of 1919 whose plot bears a certain surface resemblance to the backstory of "Shadow over Innsmouth"--declining New England seaport, and an important family brings home a bride of alien race. The style bears some resemblance to HPL. Wikipedia calls it "flamboyant, ornate, highly descriptive" calls it the "Aesthetic School" and mentions James Branch Cabell and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Like E R Eddison's Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvian Trilogy, they're not the stripped-down short sentences and a few adjectives as possible style the schools push today.

Lots of English styles, and, as KIpling points out, "every single one of them is right." But an unfamiliar one can take some getting used to.

I'll have to give some thought to "scariest." It's not something I generally pursue in fiction. Plenty of news and history, after all.

Lots of English styles, and, as KIpling points out, "every single one of them is right." But an unfamiliar one can take some getting used to.

Hear, hear.

Lovecraft is famous for having written, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown", which is the opening line of his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature from about 1927.

98 years later, after 2 wartime atomic bombings and 60 years of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, the unknown just doesn't generate the same level of fear as it used to.

(Really, they should have removed Generalized Anxiety Disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual a few editions ago. If you're not anxious, you're just not paying attention.)

To the original post: I don't usually feel fear when I read Lovecraft, but when I do, I prefer it with mystery.

The very first Lovecraft story (novella TBH) I read was "At The Mountains Of Madness." I found it truly scary as a college student, especially as much of the horror early in the work was imagining what had happened at the base camp. Over the years I have read most of HPL's stories and have not found any of them as scary as that first one.

Now I feel there's are different kinds of scary stories. HPL's typically fall into a category I'll call "intellectually scary" where the horror lies in thinking about what the writer is describing and the background to it. Most scary stuff is either "jump out and boo scary" which is where the completely unexpected is frightening or the "blood & guts scary" which is where something bodily terrifying happens to a character (Linda Hamilton used to write this stuff until she went into soft core porn). I'm sure other TMPers can come up with other categories.

All that said, the last truly scary story I read was in a recent anthology "New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird." The story was "Mr. Gaunt" by John Langan and was an excellent blend of intellectually & blood & guts scary. All I will say about it is I had to look up the word "sarcophagus" and what it is was derived from.

Scary for the reader? No.
Scary for the character(s) in the story? Yes.

I've read most of HPL, but can't really remember much of it (except for the story where the cats ate the old couple.) I've also written my own horror stories (under 500 words, usually with a humorous twist, most following the format of my first two sentences above. Stephen King I'm not (thankfully!) ;-)

(Here's my shortest one)

"He looked down upon his still body. Then he desperately tried to wake himself…"

Scary? No.
DisturbIng? Yes.

I still feel sorry for the half dead raised by Joseph Curwen.

I'm too familiar with Lovecraft to be scared by his work. I'm a horror fan, but man himself is scarier than any supernatural nonsense, all pretend.

But he was a consummate world builder, invented a new genre of speculative fiction and influenced nearly every major horror writer ever since. His work is of tremendous value, but it doesn't scare me, as exquisitely evocative as it is.

The details of HPL's tales are not really scary, but the implications of his view of humanity's place in the universe is frightening for being probably true. Our end will arrive someday and no amount of pleading to Gods will prevent that.

The underlying concepts are frightening nihilistic horror. If you decide to read them, understand them, and immerse yourself in them, they are "scary".

My kids grew up in a post-Jason/Meyers/Freddie world. By the time they were old enough to watch such movies, they had already been saturated with the concepts … cartoons made fun of slasher movie concepts in age appropriate ways for young children. They had basically the reaciton we have when someone in an 50's horror movie says "Let's split up" or "Let's go into the basement".

Unless anyone here is pushing 100 (could be), we all would have grown up in a world already saturated with the core cosmic horror concepts of the 20's and 30's.

It doesn't mean we can't be frightened. It just means the novelty aspect of some frightening things will be lost on us, and probably subverted by having seen a watered down verison on Scooby-Doo.

As far as the style of prose goes, again, you have to choose to immerse yourself in it. We have no real-life context for Shakespeare or Gilgamesh. We can enjoy them by deliberate choice and effort.

Live and Let Die is my favourite Bond movie (until recently) and novel (still). One of my daughter's friends was visiting us/her and we put it on because she had never seen a James Bond movie (in her late 20's). Is it a tense moment of racial conflict or a laugh fest when someone on the screen uses the term "Honky"?

