Steeped in Realism

Lovecraft starts his stories in realism. A curious, but normal figure, starts in our realm and graduates to insanity. Most of Lovecraft characters are drawn by their curiosity and end up like the cat. Perhaps they can be brought back if "with strange eons, even death may die." But that is the scope of Lovecraft's introduction to the eldritch: curiosity. Monsters are facinating but there are other ways to introduce the terror that I'm hoping to apply to my own stories. 

Lovecraft took pains to make his characters, or at least their interests, real. But it seems like he could only draw from his own pool of interests such as science or family history. What if he had taken interest in botany? Several stories written by other authors address the world of plants in the Eldritch realm. But nothing comes close to the original stories of indescribable gods.


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