Be afraid
June 2, 2008 7:14 AM   Subscribe

 
My favorite.
posted by owhydididoit at 7:14 AM on June 2, 2008


Herbert West is by far his best work. Clever, suspenseful, and even funny.
posted by absalom at 7:29 AM on June 2, 2008


At the Mountains of Madness for me. Creepy, creepy, creepy. Love it.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 7:33 AM on June 2, 2008


This site looks like an html rip of Dagonbytes...

...which also has Dracula, E. A. Poe etc.

My favorites are The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Music of Erich Zann.
posted by Spacelegoman at 7:38 AM on June 2, 2008 [2 favorites]


Also here, in exactly the same order and arrangement. Huh!
posted by gurple at 7:40 AM on June 2, 2008


One of my older projects, Voices in the Dark, has me and my wife doing audio recordings of a few of Lovecraft's stories. Also, try the Poe! I'll be here all week.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:12 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


Alright! It's been slow today at work, and I was starting to get bored. Thanks for saving me from the monotony.
posted by Green Eyed Monster at 8:19 AM on June 2, 2008


Now I'm not going to get anything done at work today, picking through HPL again..
posted by crunch buttsteak at 8:30 AM on June 2, 2008


Good choices everyone... Since Whisperer in Darkness and the Mountains of Madness have already been snagged I'll hacve to go with The Colour out of Space.

Weirdly I never actually rated The Call of Cthulhu that highkly, despite it being the most famous one.
posted by Artw at 8:52 AM on June 2, 2008


I'd never actually read Lovecraft but after having heard so much of him here I started reading the entire collected works on WikiSource
posted by daHIFI at 9:10 AM on June 2, 2008


Caution: The style may seem a little... fusty. And some are definately better than others.
posted by Artw at 9:14 AM on June 2, 2008


While I've read most of his story work, The Music of Erich Zahn is the only Lovecraft that's actually scared me. However, I do greatly enjoy the atmosphere and detail of The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Dunwich Horror (especially the whippoorwills, oh those whippoorwills!), At The Mountains of Madness (containing the only alien elder things in Lovecraft's writing that I'm aware of that could be considered sympathetic in any way), The Cats of Ulthar (Meow for a while. Meow forever!!!), and (though it's really different from the others) The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Anyway, this site is a great find. Unfortunately, it might not last too long. Many of Lovecraft's works are still under copyright (as I found when I tried to put the text of The Colour Out Of Space up on Everything2 some years ago), and the owners are known for being litigious.
posted by JHarris at 9:19 AM on June 2, 2008


I'm somewhat ashamed to say, especially as a Rhode Islander, that I've never read any Lovecraft.
Now I really want to find audio books of his works.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 9:20 AM on June 2, 2008


Also, the HPL Historical Society produced a silent film of The Call of Cthulhu a while ago that's pretty nifty.

How do I make sure the referrer in an Amazon link is the Metafilter account? It's automatic, right?
posted by JHarris at 9:24 AM on June 2, 2008


Anyway, this site is a great find. Unfortunately, it might not last too long. Many of Lovecraft's works are still under copyright (as I found when I tried to put the text of The Colour Out Of Space up on Everything2 some years ago), and the owners are known for being litigious.

"Some years ago" may be the operative phrase here -- "The Colour out of Space" is up on teh wikipedias, about as visible a target as I can think of if there were any kind of issue.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:24 AM on June 2, 2008


Looks like it is, good.
posted by JHarris at 9:25 AM on June 2, 2008


I did an ask on Lovecraftian copyrights a while back, which was about the characters and concepts than the works themselves, but which got a lot of links in it’s answers which might be useful.
posted by Artw at 9:37 AM on June 2, 2008


owhydididoit - i know I keep mentioning it every time Lovecraft comes up, but you might want to check out Delta Green, it's MiGotastic.
posted by Artw at 9:39 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


My favorites are Pickman's Model and The Statement of Randolf Carter, even though the latter is one he wrote while still finding his voice. They're also both stories that inform The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (which, unlike most of Lovecraft's stories, is a Dunsanian fantasy, though there are still elements of horror in it).

I wrote my senior thesis on Lovecraft. It was an awful paper and I should have failed, but I still know a bit about him.
posted by Caduceus at 9:45 AM on June 2, 2008


So many of Lovecraft's stories I've enjoyed, it is hard to pick my favorite. I've always enjoyed Dreams in the Witch House.

It can be easy to make fun of his adjective-laden prose style. But damn, I had a lot of fun reading his stuff and following threads through Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. There was really nothing else like it. A few favorite passages from some other stories:

"If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders."

"And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places."

and

"They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall."

I really need to reread some of these, its been too long.
posted by marxchivist at 9:59 AM on June 2, 2008


Winter before last I went on a long walk listening to an audio version of The Haunter In The Dark walking past frozen fields and under bare trees, coming home through a quiet village with a big old dark church.

That creeped me way the hell out.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 10:09 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


These are most of HPL's work, they're hardly selected! :-D

And Charles Dexter Ward's an early piece, fun but not of the quality of his later stuff.

But great to see this. Unfortunately, the trouble with Lovecraft is that for the most part if you don't get to it before you're 17 or so, you can't see the strength of the prose and the concept from behind the pulpiness.

