Month: October 2019

On Sunday, I nearly got a hit by a car. Now, “nearly” means “not actually hit” means I suffered no actual injury at all, but I was whacked out on adrenaline for like three hours and then crashed super hard afterwards, so the post that should’ve been written on Sunday for Monday has instead been written on Monday for Tuesday, and will appear alongside an article coming three hours from now, at the usual posting time. I’m also taking the opportunity to throw things up at slightly weird times and see if it affects traffic at all. These posts are mostly written 24-48 hours in advance, so I figure if the 9 AM time gets more traffic than the 12 noon, then hey, may as well schedule it for then.

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.

The idea that being sheltered and ignorant is actually a good thing is something that Lovecraft will come back to at least a few more times, and something he’s pretty famous for. The unknown is frightening, so the idea that learning about something is inherently deadly means that it is, in theory, perpetually scary. In practice, the ambiguous contents of darkened rooms only hold the imagination for so long, and once you have described a fictional horror, no matter how much you insist afterwards that you have described only part of it, what you described will ever after be all of it, and its horror will wear away until it becomes mundane.

Anyway, while the idea that there can be types of knowledge that are inherently dangerous is a compelling fictional concept, it is sometimes overshadowed by Lovecraft’s actual neuroses poking through. For example:

Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object which had come from Africa.

Knowing how much Lovecraft hates everyone who isn’t a New England WASP, the idea that the whole story might just be an allegory for the inherent cosmic horror that somewhere out there black people exist (scare chord) immediately punches the momentum out of it. I don’t even know if that allegory is going to be borne out, but its mere plausibility harms the story. On the one hand, that isn’t this specific story’s fault. I only know that because I have a greater understanding of Lovecraft’s work. On the other hand, part of the point of this project is taking Lovecraft’s works as a collective, as a shared universe, picking through them to see which parts of them are the Cthulhu Mythos. And there’s a pretty good argument for including both the Street and the Terrible Old Man.

Continue reading “Mythos: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” →

For the first time in his career so far, Lovecraft delivers a story that reaches the staggering length of ten pages. We’ll probably need a single full blog post to dedicate to this one.

Our protagonist is the commander of a German U-boat during WW1, and he’s leaving this document in a bottle in hopes that it will reach the surface, for he does not expect to survive his current predicament. After torpedoing a British ship, they find a sailor’s corpse in the wreckage and guess that he is Italian or Greek and in possession of an ivory carving of a laurel-crowned young man’s head. I assume this will be relevant to the plot, otherwise our protagonist is just letting us know that the sailors under his command engage in looting corpses for no other reason except, presumably, to make sure the audience knows that the Germans are meant to be the villains of WW1. The corpse takes it pretty well.

The Boatswain Müller, an elderly man who would have known better had he not been a superstitious Alsatian swine, became so excited by this impression that he watched the body in the water; and swore that after it sank a little it drew its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south under the waves. Klenze and I did not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded the men, particularly Müller.

The weird thing is that I’m 70% sure this is supposed to paint our German protagonist in a bad light. The “Alsatian swine” is totally correct, after all, and our hero’s unwillingness to entertain superstition is probably what’s about to lead to his sub getting wrecked. But Lovecraft just wrote the Street like three or four months before this story. Is he really so lacking in self-awareness as to try and characterize a villain using petty racism while engaging in near-identical petty racism himself? I can imagine someone who would agree, if you presented it to them, that racism against Alsatians is dumb but racism against Portugese is totally fine, but Lovecraft seems like he’s actually bringing up of his own volition a criticism of how petty some German (Prussian, probably?) officer’s racism against Alsace is.

The crew are haunted by nightmares of the drowned dead coming for revenge, and the sub commander is too thick to toss the ivory carving that is clearly responsible. Even assuming we absolutely ignore any potential supernatural cause to the nightmares, clearly chucking this thing would be good for morale, and it’s not exactly hard to throw something into the ocean. They’re surfacing regularly, partly because WW1-era submarines have to, but also we know they are because (and I’m getting slightly ahead of myself to say this, but) two of the crew eventually kill themselves by jumping overboard. We wouldn’t have a story if the commander behaved at all sensibly, though, so stubborn refusal to display any hint of believing in superstition it is.

On June 20, Seamen Bohm and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became violently insane. I regretted that no physician was included in our complement of officers, since German lives are precious;

Erich von Falkenhayne didn’t seem to agree with this assessment, if Verdun is anything to go by. Regrets or no, our hero executes the two. This is followed shortly by the two aforementioned suicides.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Temple” →

The Terrible Old Man

It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man.

They’ve got foreign names, though, so the safe bet is that these three are actually the villains and the Terrible Old Man is either misunderstood or else (more likely) brings well-deserved suffering on those who dare be Italian, Polish, and (according to Barnes and Noble) Portugese.