"Scary?" Nah. But to me, hardly any horror is. Things are just dangerous, which is different. Actual scary would be O'Brien in 1984 and his many, many real-life counterparts, quite a number of whom are educators--people who don't want lip service, but want you to sincerely believe something you know isn't true. Those people aren't trying to kill you: they want your soul. But you won't find them in the "Horror" section of your library or bookstore. Those places just have a bunch of relatively harmless maniacs with knives and the odd ghost or alien.

No.
Tried a few. Rather tedious read, very overblown atmosphere. Nothing much happens before I moved on to something more to my liking.

Re: earlier comments about Heinlein – I am probably alone in this but I found Starship Troopers intensely disappointing. It's tantamount to taking liberties to even call it Science Fiction.

The book or the unspeakable film, 20th?

C) Creepy more than scary.

I am indeed a fan of the purple-hued prose, bring on the weave of rhapsodic amaranthine clauses and let the tale unfold with worthy smithing of the words. Chop not a tale into gobbetes of bleak short sentences and Spartan adornments. If I pay for a novel, I do not wish to be short-changed, I paid for words artistically arranged within on all the pages twixt the covers.

The book. It's nothing more than a stereotypical "I joined the army had hard training made great chums and then fought the Japanese / Koreans/ Germans / The bugs " with the dreary bonus of a political tract about the superiority of a ruling class drawn solely from the military. The SF elements are pure set dressing.

Hmph. In that case, you might try Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero (steretypically anti-military) or Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (sterotypically anti-Vietnam.)

But I rather think you missed a couple of points. Most obviously, the ruling class demonstrates no "superiority" and is not "drawn solely from the military." Johnny Rico's filthy-rich father has never served, and has no vote. He finds it unnecessary. Presumably he rents senators as needed. (One of the H&MP lecturers specifies that discharged veterans commit crimes at the same rate as non-vets, so presumably they're equally corrupt.) The franchise is open to anyone willing to serve to get it--the vast majority of the population on some planets; a smaller percentage elsewhere--but it's carefully pointed out that only a relative handful are ever subject to military discipline. Most perform some dreary civil service function or go terraform Venus for a couple of years. Nor does any character or Heinlein say this is notably good government--only that it has not (so far) been overthrown. At least two characters say or imply they are poorly governed

SF. Writing in a world of tanks with infantry in (at most) helmets, close enough for voice command, I'd have rated an army of power-suited infantry armed with nukes and operating pretty much out of sight of one another as strikingly science-fictional for 1959. (Could you possibly be confusing Heinlein with David Drake? The SF elements in the "Hammer's Slammers" stories really are window dressing on his Vietnam/Cambodia experience in the 11th ACR.)

And--again, think 1959, or even a little earlier: books take a year or two--in a world in which conscription was almost universal, Heinlein is standing there shouting that no one should be compelled to serve the state in any capacity. It's a much more radical approach to the relation between the individual and society than anything Bellamy proposes in Looking Backward.

If you're just upset because Johnny's made a success of his military career, copies of Trumbo's Johnny Got his Gun are easy to find.

I think you missed my point.

It is primarily that it isn't a SF story at all.

The individual suits are very powerful but so would a tank have been if armed with nuclear shells. The spaceships are big powerful transports .. just like an aircraft carrier. It's set dressing.

I never said I was upset – I was bored. It's a join the dots I Joined The Army And It Turned Out Fine novel. Because of it's huge reputation – and the Hugo – I just expected more than Hornblower in Space. It was the lack of imagination that displeased – not the to theme itself. If I found the theme off putting I wouldn't have read the book at all.

Johnny's father does join up in possibly the worst and most unbelievable part of the novel. Having described how hard the training was and how several contemporaries were killed in training we're supposed to believe that a man 30 or more years older managed it fine. Sacherine sentimentality that the film had the good sense to leave out.

As I recall Bill the Galactic Hero was a far superior book. It has been quite a while ( really quite a long while) since I read it though so don't quote me on that.

"Difficult" is not always physically demanding, and "dangerous" certainly is not. I'm remembering graduating basic the first time at 20. The honor graduate was a police officer just under the max enlistment age and we all wondered how the old geezer pulled it off. I think the guy was past 40! (Current limit is 42.) Second time through basic I was 31, and my perspective had shifted. Mind you, Pops Rico went through after the Bugs hit Rio, and to get a bright guy who was used to command, the MI might have stretched things a bit. When my father went through in 1944, he had at least one man 45 years old in his boot company.

