What are Lovecraft's creepiest scenes?

[LambethWarp]

Sorry if this is mentioned upthread, but who wrote this Horla story? Sounds interesting.

Another great creepy-as-hell scene, or several scenes really: the horrible luminescent fungi growing on the cellar floor in 'The Shunned House' in a variety of malevolently suggestive shapes, and the unpleasantly evocative quasi-faces made by the roots and branches of the diseased tree in the garden...plus of course the vile fate suffered by the narrator's uncle (or whoever the old guy is) as they foolishly keep watch in the cellar overnight...

Also the mention of the woman who lived in the house who became enfeebled and mad, occasionally growling threateningly in an idiomatic and old-fashioned dialect of French despite never having previously spoken or studied the language. Definite influence of the death of HPL's parents, there (and again in 'The Colour', of course).

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

Sorry if this is mentioned upthread, but who wrote this Horla story? Sounds interesting.

   
Guy de Maupassant around 1890. Only English text version I can find online is this:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Horl.shtml

You can also find a reading on librivox.

[JulieH]

Sorry if this is mentioned upthread, but who wrote this Horla story? Sounds interesting.

Another great creepy-as-hell scene, or several scenes really: the horrible luminescent fungi growing on the cellar floor in 'The Shunned House' in a variety of malevolently suggestive shapes, and the unpleasantly evocative quasi-faces made by the roots and branches of the diseased tree in the garden...plus of course the vile fate suffered by the narrator's uncle (or whoever the old guy is) as they foolishly keep watch in the cellar overnight...

Also the mention of the woman who lived in the house who became enfeebled and mad, occasionally growling threateningly in an idiomatic and old-fashioned dialect of French despite never having previously spoken or studied the language. Definite influence of the death of HPL's parents, there (and again in 'The Colour', of course).

LOL - there is some mighty purple prose in Shunned House, and some of the imagery is just plain silly, but there's some deep creep in there too.  I like the extensive history he gives, though it wanders a bit, what with Huguenots and werewolves and the kitchen sink....

That's the next one I've adapted for my Lovecraft 5 show, and there are some references to Colour in there too - I couldn't miss the parallells either.  Or to Luella Miller, another story by someone else.

[T. Kelly Lee]

I love those little nuggets of backstory from the Shunned House!!  Good stuff.  One of HPL's chief devices is this notion that, with time, places can take on personality.  He gives us a great setup for that with this story.  It's the payoff that leaves me cold - the menacing elbow, or whatever.  C'mon, man!!!  It's clear he built up some cool lurke and then thought he needed to end the thing.  If it were mine to rewrite I think I'd just have the duo do a little digging, encounter something, and then run the hell out of the place...to reveal later that what they had found was a *GASP* giant eye or something!!  End of.  But I didn't write it, so there goes.    

[JulieH]

Oh, the guys GO OFF on the elbow...

ONe nice thing about the L5 stories is they offer me a forum to "fix" or "mock" the worst things in HPL's ouvre.
Wait til i take on Red hook.

Not so much a scary moment (until you think about it a bit much....), in fact, one of the few actual "jokes" in Lovecraft - is the bit from Pickman's Model describing a painting:

a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who had a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn.'

[T. Kelly Lee]

Have you read Gaiman's The Graveyard Book?  I cannot confirm it, of course, but I would swear he takes his inspiration for the ghoul's mocking of humans directly from Pickman.  It's a wonderful story.  Personally, I think I would prefer the company of ghouls to most of my fellows...

It's generally accepted that Horror at Redhook is a bad story.  Obviously, there's the racism there - or, more accurately, xenophobia.  But I think at its element it's really a good story and, in the arc of HPL's career, an important story.  In it you see the genesis of the ideas that would go on to populate his later "Golden Age" tales.  But the guy is on a polemic, he's using his art to speak, and I think most of us would disagree with the message.   

But this story is cool because of all the questions it DOESN'T answer.  Clearly this is HPL's take on a Faust tale.  But what is Suydam's motivation?  He's young and propserous again and married at the end - and he's sailing off on his honeymoon.  But is that all he was ever after?  Pretty boring - especially since the guy already had money.  He didn't really need Lilith to get a bride - he needed a shave and a shower.  Even at 60. 

There's clearly a chunk of story there that's implied and never given away.  And because we get the story entirely from Malone's POV, we're never going to know.  Alan Moore took these unanswered questions as a kind of ur-text and went on to write "The Courtyard," which I think is some of his better HPL inspired work.  Even from the POV of a would-be Fox Mulder.   

