HPL stories you just don't really care for

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Well, I gotta say that the blatant racism in "The Street" bothered the heck out of me when I first read it, and I found "Dream Quest" long and dull.  But I think the thing HPL really sucked at was comedy.  "Old Bugs" is preachy and dumb, and there's not a single decent chuckle in "Ibid."  All-in-all, it's a good thing he stayed out of vaudeville.

Sometimes he's quite funny. The problem is that it's rarely intentional.

[chrisblue77]

The Picher in the House, the Cats of Ulther, Cool Air, these are terbeal storys, much like my spelling

[Tcho-Tcho Gourmand]

I really hate "The case of Charles Dexter Ward"; sorry, but it's so repetitive and so obvious that I can't stand it. Of course, I hate "The Street", too.

[Miskatonic Philologus]

Ruth - CthulhuChick: Sometimes he's quite funny. The problem is that it's rarely intentional.


My ABSOLUTE favorite in this category (pointed out in the podcast) is the line in Innsmouth about the fire-escape:

 Having filled my pockets with the flashlight’s aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state’s safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel...

 Indeed, the Deep Ones are known for their slip-shod adherence to building codes.

[Bob Lovecraft]

See, now that's really why the Innsmouth raid happened: OSHA got pissed and shut that place down.

Bob

[Miskatonic Philologus]

Getting back to this thread - I happened to have left Thing on the Doorstep on my MP3, and being to lazy to delete it, wound up relistening a bunch of times to it.

I have to say, I have a much better appreciation of the tale now - I mean it IS damned creepy. Getting past the woman-dominates-man sub-topic (remember that Asenath is actually possessed by her father, so she is actually no she), the key theme is one person psychologically dominating another.

A very scary story  

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

Getting back to this thread - I happened to have left Thing on the Doorstep on my MP3, and being to lazy to delete it, wound up relistening a bunch of times to it.

I have to say, I have a much better appreciation of the tale now - I mean it IS damned creepy. Getting past the woman-dominates-man sub-topic (remember that Asenath is actually possessed by her father, so she is actually no she), the key theme is one person psychologically dominating another.

A very scary story  

Glad you're liking it. Involuntary possession....scarier than becoming a Deep One.

[Genus Unknown]

I'll have to give "Doorstep" another read. I mainly remember it as being way too long for the amount of story it contains. Could have done without the Innsmouth connection too; it adds nothing to the story, and if you've read TSOI, it's distracting. I just keep looking for fish-man connections.

[JulieH]

Yeah, Doorstep didn't really NEED to connect up to anything else.  As usual, I wonder about the characters who suffer the true horror, and get mentioned and ignored compeltely...

Can you imagine being Asenath - the real girl - as your father takes your body?? NASTY!

It's like trying to imagine the arguments Wizard Whately used to convince Lavinia there was an upside to things.

For stories not liked - I've never been fond of the various dreamlands stories.  Horror just isn't when it's not in a recognizable world.  Making it take place "somewhere else" lessens the impact of any personal stake in the danger.

[Bob Lovecraft]

JulieH has a very good point about both the story completely ignoring Asenath and about horror in an alien setting.

To me, The Thing on the Doorstep was a great story, and part of that was because of the horror Daniel Upton shows for what happened to Asenath. Although to be honest, I think he was much more concerned about what Old Ephraim did and not so much what the victim suffered, but either way it is acknowledged. I wish Lovecraft would have gone into more detail about it, and had his characters much more horrified by it; it is, after all, the ultimate form of rape. Then to follow that up with the girl's murder is just the icing on the horrible cake.

As for horror in an alien setting, yeah, it just doesn't work as well as horror in a familiar setting. To me, part of the thrill of good horror is the perversion of the everyday world around you and the inability to cope with the change/revelation of it all. By contrast, take a normal person and chuck them into a wierded out environment and you have to explain to people WHY this is so horrible. It can work, don't get me wrong, but you have to have a lot of touchstones to everyday things. Take Hellraiser II for example. The protagonists are pulled into the Cenobites' world and it is a terrible place. But it is a terrible place made up of things from mundane life like knives and hooks and claustrophobic mazes and whatnot. In the dreamlands setting, almost NOTHING is mundane, and therein lies the disconnect. You simply have to try much harder to empathize with the character, and in doing so, you lose any real sense of danger/horror/excitement.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

For stories not liked - I've never been fond of the various dreamlands stories.  Horror just isn't when it's not in a recognizable world.  Making it take place "somewhere else" lessens the impact of any personal stake in the danger.

But the Dreamlands stories aren't supposed to be scary. They aren't horror stories at all.

[catamount]

For stories not liked - I've never been fond of the various dreamlands stories.  Horror just isn't when it's not in a recognizable world.  Making it take place "somewhere else" lessens the impact of any personal stake in the danger.

But the Dreamlands stories aren't supposed to be scary. They aren't horror stories at all.

You make a good point, look at how ghouls are written in Dreamquest... versus how ghouls are portrayed in Pickman's Model. They seem almost like completely different creatures.

[Miskatonic Philologus]

It's true that Asenath doesn't get the back-story she deserves - but I have been left wondering what the hell happened to Dan Upton??

He killed the possessed body of Edward Derby, so was he commited to the nuthouse? sent to prison? surely he wasn't let off... And, of course, he did it not only out of friendship for Edward, but also stop stop whatever ole Whately was up to.

The lines near the end, in Edward's letter, I find quite moving:

Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you.


I now think of Doorstep as one of those HPL tales that grows on you.

[JulieH]

For stories not liked - I've never been fond of the various dreamlands stories.  Horror just isn't when it's not in a recognizable world.  Making it take place "somewhere else" lessens the impact of any personal stake in the danger.

But the Dreamlands stories aren't supposed to be scary. They aren't horror stories at all.

You make a good point, look at how ghouls are written in Dreamquest... versus how ghouls are portrayed in Pickman's Model. They seem almost like completely different creatures.

I forget - I lump in all the "non-current real world" stories, like the Doom that came to Sarnath and The Old Gods, and all those into what I think of as "The Dreamlands stories".  And the only ones I like are The Cats of Ulthar (though it's not scary either) and Nyarlathotep - which always makes me think of Lud in King's Wasteland.

[Fenrix]

If it leans horror, I can find some reason to like it. If it leans fantasy, I tend to dislike it. Although I do hate Dreamquest of Unkown Kadath ever since C&C analogized it to Lovecraft's Wizard of Oz story. Everyone loves Baum, even HPL. 

I can't remember more than a handful of discussions of "Herbert West" that didn't lambast it as quasi-juvenile drek. I instead get the feeling that it's reputation is enhanced for a lot of more casual fans by the Stuart Gordon film, exacerbated by its absence from Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, which from personal observation and hearing from various fans, I assume was the most popular Lovecraft from the early 1980s to about 2000 or so, until they went into public domain and before the various Joshi annotated versions.

I'm the opposite. Herbert West: Reanimator is my favorite story. And I really dislike the movie. I think that's my unpopular position (which I find myself defending often) is loving the story and disliking the movie.