I'd give Heinlein SF creds on Starship Troopers both for the tech and for the view of politics. In the aftermath of WWII and Korea, he's saying that nukes won't solve all military problems, and that future war won't just be WWII with upgraded equipment. That moves him several grades ahead of Pournelle and Drake, not to mention Gordon Dickson, whose Dorsai! was a nominee the year Troopers won. As for politics, what we'd now call the Fukuyama view of the political future was already dominant in 1959, and you're not the first person to be incensed at his suggestion that expanding the franchise might not be the only way forward. I'd regarded playing around with alternate ways of organizing society as one of the regular functions of SF. You're saying this isn't so?

Mind you, I remember Bill as a tired collecton of anti-military jokes, most of them older than Harrison, and I regard satire as only one grade up from puns. "Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep" was Harrison's stock in trade, and he spent a lifetime evading the question of confronting real evil. I read a bunch of Harrison, but there's none on the shelves to consult. He's sometimes amusing once, but I never found him worth re-reading.

I think I'll leave the notion of an aircraft carrier as a transport for another time, along with the idea that the only difference between infantry and tanks is firepower. Because by that standard, I'm not sure I've ever read any military SF which can't be dismissed as "not really SF."

To come back to the original topic, this was an interesting lecture:

link

Ken Hite has thought through horror and fear and has some useful things to say about making games scary for the players.

I know, OFM: everyone should write like Hemingway…

Gee whiz. Where did I say that?
TBH, I consider Hemingway a step backwards in prose. But what do I know? I'm just a guy who likes what I like, and want value for money when I buy a book.
For the record, I identify SO MUCH with Ralphie when Teacher brings out Silas Marner, perhaps the most boring book I was forced to read.

When I was playing CoC, the RPG, I also collected every CoC book and story I could buy off the market. They were tame as vanilla ice cream, compared to the RPG.

The RPG is not scary at first, but over time, it builds. I started having day-mares*, another player had nightmares. We both had to quit the RPG at the time.

*: I worked in a public place, swarmed by thousands of people, every day in the hallways, and my job required me to walk among them, repeatedly. I started creeping out as I would meet their eyes, and think that many of them were cultists. It sounds ridiculous, now, but 30 years ago, it was too real.

We were playing, Horror on the Orient Express, a mega-module, when we quit. Prior to that, we played several other Chaosium published modules. The authors never missed any detail that a Player might ask about -- they were astoundingly, comprehensively detailed. Those modules were in a class all their own. CoC RPG is in a class all its own. Love the concept, but the game became too much, over time. Cheers!

Disturbing more than scary.

On the tangent again (for the last time).

If Starship Troopers actually did explore the world it was set in then it might be more interesting – but it just doesn't. Everything is caricature rather than character.

SF that creates an alternate society that is believable – we could discuss LeGuinn or Vernor Vinge. Or even the earlier Dune novels. Or Phillip K Dick.

You seem to be reading a lot more into my not liking the book than the reason I have given. It really is no more though than what I said. It's poor science fiction, I don't believe it or the society depicted.

For me Starship Troopers is one of the worst books I've dragged myself through. But we won't agree – and I am not asking you to – as it clearly means a lot more to you. I'll never read it again.

What Horror Writer does scary you John?

None. I can't be bothered to read Horror. Why should I? It simply doesn't interest me at all.
I dabbled in Lovecraft back in Ye Olde Days. I had heard the hype, but when I sat down to read him, it didn't impress me in the least.

There's a whole lot of people trying to tell other people what they "should read".
And then they get offended when people disagree.

On the main topic: OFM, can you give me someone whose prose style you do like, for calibration purposes, then?

On the tangent. 20th, yeah, if LeGuin's works and Herbert's Dune are your notion of a believeable society, we don't share enough vocabulary to hold an intelligent discussion.

OFM, you started this thread to tell us that an author in a genre you don't read didn't fulfill what you regard as the basic function of the genre? Do you do this with every genre you don't read? I shall file your opinion next to a vegan's guide to cooking steak.

Right with you there on Silas Marner, by the way. If R. Nelson Snider HS--the site of the atrocity--were on fire today, I'd be there with sticks, hot dogs and buns, and it's been better than years.

But you never answered Wackmole's question. If HPL's prose is too ornate for you and Hemingway is a step backward, who's right on target?

Yes.