[JulieH]

That's part of why it will be so improved by being presented in the forum I've established as the Lovecraft 5 - I can use the voices of the characters to speculate, to put it into context, to compare it to similar contemporary tales and urban legends, to ponder the racism, and to bring up possibilities for what may have truly transpired....

And scoff at elbows.  Oops, different story.

[T. Kelly Lee]

That's part of why it will be so improved by being presented in the forum I've established as the Lovecraft 5 - I can use the voices of the characters to speculate, to put it into context, to compare it to similar contemporary tales and urban legends, to ponder the racism, and to bring up possibilities for what may have truly transpired....

And scoff at elbows.  Oops, different story.

I'll be interested to see what your take is!! 

I am delighted at the extent to which HPL mixes up his Greek and Hebrew mythology here.  And throwing in the Witch Cult references are even better.  If memory serves he mentions "Witch Cults" more than any other book in all of his writings.  He was clearly impressed with it - and I wonder if he bought the theory.  So much of his work is based on it. 

[JulieH]

I like the mix too, since one thing HPL was always good at was "big picture" stuff - in other words, these things (whether it be us and the old ones, or various religions) may not recognize each other, but they do live side by side and have their own opinions about overlapping subjects.  No thing exists in a vacuum.

...except Azatoth.

[LambethWarp]

It's generally accepted that Horror at Redhook is a bad story.  Obviously, there's the racism there - or, more accurately, xenophobia. 

Hmm, I would say xenophobia is the fear of different nationalities and cultures - HPL clearly had that in spades but was absolutely racist in the literal sense, with his obsession with inferior or more primitive 'breeds' of mankind, and this comes through very obviously in THaRH.

[Bob Lovecraft]

It's generally accepted that Horror at Redhook is a bad story.  Obviously, there's the racism there - or, more accurately, xenophobia. 

Hmm, I would say xenophobia is the fear of different nationalities and cultures - HPL clearly had that in spades but was absolutely racist in the literal sense, with his obsession with inferior or more primitive 'breeds' of mankind, and this comes through very obviously in THaRH.

Ah, HPL. You Nazi bastard.

Bob

[LambethWarp]

"HPL in 'not too fond of ye Negros' shocka" - yeah yeah, this has been discussed to death a million times of course - I was just saying that while racism and xenophobia are not necessarily the same thing, HPL was definitely guilty of both. Especially at 'Red Hook', from what I remember of it.

[Bob Lovecraft]

You know, speaking of "... Red Hook", I totally forgot the scene when our protagonist (to lazy to try to remember his name right now) is in the underground tunnels and sees the mutated cat-thing. I remember being a bit freaked out by that little throw-away passage.

Bob

[T. Kelly Lee]

"HPL in 'not too fond of ye Negros' shocka" - yeah yeah, this has been discussed to death a million times of course - I was just saying that while racism and xenophobia are not necessarily the same thing, HPL was definitely guilty of both. Especially at 'Red Hook', from what I remember of it.

Well, in the case of Redhook HPL really is piling on the xenophobia - as opposed to the African American hating.  He trashes pretty much every foreign nationality that isn't Anglo Saxon - and it's obvious that he's motivated by outright fear.  Even the Irish protagonist turns out to be pretty dull and weak-willed. 

I think the question one has to ask about HPL is, after acknowledging his racism, was he extraordinarily racist for his time?  He was certainly as racist as President Woodrow Wilson - the bar by which I tend to set historical racism for the 1910's-20's.  Presidents tend to be a reflection of the values of their time.  But he was certainly a good deal more racist than the American intelligentsia of the day, of which he was arguably a member.  This, to me, has always been the great paradox of HPL and one can imagine that he must have been raised in an extraordinarily racist household in order to have received such strong imprinting. 

[Eric Lofgren]

I would say that most households, even up to today, in North America and elsewhere, have held racist views of some degree or another. Marginally in some cases (like my own growing up in Canada) to outright xenophobia. I don't think these are views that can be held as endemic to a "white" society but simple ignorance and often just fear. I think HPL, while probably a little more extreme than others, was just pandering to his era by using it as a plot device, assuming it would be accepted. But it is curious how we see his views softening in his works, by the time he's near his death. He was a smart man. I'm sure he eventually worked out how unproductive and irrational racism was.