Martinus Wrote:
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> It has been released!
>
> [search.barnesandnoble.com]-
> Lovecraft/e/9781435107939/?itm=3

That is one amazing deal. Hardcover! Great dust-jacket! Tons of Mythos fiction! And a really cheap price!!! Even though I have all his fiction in Arkham editions, it's really tempting to pick this up!

Eldritch Frog Wrote:
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>
> That is one amazing deal. Hardcover! Great
> dust-jacket! Tons of Mythos fiction! And a
> really cheap price!!! Even though I have all his
> fiction in Arkham editions, it's really tempting
> to pick this up!

Actually you don't -- the long version of "The Mysterious Ship" has never been published before. It probably doesn't amount to much, but you definitely haven't read it before. :-)

And besides, the Arkham House books don't have the original versions of "The Shadow Out of Time" and "Hypnos".

Come on... you know you want it... ;-)

Martinus Wrote:
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> Eldritch Frog Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> >
> > That is one amazing deal. Hardcover! Great
> > dust-jacket! Tons of Mythos fiction! And a
> > really cheap price!!! Even though I have all
> his
> > fiction in Arkham editions, it's really
> tempting
> > to pick this up!
>
> Actually you don't -- the long version of "The
> Mysterious Ship" has never been published before.
> It probably doesn't amount to much, but you
> definitely haven't read it before. :-)
>
> And besides, the Arkham House books don't have the
> original versions of "The Shadow Out of Time" and
> "Hypnos".
>
> Come on... you know you want it... ;-)

In that case for a mere $13 how can I pass this bye?

I just received mine yesterday (for 13 bucks I figured why not?), and have to say I'm pleasantly surprised. The materials are of course on the cheap side (cardboard rather than cloth boards, lightweight paper, etc.), but overall it's a handsome book. The dustjacket is attractive, and the binding looks remarkably solid for the price; I was half expecting it to be a "book club" style glued binding, but it's somewhat nicer than that.

Of course the contents need no review, and it is nice to have most of HPL's fiction between two covers.

"Walls of Eryx" is interesting in that it's one of the few Lovecraft works, aside from certain of his early Hellenic/Classicist works, to have something of a progressive viewpoint. Although Lovecraft is generally thought to have become less conservative with time, and this true to some extent for his economic viewpoint, in actuality the apocalyptic and xenophobic hysteria of his works actually increased in his later writings, rather than decreased, although he learned to disguise it better within the symbology of his inverted Cthulhu "Mythos" polemic.

Exactly why I wanted to get the complete collected works (hopefully they are in chron order) - HPL has such a peculiar POV it will be interesting to see how it developed. Certainly CAS and REH seemed less out on a cosmic limb. Interesting that our three big supernatural horror writers today, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice, kept their scope far more personal and psychological. I am not sure anyone really carries the mantle for HPL's cosmic dread since that time (pastiche and tribute work notwithstanding).

"Cosmic dread" is something Lovecraft theorized about a lot, and he felt it had been achieved by authors such as Blackwood, but it is not clear that he actually produced any himself. He certainly did not think so. I do not think so, either, but there are other qualities to be enjoyed in Lovecraft.

Jojo,

You don't think the mood and atmosphere of sections of Whisperer in Darkness or Call of Cthulhu hit that mark? My impression is that HPL felt it and strove to capture it, but was self-deprecating and always thought he missed.

I can't think of anything more unique to HPL than this striving. Or more precisely, this peculiar cosmic angst is what holds most of his major work together. One may admire his atmosphere and mood, precision and careful narrations or interesting prose style, but without the focus of his dread of our place in the universe the other qualities would not be sufficient I think.

With CAS it is the beauty of the language ahead of the narrative or any vision. With REH it is the power of the narrative ahead of everything else.

But if you find otherwise it is just more fascinating.

steve

sverba Wrote:
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> You don't think the mood and atmosphere of
> sections of Whisperer in Darkness or Call of
> Cthulhu hit that mark?