But Lovecraft is one of the sources who made me who I am. Thanks for this!
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:14 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


There are a couple here I haven't read. Thanks, and Cthulhu f'tagn!
posted by Mister_A at 10:38 AM on June 2, 2008


Loosk like Marvels doing some Lovecraft adaptations - their version of Dagon has nice art.
posted by Artw at 10:41 AM on June 2, 2008


Many of Lovecraft's works are still under copyright (as I found when I tried to put the text of The Colour Out Of Space up on Everything2 some years ago), and the owners are known for being litigious.

I am very curious as to where you got the idea that Lovecraft's works are under copyright and even more curious about who demanded that you remove them.

Of course, if this happened before March of last year, that makes something approaching sense, but even then as far as I'm aware the copyright wasn't actually owned by anyone; Chaosium was able to trademark the Call of Cthulhu brand but never able to actually assert copyrights to Lovecraft's work.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:48 AM on June 2, 2008


CitrusFreak12: Now I really want to find audio books of his works.

If you go to Swan Point and lie on top of Lovecraft's true grave you will hear his works whispered in your ear.
posted by Kattullus at 10:59 AM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


I took The Lurking Fear and Call of Cthulhu and ran them through a text-to-speech program and saving the audio files. I listened to them in the car on pizza delivery shifts. There's nothing like it for making a big guy jump at shadows when walking up a dark unknown driveway on a chill windy night. I got the same effect by giving some of Roald Dahl's more morbid stories the same treatment.

What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths.
posted by lostburner at 11:35 AM on June 2, 2008


lostburner - Well taht would be the unnatural rasping buzzy voices for Whisperer in Darkness sorted then...
posted by Artw at 11:36 AM on June 2, 2008


Of course that should read saved.
posted by lostburner at 11:40 AM on June 2, 2008


One of the stock devices used by my high school buddy and I to fill in blank spaces in conversation (or really for any purpose) was to suddenly utter "The window! The window!" in as stupid a voice as we could manage, and lurch in a random direction.




We were active in both band AND drama club.

Source of windowy quote: http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/dagon.htm
posted by rhys at 12:09 PM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


check out Delta Green, it's MiGotastic

Thanks! Looked briefly, must check out more thoroughly after work... but looks very cool.
posted by owhydididoit at 12:47 PM on June 2, 2008


Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

*shudders*
posted by SPrintF at 1:04 PM on June 2, 2008




I'll say too. Mine:

'the Cyclopean water city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss'.
posted by Mocata at 1:13 PM on June 2, 2008


lostburner, one night I am going to break into your car and reburn your CDs so that the last track ends with a voice that sounds like it was from leprous organs pressed into service as vocal chords, hissing, "You FOOL! Text-to-speech is DEAD!"
posted by adipocere at 1:50 PM on June 2, 2008 [4 favorites]


To which you'd have to reply: "WTF? Taxtospeefch is my DAD?"
posted by Artw at 1:52 PM on June 2, 2008


Now I really want to find audio books of his works.

The afore-mentioned HP Lovecraft Historical Society has done a radio drama of At the Mountains of Madness. It's quite good, and comes with nifty prop newspaper cuttings and such.
posted by rifflesby at 3:13 PM on June 2, 2008




HP's non-horror writings are also out there. My favorite was posted by Kattullus previously:

The ill effect of metrical laxity on the younger generation of poets is enormous. These latest suitors of the Muse, not yet sufficiently trained to distinguish between their own artless crudities and the cultivated monstrosities of the educated but radical bard, come to regard with distrust the orthodox critics, and to believe that no grammatical, rhetorical, or metrical skill is necessary to their own development. The result cannot but be a race of churlish, cacophonous hybrids, whose amorphous outcries will waver uncertainly betwixt prose and verse, absorbing the vices of both and the virtues of neither.

from Metricial Regularity.
posted by shavenwarthog at 3:56 PM on June 2, 2008


Some Lovecraftian Thoughts On Borges’ “There Are More Things”

Guaranteed not to destroy your sanity.
posted by ersatz at 4:04 PM on June 2, 2008 [1 favorite]


I was always of the opinion that Call of Cthulu was important for laying out, in no uncertain terms, in the first two paragraphs, Lovecraft's entire philosophy of horror. There are big, nasty forces out there beyond our comprehension to which we are but insects crawling across the proverbial floor.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:47 PM on June 2, 2008


Hmm, not bad, but yes, Wikisource has become the man. Er, wiki.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 7:08 PM on June 2, 2008


Pope Guilty: It was some years ago, I forgot precisely who it was but it was an E2 administrator who wanted them removed. It was back during their torchbearing purge of copyrighted stuff, probably around 2002. I don't have the /msgs saved unfortunately.

E2: The judgmental, idiosyncratic Wikipedia that time forgot.
posted by JHarris at 8:10 PM on June 2, 2008


I'm sure theres a place for exiled E2 admins at Citizendium.
posted by Artw at 8:28 PM on June 2, 2008


Citizendium? Is that one of the Lesser Gods? Clarke Ashton Smith, maybe?
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:11 AM on June 3, 2008


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