THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: David_Dovey on 13 Dec 2010, 13:17
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Wil Wheaton dropped this little bomb on his Twitter: You can read the entire H.P. Lovecraft library, for free, legally, online at Feedbooks. It appears that this news has crashed the Feedbooks website because it's not working properly right now, but when it does get back up, the link is right here: http://www.feedbooks.com/author/12
Ia, Ia! C'thulu f'tagn!
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awesome
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This site: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/ has been up and running for at least 5 years now.
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I picked up his entire one-volume complete works for 14 bucks. His works, although alarmingly racist, are way better suited to reading curled up in the dark with just a night light than looking at a glowing computer screen, I think.
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Agreed. It's something that needs a big chair and preferably whisky or something of the sort.
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I got a couple different collections but they are all pretty terribly bound with really cheap materials
i wouldn't recommend them
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I have a trade paperback called Tales of Lovecraft. it's not a complete collection of his writing, but it includes everything that I'd consider essential, and it comes with a decent introduction.
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I picked up his entire one-volume complete works for 14 bucks. His works, although alarmingly racist, are way better suited to reading curled up in the dark with just a night light than looking at a glowing computer screen, I think.
You might find it interesting then that Lovecraft was that kind of racist that had him absolutely terrified rather than feeling entitled. He was fearful of leaving his own home often because of this.
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Yeah. Lovecraft never managed to get over his racist opinions basically because they were completely irrational, and, like a lot about his personality, had a lot to do with being withdrawn from school when he was 8 and then spending pretty much all his time for the next 10-15 years at home with his mum reading. On every other issue, Lovecraft had become, by the end of his life, rather progressive. Did you know he described himself as a socialist and a New Deal Democrat? It's all in the old boys letters, which are awesome. He wrote (it's been estimated) enough letters to fill a hundred volumes, and they've only just begun to be published. Here's a brilliant section Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi quotes in an excellent article (http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/lovecraft.html) about him, rebuking Frank Long for equating science and technology:
"Listen, young man. Forget all about your books & machine-made current associations. Kick the present dying parody on civilisation out the back door of consciousness. Shelve the popular second-hand dishings-up of Marxian economic determinism – a genuine force within certain limits, but without the widest ramifications ascribed to it by the fashionable New Republic & Nation clique. For once in your life, live up to your non-contemporary ideal & do some thinking without the 1930-31 publishers' sausage-grist at your elbow! Get back to the Ionian coast, shovel away some 2500 years, & tell Grandpa who it is you find in a villa at Miletus studying the properties of loadstone & amber, predicting eclipses, explaining the moon's phases, & applying to physics & astronomy the principles of research he learned in Egypt. Thales – quite a boy in his day. Ever hear of him before? He wanted to know things. Odd taste, wasn't it? And to think, he never tried to manufacture rayon or form a joint-stock company or pipe oil from Mesopotamia or extract gold from sea-water! Funny old guy – wanted to know things, yet never thought of a collectivist state....leaving this last for the unctuous windbag Plato, upon whom the moustacheletted little Chestertons of a later aera were to dote. Bless me, but do you suppose he actually had the normal human instinct of curiosity & simply wanted knowledge to satisfy that elemental urge? Perish such an un-modern & un-Marxian thought.....yet one has dim suspicions........ And then this bozo Pythagoras. What did he want to bother with that old "what is anything" question for? And Heraclitus & Anaxagoras & Anaximander & Democritus & Leucippus & Empedocles? Well – if you take the word of your precious old satyr-faced pragmatist Socrates, these ginks merely wanted to know things for the sake of knowing! According to this beloved super-Babbitt of yours, who brought down philosophy from the clouds to serve among men – serve useful ends in a civically acceptable fashion – the old naturalists & sophists were a sorry lot. Your dear Plato agreed. They were not social-minded or collectivistic. Tut, tut – they were actually selfish individualists who gratified the personal human instinct of cosmic curiosity for its own sake. Ugh! take them away! Moustacheletted young Platonists want nothing to do with such outlawed & unregimented pleasure-seekers. They simply couldn't have been real "scientists", since they didn't serve big business or have altruistic or bolshevistic motivations. Practically & Marxianly speaking, there simply weren't any such people. How could there be? "Science" is (they print it in books) the servant of the machine age. Since ancient Ionia had no machine age, how could there be "Science"? (SL 3.298-99)"
Seeing HP Lovecraft call Plato an 'unctuous windbag' is absolutely priceless. His letters pretty much go on in this fashion constantly btw. if he lived nowadays he'd be a legendary boarder/blogger.
