Ok, Dale. I went back and annotated the paper and identified eight aspects contained in it, either directly and explicitly, or else implicitly and this stimulated some tangential thinking.
Not real sure I'll actually get to all eight...
Starting with your observtions on humor, this is an area in which we mostly agree:
Quote:DN
Let me further ask veteran readers of Lovecraft who read him first as youngsters: Didn’t you, like me, indulge in “Lovecraftian humor� I did almost as soon as I began to read him. Classmates still remember, too, the social studies class period during which the teacher was called away and I strode to the chalkboard and offered a spontaneous lecture on Cthulhuism. I remember a fanzine ad that mentioned “The Dumb Witch Horror.†Peter Cannon’s Scream for Jeeves combined Lovecraft and P. G. Wodehouse. Lovecraft parodies have abounded over the years. But do people write parodies of Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, or Arthur Machen? The extravagance of Lovecraft’s fiction makes it the inevitable target of affectionate parody and, of course, of affectionate imitation. I suspect that some of those reading this piece have tried to work up some of that fun Lovecraft feeling by writing Mythos tales of their own. It may not be easy to write a really convincing Lovecraft pastiche, but it’s very easy to get the hang of Lovecraft’s fiction. As readers of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories may attempt pastiches, so Lovecraft readers have a phase as “Lovecraftian†writers.
I came to HPL late; I already knew about CAS. There was in the 1960s a band called "H. P. Lovecraft". I never heard any music by them, but hearing the name of the band I already had some idea that he was a writer of horror, although I don't know how.
Anyway, I took a date to see
The Dunwich Horror at the drive-in, down in San Diego (FWIW) while in college and it was an awful film. But later, when I saw HPL books in the same section with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, I bought one, no doubt.
I think maybe you've raised elsewhere the idea that HPL injects humor *by intent*, and also simply unintended, by use of overwrought dialog (and dialect!), phonetic renderings of sounds, etc. If not, my apologies, but I'd like to expand here a bit, if you don't mind...
HPL's narrators seem very dry, indeed, so we can't expect much laugh-worthy stuff out of them, either when they describe something directly, or the narrative limited omniscient POV tells us what they are thinking, or what may occur to them.
Nor are there many intended yuks in the descriptions.
But two instances of intended humor, understated, of course (but that's often the best kind!) occur to me:
In
The Picture in the House, the narrator, a guy riding his bike along a NE backroad, gets caught in a rainstorm, and ducks into what he thinks is an abandoned farmhouse.
But he is wrong...
SPOILERS
...
In spite of the unkempt and frankly unclean interior, a decrepit and yet strangely youthful old codger, disturbingly robust, too, comes down the stairs and proceeds to show the biker an old book. There's a place in the old book where there's an illustration, and it's apparent that the old boy has looked at this page hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
It's a rendering of a cannibal market place, as related by early explorers. It's pretty disturbing to note that *anyone* would repeatedly view it, but the old boy rather innocently (truly--he was a rustic innocent, socially; had no idea how what he did/said would affect interlocutors) tells the biker how he indeed was fascinatd by the image--and worse: what, exactly about the illustration appealed to him--and how, over time, it made him wonder about what a cannibal meal would be like.
The old man was becoming increasingly animated as he blythely relates all this, and even goes so far as to begin to intimate that he had done away with various local characters and, ostensibly, eaten them.
All this is related in the thickest possible--and maybe beyond "possible"--old Yankee accent. And you can well imagine how nervous the biker might have been while listening in horrified silence.
Then, as if the old man first noticed some squirming, he interjects sternly:
"Set still! What ails ye?" or something like that.
Well, duh!!! OF COURSE we, the readers, know "what ails" the biker! He's getting scared witless by a confessed murderer/cannibal who appears to have lived for more than 150 years!
The second example comes in the prose poem, Nyarlathotep, and I believe that another posters her at ED identified this, because I sure missed it.
As most HPL readers know, this is essentially the end of the world, and it's presaged by "signs", one of which is:
Quote:HPL
...And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem;...
The idea that the screams of those who intuit by dreams that all are doomed is viewed in the same light as, say, littering, or loud music, i.e., "a public problem", seems to comically understate the situation. I mean, they've got *lots* worse problems coming... :^)
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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