I'd expect so, if you dug him up.

Haven't read any, but do like the thing "trilogy".

Saw a docco on him. Eerily familiar.

OFM, you started this thread to tell us that an author in a genre you don't read didn't fulfill what you regard as the basic function of the genre? Do you do this with every genre you don't read? I shall file your opinion next to a vegan's guide to cooking steak.

Reading comprehension has fallen off greatly.
I said that what I read of HPL didn't achieve its desired affect.
I also said that I don't read Horror. That is a preference I've honed since I attempted to read HPL back in the previous century. Nothing I read that can be classified as Horror interested me at all.
I read the Jim Butcher Harry Blackstone series until it reminded me too much of those awful Dragonball Z cartoons, where the next series just got tougher, until Harry summons his inner … whatever and moves on to the next book.
I like the Flashman books.
I dislike most "science" fiction books because the "science" is handwavium fantasy. They introduce too many not-science concepts.
Since Heinlein is being bashed regularly here, I think "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" makes no absurd assumptions, and is a fine political thriller.
Earth Abides also makes no absurd assumptions. Ditto A Canticle for Leibowitz.
For fantasy, I love LOTR and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Conan also.
And I wish Martin would get off his ass and finish A Song of Ice and Fire. Lazy twit.

By the way, I find your persistent "need" to pick apart my preferences rather annoying. I don't like Hemingway, and feel no need to justify that. You're not my American Literature 305 professor. I'm just taking the course for fun.
If you find me inconsistent, that's your problem. Not mine. My only intent in starting this Poll Suggestion was to amuse myself. If it gets run, you can pick it apart again in a few months.

I guess we don't – Le Guinn created painstakingly consistent worlds to explore. That would be my opinion. Yours appears to be the reverse – there's no meaningful point of contact.

She was also one hell of a writer. We probably differ there as well.

I enjoyed LeGuin. So there! 😄

By the way, I find your persistent "need" to pick apart my preferences rather annoying.

Yeah. It's not like you started this thread with an insult, or anything …

I don't imagine I would be scared in the least now, but I did find a couple of James Herbert novels at least a bit horrifying – not jump-scary, but a bit horrifying at 12/13. I read HPL quite recently and it was ok. I think if I had read Shadows Over Innsmouth (I think) at that age, I might have found it a bit horrifying too.

I can see why HPL was so influential on RPGs rather than literature.

robert piepenbrink+1

I think what sets HPL apart is that his works include deep world-building tied to the real world, and really while it's called "Horror," what he really did was akin to Science Fiction Horror.

His core premise still resonates -- that the Universe and Reality are more ancient and mysterious than we imagine, that Humanity is but a fly speck before vast ancient intelligences who see humans as little more than useful tools at best, and that to perceive reality as it will drive you to the edge of madness. So all of his best stories, like Rats in the Walls, take reality and then just twist it off kilter. Of course he also wrote pure-up swashbuckling adventures in his Dreamlands works as well.

Great discussion guys, I really enjoyed it.

Basically, you have to be ready to appreciate Lovecraft. I never was.

Clearly, I touched a nerve, OFM. But you didn't give me much to play off. "I don't find Lovecraft scary--but then I don't find any horror writer scary. And I prefer the prose of X" would have helped me better understand where you were headed. Just FYI, I think you and I might have given up on Butcher at about the same point.

SF. I'd have said there was hard SF, where the science is important and generally good--though by now some has been rendered obsolete--SF adventure stories because there's no room for lost races and hidden kingdoms on Terra any more, and SF as political statement. Authors of the latter two needn't read physics journals. Nominally, 1984 is science fiction, but the accuracy of the science isn't really important.

With you on Leiber and Howard, but I think Martin's blocked. You're asking what he can't deliver. If he could, he'd have done it.

20th, OFM, I was with LeGuin to about 1966--Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile. After that, all her world-building was to drive home a political/social message, and we parted companhy. Oddly--I never realized this before--that was also the last year for Heinlein with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and for the same reason. (The line there is slightly blured in that I do keep 1978's "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" and I also ditched 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land.) It was said of H G Wells in his later years that "he sold his birthright for a pot of message." He wasn't the only one.

I'm more in agreement with later Heinlein than with later LeGuin, but it's poor story-telling either way. When you can shape your world to "prove" your point--well, does anyone else remember the character in "Guys and Dolls" who had filed the pips off his dice for luck, but remembered where they previously were?