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Khar, this is exactly why I have the Penguin collections of his books. S.T. Joshi's annotations are fantastic. Although, I'm totally on board any way of getting Lovecraft out there for free on the interwebs.
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The mere sight of the word "moustacheletted" made a moustache up and sprout on my face in a manner of seconds
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Does anyone know where one might pick up a slightly grander version of his collected works? Preferrably something large and heavy, properly bound. I bought his collected works on Kindle for a buck, but really, HP Lovecraft is an author whose texts it feels extremely inappropriate not to read from a tome
What you're looking for is Arkham House (http://arkhamhouse.com (http://arkhamhouse.com)), the company that August Derleth created to publish Lovecraft’s works. If you want archive-quality hardbound volumes of Lovecraft, that’s the place to get ‘em.
The only bad thing I can say about the Arkham books is that the slipcover art is pretty atrocious.
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There's also Library of America's HP Lovecraft: Tales (http://www.amazon.com/H-P-Lovecraft-Library-America/dp/1931082723) which is pretty sweet. It has all the most up to date editions of the texts, and I think it's probably the only single book that contains The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At The Mountains of Madess, and indeed all the key mythos tales (Call of Cthulhu, Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Colour Out of Space etc.) plus some of the more 'mainstream' pulp horror fare such as Cool Air and Herbert West - Reanimator and the really good early stuff like Rats in the Walls and the Outsider. The only thing it seriously lacks is any of the 'Dreamland' stories...I would have put in at least one representative, maybe Celephais. I would also probably have put in Fungi From Yuggoth, but then this thing is called 'Tales' so hey. I suppose they wanted to concentrate on the horror aspect, which many of the Dreamland tales contain only obliquely.
What do people thing of Herbert West, btw? Lovecraft himself hated it, it was his one serious attempt to do something that appealed to an audience other than himself. I think it's somewhat unfairly maligned; he definitely wrote worse things, and even in Herbert West he has a uniquely Lovecraftian slant on the classic I AM MAKE SCIENCE! YOU GO TOO FAR! trope. The simple fact that he never invokes God or the soul is fairly original in itself.
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People who think Herbert West is terrible have obviously not considered that Lovecraft's opinion of his own work makes no difference and that it's existence allowed the making of the films Re-Animator and Bride of Re-Animator.
If the line "He didn't have the guts" doesn't make you chuckle you need to fix that by watching both movies. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWL3l6kYljQ)
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About Herbert West Khar. I agree with you. Ugh. I've been up since some time I can't remember writing finals papers though and I needed a break. I can't really elaborate right now though. I just needed to read something written by someone else for a little bit. This helps somewhat. I like your Lovecraft-talk Khar. Write some more. My sleeeeplessfs needs more protein to wake. AH.
Man, this sucks. I have things to say about HERbert West but I can't seems to type them and my hands are slowly dying on the keyboard and I'm going to get back to writing papers and drinking wake-water-water and I'm going to stop writing sentences like Cormac McCarthy.
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As I was saying in meebo last night, I think the thing about Herbert West is that Lovecraft scholarship, as a thing that won't get you laughed at by everyone else in academia, is only about ten or fifteen years old, so people who study Lovecraft are super defensive about both themselves and the old gent from Providence being taken seriously, thus they sideline Herbert West. Furthermore, it creates the supreeme annoyance of almost single-handedly destroying the neat classification of Lovecrafts writing into three periods or themes that would otherwise chime brilliantly with his lament "I have my Poe pieces and my Dunsany pieces but, alas, where are my Lovecraft pieces?" (Earlier atmospheric supernatural horrors: Poe, Dreamlands: Dunsany, Cosmic horror and mythos: Lovecraft). Scholars like neatness. Herbert West is much more of a ripping yarn than any of his other stories, and probably does suffer for that, but hey.