The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man

There’s more to this sentence, but what matters here is that Kingsport is now a thing. This shows up in a couple of other Lovecraft stories and also in Arkham Horror. Honestly, if you wanted to condense the Cthulhu Mythos down such that Kingsport and Arkham were the same town, that’d be defensible. They’re both New England towns and the only things that really distinguish Kingsport from Arkham are which specific stories and landmarks happen to be placed in one location or another. If you wanted to combine them, you could.

The Terrible Old Man, not otherwise named, is super creepy and weird. He lives in a creepy old house, he talks to bottles with little bits of lead suspended in them, and the lead moves, apparently in response. The people of Kingsport mostly leave him alone on account of how spooky he is, but our protagonists are immigrants, and therefore evil/stupid:

Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.

The plan is for two of the robbers to break into the house and torture the Terrible Old Man until he reveals the location of his hidden pirate treasure, whereupon the third robber will be waiting outside in the getaway car. Things do not go according to plan, in an ambiguous but spooky way:

Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble one’s reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.

Intriguingly spooky, but also possessed of strong undertones of racism. This story is pretty much Lovecraft in a nutshell, and it’s basically a replacement level Lovecraft story in terms of quality. If you picked a Lovecraft story at random, you’d probably get something about as good as this.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Terrible Old Man, The Tree, and the Cats of Ulthar” →

The Street

This is the fictional biography of a New England road. Lovecraft describes how it was made by Puritan settlers, expanded in the colonial days, got industrialized, and was then ruined when all those immigrants came, because Lovecraft.

Then came days of evil, when many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before. And those who came were never as those who went away; for their accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing.

 

New kinds of faces appeared in The Street; swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.

But Lovecraft doesn’t just hate immigrants. He also hates Communists!

 Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned The Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in The Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime.

I say he hates Communists. Really, it’s more that he hates Russians, and would probably have been perfectly okay with Communism had it ever become popular in New England.

Continue reading “Mythos: The Street, the Doom That Came to Sarnath, and the Statement of Randolph Carter” →

I keep finding myself writing so late in the night that I discover I have no time left for a blog post before I need to sleep, so then I shuffle the blog post somewhere else and it ends up on the wrong day or at a weird time. I’m not even writing especially quickly, only about 1,000 to 1,500 words a day, which is good but not great and definitely not indicative of spending 3-4 hours a day on the work. I only hope that the extra time is coming through in the quality of the writing.

That has more connection than today’s story than just an explanation for why it’s being posted alongside a Tuesday article instead of on Monday where it belongs. The White Ship was written by HP Lovecraft after being inspired by Lord Dunsany, whose work he had recently been reading (we don’t even have to resort to guesswork on this one, as we often do, because Lovecraft conveniently says as much in one of his letters – that, or Barnes and Noble is lying to me). My current writing distraction was inspired by my recent study of Lovecraft.

Our hero today is Basil Elton, the latest in a long line of lighthouse keepers, because all lighthouse keepers without exception are grizzled old men in sailor’s coats with salty white beards whose father kept the same lighthouse, and his father’s father before that. Hereafter referred to as Lighthouse Guy, because this story is like five pages long and no way is that enough time to lodge the protagonist’s name in my head.

Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.

As my past and current literary investigations suggest, I tend to wander back through the history of media, paying relatively little attention to the big new thing and instead examining the past to see what has not crumbled. It’s an easy way to make sure I read mostly good literature. In fact, if you dig through my readings more randomly selected, like from the LitRPG genre where people largely directed me to whatever was popular right now or when I selected short stories almost at random from a Humble Bundle by a specific publisher, you’ll notice that I tend to be surprised and alarmed at how common certain shitty tropes or hacks are, because I’m used to reading the greatest fiction of any given decade, and that’s obviously a Hell of a yardstick to be measured against (I like to imagine that my focus on the greatest books improves my writing, but there’s no way it’s been improved to that level).

All this being a long walk towards saying that I feel a kinship with Lighthouse Guy here, whenever I wander into a multiplayer game whose time has come and gone. Like Lighthouse Guy, I didn’t personally see the golden age. I just hear about it from the greybeards left behind. Once, they say, there were so many players here that every town and quest hub, no matter how obscure, had at least a half-dozen other people visiting. Now? Now you see fellow travelers in the newbie zones leveling their latest alt, and you’ll see the main toons gathering in the designated last bastion of player interaction, but the rest of the game may as well be single player.

I feel for you, Lighthouse Guy. We did not see the golden age. We just live in its aftermath. Not ruined, but empty.

Continue reading “Mythos: The White Ship” →