Lovecraft Trolling

 After reading Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" I think I have a better understanding of Lovecraft and the new character I've been working on. There are plenty of other sources I need to read before I'm ready to proceed so I should get to work on that. In the meantime, I wanted to make a note about the "trolling" Lovecraft does in his works. I noticed a similar approach in Machen's stories that leaves the horror in the imagination of the reader's mind. Anything the mind can imagine will be infinately better than what can be described on paper. My issue is that there doesn't seem to be enough to build a solid image out of the terror. Machen and Lovecraft like to give us hints about their monsters without providing concrete descriptions. Cthulhu, the most iconic creature in Lovecraft's work, is described in the story as "a mountain moved." We've given the size of Cthulhu but not the image. Only Lovecraft's own sketch of Cthulhu is the reason we have that image of a tentacled head with the prehensile wings. Machen does the same with the description of what happens to Pan's victims and hints at the end about a larger pantheon that could destroy humanity. 

So is Lovecraft trolling us by making us guess the rest of the story? We, like the protagonists, only have a glimpse of the full scope of horror. But the moment that horror is explained the mystery and the fun disappears. It's the curse of the vague. "Less is more" as the cornerstone of the story, also becomes the burden because the writer can never truely reveal their thoughts about the monster or risk ruining the fun behind it. It's one of the aspects that has made Lovecraft so popular: the interpretation of his work. The problem then becomes that most people miss the mark when it comes to Eldritch horror because they focus on the monster instead of the underlying horror. Just a thought.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finishing The King in Yellow: The Prophets' Paradise

The final story in Chamber's collection that has any connection to the King in Yellow. This story is made up of very short parts or chapters listed as: The Studio, The Phantom, The Sacrifice, Destiny, The Throng, The Jester, The Green Room, and The Love Test. I see a pattern of each story in Chamber's story of the themes around the King wanning away with each entry. This collection has the bare bones of what could be considered a reference.  For example, The Green Room mentions a character with a powdered face. This could be similar to a pale mask. But the analogies are so thin here that it's difficult to draw connections. 
Read more

A Forgotten Legacy, Nonfiction

Of course my interests in Lovecraft are for his Cthulhu stories but what about his non fiction? Lovecraft, being an amateur scientist, completed several books on astronomy specifically on the Moon and Mars and other heavenly occurrences. He kept a magazine for Rhode Island for nearly five years and for some reason had a book about smelting. It's easy to forget that there's more to Lovecraft than the stories he wrote. I wonder if he had any influence on the scientific world. It's more likely that this was akin to a youtuber making videos on their favorite subject. Or similar to what I'm doing with so few, if any, viewers. That's okay with me, this blog is by and for me.
Read more

Review: Hostile Dimensions

I thought I'd do something different today; a movie review. I hyped myself up for Hostile Dimensions. Found footage films are a dirty pleasure of mine and the concept of the film was interesting. Despite the obvious indie film vibe the film gave off, I still held hope for this film. I was wrong. This film is awful. It never manages to go deep enough to shake off the amateur feel in it. The story follows a film maker and her friend as they try to locate a missing girl who fell into another dimension via a door. Specifically, a door unattached. A threshold and a door without a wall. The pair team up with a professor, who looks younger than them, who explains that this is a wolf door, a portal to alternate dimensions. At no point  does the film establish our protagonists to the missing girl. Why do they care that a radom girl went midsing? What is their connection? It doesn't matter as the missing girl somehow finds her way out without their help. But that's the least of the s...
Read more