Btw, I hope everyone is aware of the fabulous existence of the HP Lovecraft Historical society (http://www.cthulhulives.org/), producers of everything from t-shirts to full length silent film versions of Lovecraft stories.
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I've got a buddy who is looking for a book that has specifically just the Old Ones mythos. I know you posted one that has pretty much ALL of his works (thanks!), but this guy wants one that is broken down into just the GOO stories. Any idea if that exists or where to start looking?
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Pretty sure such a thing doesn't exist. That one above is the collection I've seen with the most mythos stories in it. If you want to read them online or w/e then the mythos stories written by Lovecraft are: The Nameless City, The Festival, The Colour Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Dreams in the Witch-House, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time, The Haunter of the Dark, The Thing on the Doorstep and the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. A comprehensive collection would also include the Fungi From Yuggoth sonnet cycle and A History of The Necronomicon.
What do we think of Lovecraft's poetry btw?
"Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head."
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the unctuous windbag Plato
pumped my fist in the air when i read this
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Here's (http://manybooks.net/authors/lovecrafth.html) another site to try - lots of other authors there as well: Howard, Poe, Stephen Leacock, Stoker
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From the damnable shadows of madness,
From the corpse-ridden hollow of Weir,
Comes a horrible message of gladness,
And a ghost-guided poem of cheer -
And a gloom-spouting pupil of Poe sends the pleasantest wish of the year!
May the ghouls of the neighboring regions,
And the curséd necrophagous things,
Lay aside their dark habits in legions,
For the bliss that Brumalia brings -
And may Druids innum’rable bless thee, as they dance on the moor’s fairy-rings!
So, Galba, may pleasures attend thee
Thro’ all thy bright glorious days;
May the world and the mighty commend thee,
And the cosmos resound with thy praise -
And may all future ages be brilliant with the light of thine intellect’s rays!
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Fungi from Yuggoth. The whole thing. Especially "Alienation".
Speaking of cosmic horror, anyone here a fan of Thomas Ligotti? Ramsey Campbell? T.E.D. Klein?
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Oh hell yes, Thomas Ligotti. I’ve got everything I can find that doesn’t cost a shit-ton of money: The Shadow at the Bottom of the World compilation, Teatro Grottesco, and My Work Is Not Yet Done. He’s pretty amazing—the only author I’ve come across that can exactly capture the bizarre mix of horror and uncanniness of a nightmare.
As for the other two, I’ve been interested in them but haven’t read anything. What would you recommend as a good introduction?
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Check out William Hope Hodgson too.
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Khar, this is exactly why I have the Penguin collections of his books. S.T. Joshi's annotations are fantastic. Although, I'm totally on board any way of getting Lovecraft out there for free on the interwebs.
re: Joshi's annotations, where do you think my gibberish black metal project (Ruins of Istakhar) got its name?
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So I followed Butt's advice and bought HP Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, which is a 1000 page heap of a book. Where should I start?
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In a nice sunny place, preferably not in New England.
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So I followed Butt's advice and bought HP Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction, which is a 1000 page heap of a book. Where should I start?
Well, depends on how dedicated you are.
I started at the beginning and made it through 2/3rds of the book. I liked starting at the beginning and reading his stories in chronological order since you can see how his writing developed over the years, and how his ideas lead him from one story to another.
Here are the must reads:
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Lurking Fear
The Call of Cthulhu
At the Mountains of Madness
I haven't read The Colour Out of Space, but I've heard it's good.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is not horror in the least, but I thought it was fun.
Some short, good ones to read are:
Cool Air
Pickman's Model
Otherwise, I recommend skipping Herbert West Re-animator. That was dreadful and awful. I hated it.
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Some short, good ones to read are:
Cool Air
Pickman's Model
This got lost when my old MacBook died, but I did this really fucked up experiemental noise/ambient/drone metal thing where Roddy read the whole of Cool Air and I put loud guitar dronings and feedback over it.
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Also make sure you get through The Rats InThe Walls and The Music of Eric Zahn.
Oh yeah! I liked the latter one (Eric Zann, btw) a lot. Former one is very good, also. Thanks for reminding me of these!