No, not really. What Lovecraft meant by "cosmic" seems to be essentially the suggestion that reality is something altogether other than what it normally appears to be. Both of the stories you mention are straightforward science fiction tales in which plausibility may be stretched but no laws of nature are necessarily broken. The monsters involved are definitely material beings. While great in their own right, of course, neither of the stories bear any resemblance to Blackwood's subtle and perplexing "The Willows," cited by Lovecraft himself as the epitome of the "cosmic." There is a curious tension between the ideals Lovecraft set down for the weird tale and what he himself wrote.

I thought the focus here was CAS, but can't sort him out from HPL for some things. Years ago, a [London] TIMES book reviewer expressed fascination that even Lovecraft's monsters had their own monsters. As to cosmic vision, I suggest Olaf Stapledon's STAR MAKAER as matching HPL's cosmic vision. Stapledon might be viewed as an optimist and HPL as a pessimist when looking at humanity's place in the Universe. Both use musical metaphors with Stapledon's "brave music" and HPL's idiot flute players and cacophony.

J. B Post

OK, Jojo, I am going to have to dust off my old Algernon Blackwood books and give that story a read. I appreciate your insight.

I am reminded here of Harold Bloom's comments on "the necessity of misreading" ...he posits "a poet is strong because poets after him must work to evade him".

Maybe HPL, while admiring Blackwood and others, had to evade them. hence the curious tension you observe.

Just as writers now must evade HPL.

Steve

"...With CAS it is the beauty of the language ahead of the narrative or any vision. With REH it is the power of the narrative ahead of everything else...."

I can't help triangulating CAS between HPL and REH. They took up such a large space together.

steve

I agree with Jojo Lapin X; Lovecraft's cosmicism has been overstated. Although theoretically he was overtly or ostensibly concerned with cosmicism, most of his actual works dwell upon the bestial/hybrid/animalistic/degenerative/
cannibalistic/ghoulish aspects of caricatural human degeneration -far more than is purely attributable to that "piquancy" which Joshi says that Lovecraft found in such subjects.

I agree with J. B. post as to Lovecraft's pessimism, to a degree; Lovecraft was basically a Roman or 18th-century English satirist. He only truly found his voice as a writer when he decided to invert and satirize the Hellenic images and classical conventions of his earlier works via his later Cthulhu "Mythos". Joshi, too, would seem to imply this; simply count the number of times Joshi uses the word "satire" or "satirical" to refer to Lovecraft's fiction in his Lovecraft: A Life.

Lovecraft's use of "idiot flute players and cacophony" is yet another aspect of his inversion of Hellenic mythology as a symbol of chaos, authocthonous modernism, and decay/degeneracy. For the puritan/traditionalist Lovecraft, the pagan/Dionysian/Bacchanalian/
sensual Pan was a perfect image of degeneracy.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 16 Oct 08 | 07:46PM by Gavin Callaghan.

There are two separate but related issues regarding Lovecraft and cosmicism.

First is the degree to which Lovecraft himself claimed to hold a cosmic viewpoint. That, it seems, is not open to question, although, given his emotional investment in the "human aquarium", how consistently he held that perspective in his personal views is very questionable. In fairness to Lovecraft, however, the cosmic perspective is difficult, indeed, for us mere mortals to sustain (see, for instance, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations).

Second is the degree to which Lovecraft embodied the ideals of cosmic horror in his fiction. This question is a very complex one, in my view, and I don't have time at the moment to write in detail about it. The short answer is that, while I agree with Gavin and JoJo Lapin X that much of Lovecraft's horror is not cosmic, I also feel that one cannot overlook the fact that Lovecraft considered his two best tales to be "The Colour Out of Space" (it's quite surprising that no one has mentioned this tale, so far) and "The Music of Erich Zann", both of which are clear exemplars of cosmic horror. Undiluted cosmic horror may be difficult to find in Lovecraft's fiction (as it is in anyone's, I should add), but I would argue that it is present to some degree or other in most of his work, and it is an ideal to which Lovecraft aspired.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 17 Oct 08 | 10:23AM by Kyberean.

a.) Where would we put the infamous Mythos, perhaps HPL's most singular contribution, if not in the realm of cosmic horrors?

b.) I am having trouble reconciling the stance of recent posts (that HPL did not really deal with cosmic horror) with the way so much of his work is studded with quotes like the following:

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.
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity -- never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.

We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy.