Biographical• Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in

Providence, Rhode Island• Raised by his mother, two aunts and grandfather. His

father went psychotic and died when Lovecraft was very small.

• From a well-to-do family that fell on (relatively) hard times.

• Wanted to be an astronomer, but had a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated.

• Plagued by “Night Guants”• Unsurprisingly was a strange, imaginative child and become a strange, reclusive

young adult.• Was brought out of his shell by developing contacts and correspondence with other

writers, that shaped and encouraged his own career as a writer.• Married in 1924 and moved to New York, but it wasn’t a happy time – financial

troubles, lack of work, and prolonged separation led to divorce a few years later.• Returned to Providence to live with his aunts for their (and his) remaining years.• Lovecraft died early, of intestinal cancer, in 1937 aged 46.

• He wrote 50+ stories Between 1905 and 1935, many published in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales

• Influenced by the gothic horror of Edgar Allan Poe, the fantasy stories of Lord Dunsany and ancient-arcane-evil stories of Arthur Machen

• Stories divide roughly (but not neatly) into standard macabre horror (earlier stories) dream-world fantasy pieces (mid period) and proper Lovecraft (Cthulhu) mythos stories (later, longer stories).

• Lovecraft was certainly a horror writer, but the term doesn’t really do him justice.

• He developed his own “world”, the details of which were revealed in small chunks and mysterious hints in his stand-alone stories.

• He himself described his genre as “Weird Fiction” and his form of horror as “Cosmic Horror”.

“Lovecraftian”

• Weird/bizarre• Other/Otherworldly• Mysterious/Hidden/Forbidden• Ancient/Arcane• Interdimensional/Cosmic• Dreams/Madness

So what’s different here?The “evil” in Lovecraft does not come from any traditional,

recognisable source, human or paranormal – his horror is not fundamentally about murder, torture, gore, ghosts, ghouls, death, demons, hell, etc – at least not in a conventional sense – though many of these things do feature in his stories.

In his best works the “evil” is something on the edge of our world, mysterious and unknown, alien and “other”, possibly incomprehensible - which is precisely why it’s so terrifying.

The evil in Lovecraft isn’t even “evil” as such – it’s a-moral. It’s simply utterly indifferent to the wants and needs of human life - hostile, chaotic, “other” and “unnatural” to us.

• “Like many of Lovecrafts stories this movie has that feeling of going into the unknown, of discovering an otherwordly thing that has existed for eons yet we know nothing about. Of knowledge of the universe that could drive you MAD!”

“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and the local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes.

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities.

These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.”

H.P. Lovecraft in note to the editor of Weird Tales on resubmission of "The Call of Cthulhu"

Madness and an Irrational Universe

H.P.Lovecraft

“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 to voyage far.”

(The Call of Cthulhu – 1926)

Encounters With The Old Ones

“Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God!...Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johanson was wandering deliriously.” (Call of Cthulhu -1926)

The Thing Cannot Be Described

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneously pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing…but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.” (Call of Cthulhu – 1926)

That Which Causes Madness Through Cosmic Horror is Better Left Unseen

“The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but the location was bad enough…Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms…In a natural glade of the swamp. On this now leaped and twisted [an] indescribable horde of human abnormality…void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying bellowing and writhing…It may have been only imagination and it may have only been echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he had heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unilluminated spot…to hint of the faint beating of wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees. (Call of Cthulhu – 1926)

What Unimaginable Connections?

-A Deranged Artist-A Voodoo Cult-A new Island

The strange links between the three stories of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ serve as a model for the strange connections of the entire mythos and the reality behind it.

The Geometry Was All Wrong

[Wilcox] talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of green stone – whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong… (Call of Ctthulhu -1926)

Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it was obtuse. (Call of Cthulhu – 1926) http://vimeo.com/9405378

Azathoth – The Ultimate Irrationality

Outside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. (The Dream Quest of Unkown Kadath – 1933)

The “Great Texts”• The Call of Cthulhu (1926) - the most famous, (but I actually

think one of the weakest) of the core stories... mainly famous for Cthulhu himself and his "wrong angled" city (R’lyeh) under the sea.

• The Colour from Outer Space (1927) - *FAVOURITE* - The story that hooked me on Lovecraft - fallen meteor/disease and mutation analogy, and yes, it is about an alien "colour".

• The Dunwich Horror (1928) - backwards country folk, "strangely domed hills", hints of demonic cults, un-nameable blasphemous spawn ect. ect.

• The Whisperer in the Darkness (1930) - Strange, alien goings on, rasping inhuman voices heard in the woods, weird forms seen in the river - revealed to be bizarrer than you might imagine.

• At the Mountains of Madness (1931) - *FAVOURITE* - A Novella. Ancient fossilised things discovered in the Antarctic. Ancient ruins, frozen and buried. Extremely influential.

• The Dreams in the Witch House (1932) - Talk of weird maths and geometry (angles again!), inter-dimensional travel, dream/reality confusion, the perils of student digs. And a rat with a human face. Excellent.

• The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1932) - *FAVOURITE* - Fishy decaying sea side town where something is seriously not right with the locals. You will never look at sea side towns – or fish – quite the same again.

• The Shadow out of Time (1934) - Ancient lost cities (again), dream/reality confusion, cosmic scale, a lot of mythos hinted at and tied together, remarkably sci fi.

Mythologising

• Necromonicon, Pnakotic Manuscripts, Book of Ebion etc.

• Arkham and Miskatonic University

Language

http://cthulhuchick.com/wordcount-lovecraft-favorite-words/

Creatures• “They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and

ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.”

Sea Creature~or~

Lovecraft Fan-Art

~End~