<![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space - io9 Comments]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Good article. Altered States of conciousness is the stuff of many stories. Jesus took 40 days in the desert, Moses walked the hard mountains of Sinai. Native Americans have their Visions Quests. I think if you're attracted to the dark side, too bad for you. Because the dark side is filled with bigger, stronger, nastier things than you can imagine, and they eat human souls like popcorn. Yummy.

Jeff-Minor

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Lovecraft is a god of SCI-FI damn it !

IA IA CTHULHU F'TAGN

ithidet

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Avram Davidson's criticism of HPL was so good it was turned into a song by Rudimentary Peni:

"Howard Phillips Lovecraft, heaven knows, had a talent for writing which was of no means proportion: only what he did with this talent was a shame, and a caution and an eldritch horror. If he'd only gotten the hell out of his aunties' attic and obtained a job with the federal writer's project of the WPA, he could have turned out guidebooks that would have been classics and joys to read forever. Only he stayed up there muffled up to the tip of his long gaunt New England chin against the cold which lay more in his heart than in his thermometer, living on 19 cents worth of beans a day, rewriting (for pennies) the crappy manuscripts of writers whose complete illiteracy would have been a boon to all mankind -ah, but life is a boon- and producing ghastly, grisly, ghoulish, and horrifying works of his own as well -of maneating things which foraged in graveyards, of human/beastie crosses which grew beastlier and beastlier as they grew older, of gibbering Shoggoths and Elder beings which smelt real bad and were always trying to break through thresholds and take over; rugous, squamous, amorphous nasties abbetted by thin, gaunt New England eccentrics who dwelt in attics and who were eventually never seen or heard from again. Serve them damn well right, I say. In short, Howard was a twitch, boys and girls, and that's all there is to it."

Maliboo00

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> green city...wow!, it reminds me of salvador dali.nice!-blurey

blurey

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> @Dr_Henry_Armitage: I am of the opinion that Luc pretty much always says it best.

Annalee Newitz

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Luc Sante nailed it when he wrote of HPL:
"He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering-the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list."

I'm also reminded of Lovecraft whenever I hear the recording of FDR saying "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Precisely so.

Dr_Henry_Armitage

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> I have a soft spot for Lovecraft (I've just seen Cloverfield, and damn it if it wouldn't have been a better movie with Cthulhu instead of some random American Godzilla), but, at the risk of sounding too politically correct, most of the time his racism is quite gobsmacking...

Ptarmigandalf

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> I always liked "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" the best--the one where the guy goes to investigate the strange fish-people, and then realizes that he actually IS a strange fish-person, and that he can resolve his lifelong sense of dislocation be reuniting with his fish-brethren beneath the seas. Lovecraft family values!

And, you know, it's the only one that doesn't end with the narrator describing the sounds of unnameable scraping horror made by the beast from out of another dimension that's clambering up the winding stair to eat him EVEN AS HE WRITES.

charlottebackson

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> "unknown deserts of Arabia, wherever those may be"

That would be the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, considered unnavigable until after WW2.

Those 'basalt blocks, half shrouded in sand' are probably inspired by Nan Madol on Pohnpei [www.pohnpeiheaven.com]
-Kle.

Klebert L. Hall

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Personally, I like the "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" more than his other stories, it is pretty much Lovecraft's dreams transcribed. It features characters from many of his short stories, including Pickman's model. It is not exactly a horror novel, it comes across as more of a fantasy novel.

It ends on a good note too, so... definitely not his normal story.

Ghede

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> @Jim_in_Buffalo:

Would that be The Starry Wisdom : A Tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, edited by D.M. Mitchell? I liked that one, but most of the alt.horror.cthulhu crowd really seemed to hate it.

Lieutenant 030

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> I'm so painting that green city on the side of my Ford Econoline.

Seriously though, great article.

Geoff, I was going to ask if you are familiar with the architect Lebbeus Woods, but then I see you are, and you interviewed him, fantastic!

[bldgblog.blogspot.com]

Seth L

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> The Shadow Out of Time is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories

Oasx

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> ia!
ia!
Cthulhu ftagn!

That last drawing, the one of the Nightmare Corpse-city of R'lyeh, is from this awesome book that my former housemate had a copy of. I've got to find that one again... the pen-and-ink rendition of the story Call of Cthulhu is incredible.

Jim_in_Buffalo

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> ia!
ia!
Cthulhu ftagn!

That last drawing, the one of the Nightmare Corpse-city of R'lyeh, is from this awesome book that my former housemate had a copy of. I've got to find that one again... the pen-and-ink rendition of the story Call of Cthulhu is incredible.

Jim_in_Buffalo

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Especially in stories like this, Lovecraft tends to makes me think of Thomas de Quincey's opium dreams of the Orient in his Romantic Confessions of an English Opium Eater... the imagery is remarkably similar.

Beyond_the_Zero

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> bless you for lovecraft on a friday!

DarkPlaces

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Ah, where would old H.P. have been without the words "shambling" and "cyclopean"? Or "eldritch," for that matter?

Ed Grabianowski

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Plague's morning made happy

Plague

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> I love these images, but I have to say, I found Shadow Out of Time, while extremely dense in terms of Lovecraft's mythology, one of his weaker efforts.

braak

]]> <![CDATA[On the Trail of Grotesque Gods from Space]]> Shoot, thought this was gonna be about Zardoz. Then I realized... Nice, this isn't about Zardoz.

Grrsn Dn

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