Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown Page #3

---

they exchange many many letters even after they had left the amateur journalism movement

and he kind of found his home in a magazine like that

or another magazine, fan magazines that he wrote for

and he found a lot of like-minded souls out there would read his stuff and really love them

and he developed followers, I mean it's almost like a cult to them and himself

he wrote so many letters in such white heat and such intensity and such length

that it's easy to suppose that he sacrifice stories to his correspondence

I believe he had token like over 120000 letters written

and these letters are in short pieces too, I mean

they are copious, and pages and pages of details and notes or suggestions

on how to improve their own writing

as the web of his correspondents grew

it also allowed Lovecraft to test early stories on respected readers

in 1919, an armaturejournal called the "The Vagrant" took notice

"Dagon" was the first of Lovecraft's stories to be printed

a captured sailor escapes German sea-raiders

only to come aground on a stretch of sea bottom forced up ,

by a volcanic upheaval

the region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish

and of other less describable things, which I saw

protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain

it's got this awful sense of atmosphere that this poor guy

is out in the middle of nowhere

surely doomed with a black sun scouring on, what an image

as the sailor explores the riff, he discovers a cyclopean monolith

whose carved surface depicts a race of an ancient fish-man

they were damnably human in general outline

despite webbed hands and feet

shockingly wide and flabby lips,glassy, bulging eyes

and other features less pleasant to recall

Suddenly all hell breaks loose with this huge "Charlie Tuna"character coming out and embracing this monolith

and then at the end what happens is that narrator just demented

he is now on the other side of the world but afraid old Charlie's following him

and he is:
"Oh my God! That thing in the window!"

well, has this creature followed him, or is he just plain nuts, we don't know

but either way it's a great little story

but you know, you have it there, you've got the creature from the cyclopean creatures from the sea

is virtual Cthulhu in miniature

"Dagon" and other stories from this period would set the Lovcraftianmodel

scholarly people discovering violations of natural law

and being driven towards madness or death

it's also exhibited Lovecraft's use of baroque description and subjective adjectives

one of the clich notions of Lovecraft propounded by people don't very like his work, usually

you know is that he only has one style that consisted mostly or partly on the adjectives

like, um, "Over the eldritch town of Daleech"

the gibbous moon hung illuminating the squamous and batrachians inhabitants"

what he is saying that is just that, um, you know the moon was nearly full

over the weird town of Daleech, and

everybody who lived there were bloody peculiar frogs

what Lovecraft is, a baroque writer as that he goes in and carefully modulates

these over ripe incredibly complicated physiologies and sentences and style

but it's all his own

if you meet Lovecraft for the first time as an adult you do kind of have to learn how to read him

it's not a modern style it's not a strip-down style

it's not a very efficient style and there are many many things about it that is erasable

He will pick a few words and over use them appallingly

"Eldritch", "Gibbous"

a lot of his stories are ??? nothing happens

especially nothing happens to the narrator

they are just people who start terrified and they end up terrified

And there are other things you can make fun of him for:

the tendency to write in the first person,

and to keep writing

the ultimate parodic Lovecraftian phrase is

somebody going mad while writing and something's coming up:

"I can hear them now coming up the steps

their hellish tentacles are scrumming at the door

ah, Shub-Niggrath, the beast with a thousand youngfhtagn fhtagn"

and it's done, dot dot dot

you disappear in a burst of ellipsis of italics

it's a style that incredibly anal retentive

and you know this guy went over it and over it and over it until he made the combination that to his taste

which maybe gaudy to some it wasn't a perfectbalance

one thing that influenced this purple style

was Lovecraft's current fascination with the writing of Lord Dunsany

Dunsany wrote these magical little tales of dreamlands and gods and

he has this amazing prose style influenced by the King James bible

and apparently nothing else

Lovecraft was very taken by Dunsany's creation of a mythical pantheon of gods

and Lovecraft eventually admitted that, that's how he come to write the stories of the of the Cthulhu mythos

he took those Dunsanian gods which are setting in a fantasy world

and put them into the real world, and that's how he came up with his own cosmic mythology

though Lovecraft was now a published author

pursuing payment for what was only to be a personal pleasure

was far from his idea of a gentleman:

an existence that enjoy "being " rather than "doing"

his fellow amateurs urged Lovecraft to go against his anti-commercialism

and higher out his skills as a "ghostwriter"

as an invisible author, Lovecraft would be published many times between 1919 and 1920

with no practical experience in commerce however, Lovecraft charge rates much lower than the standard of the time

barely clearing a minimum goal of 15 dollars a week

despitemeager returns, this was a prolific time for Lovecraft

1921 17

by 1921 he had written close to 17 stories

unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood

bring only fear and sadness

wretched is he who looks back upon

lone hours in vast and dismal chambers

with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books"

the glory of the "The Outsider" is that it is the story of the thing beyond arcane

briefly coming into the file light into that circle

and then fleeing back into the darkness,

A lone narrator emerges from his crumbling castle

after a long seclusion

he comes on to the surface of the earth to find people fleeing in terror

from a monstrous thing that the narrator can plainly see before him

I love the twisted ending so to speak

and the you're reading the story, in the very last line of the story it scares you

I was proud of this guy as he escaped from his catacombs

and the moment that the real people saw him and screamed and he saw his reflection

and in horror he stenches out his hand and touches the mirror Boom! That's the end of the story

"oh my gosh, he is a ghoul, he is a creature from the darkness, now we must go off with him"

and I went back and reread it just to see how he done that

At his best, Lovecraft is as much as an existentialist as Albert Camus would be

I know always that I am an outsider

a stranger in this century and among those who are still men

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes