He uses the Other and the Unknown to display his primary concerns. I don't think it's good to downplay the colossal moral errors that things like slavery, racism, prejudice, tribalism, and bigotry really are.īut, for Lovecraft, I don't see that racism is even a secondary concern in his stories. And I don't want to downplay it and disguise how very racist both he and the past were. Westeros is England.Īnd with Lovecraft, the racism isn't the point either. And, in turn, Hornblower is based on Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald. And that's straight from the original pitch for Star Trek. At best you're mushing a few of those together.įor example, Captain Kirk = Horatio Hornblower. A term which I've always found to be a bit much, because if you scratch the surface of any fantasy "world" you will find an actual historical time/place/personage with dash of fresh paint and costume jewelry. The point is he didn't engage in obsessive "world-building". He referred to it as "Yog Sothothery" (Jesus, Yog Sothothery! - it's like he made this whole thing up to troll dyslexics and people with speech impediments) The writers who wrote in this mythos after him started to take if very seriously, but Lovecraft didn't. Yog Sothoth, N'ylarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Ithaqua, Tsathoggua, Hastur (the Unspeakable) who, paradoxically, is the most speakable of these great old ones. It includes a pantheon of unpronouncables. So, Lovecraft created what is known as the Cthulhu Mythos. They are tightly linked, and maybe not in the way that you think. I gain power as writer by going to the source of the river.īut before we dive into the story we have to deal with two things. Great artists steal."Īnd, for me, it's tremendously worthwhile to go back to read the things that have inspired generations of people.
And, as we will see, much of what came before him echoed through him. Lovecraft echoes through everybody who comes after him. And whatever other criticism you might level at the man and his writing - lots of them are justified - I don't know of anything else like that in literature. But Lovecraft scares me years later, when I see or hear something I don't understand and it suggests to me the hidden depths of chaos in which we all unwittingly dwell. Lovecraft doesn't scare me when I read him, not really. And why he's worth reading.Īnd the thing that I get with Lovecraft, that I don't get anywhere else, is this lingering sense that madness is the correct understanding. And it's at the level of the image that he succeeds.
He's writing revelation - wild and disturbing visions of how things really are, or could be. Lovecraft is actually something like a prophet. And that's why you should stick around for the rest of this video. So just outlining the story doesn't explain why Lovecraft is great. It's a habitable structure constructed, not from light and sound, but from words and the creative response of the reader. But a story or a novel is NOT a blueprint. And if a blueprint doesn't work the house falls down. That's because screenplays are blueprints.
Now, screenwriters like to talk about how important story is - and it is - if the story is broken in film, it doesn't work.
Yog Sothoth, N'ylarlathotep, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, Ithaqua, Tsathoggua, Hastur (the Unspeakable) who, paradoxically, is the most speakable of all. The threat, the menace the thing that drives men mad - the thing that dangles the thread that the investigators must follow deep into the maze of their own insanity - is always one of the Great Old Ones. And every expansion of our knowledge in the physical sciences has pointed to our greater and greater irrelevance. We don't have a good story of why we are here and what we are supposed to do. We live in a time, the last 150-200 years or so when old belief systems have collapsed or are collapsing and nothing has replaced them. Because the Lovecraftian truth is a universe in which humanity is utterly insignificant. Madness turns out to be the correct understanding of things. And they find truth, as much as they can understand, anyway. In a nutshell here is how a Lovecraft story works.Īn Investigator seeks out secret knowledge. Shadow over Innsmouth is one of my favorites, but Cthulhu is really worth thinking about because it sparked the entire Mythos. I'm going to dive deep into two stories, Call of Cthulhu and Shadow Over Innsmouth. And if you want tl/dr on the horror - there's Poe then Lovecraft and then everybody else. Lovecraft, an author who is one of the great well-springs of the horror genre.
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