He's a specialist in folklore and mythology and being very skeptical of the whole situation looking to disprove the whole thing as a local legend with no basis in reality. This story starts with Albert Wilmarth, a resident professor at Miskatonic University in Arkham, exploring the rumours of strange, alien-like bodies floating in a Vermont river. "My brain whirled and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible wonders." But I'm willing to give it more than a fair chance. Lovecraft's writing has a reputation for being slow and overly elaborate, even for the time it was written. I did have somewhat of a negative preconception going in. How do I know this without reading one of his books? Yours truly used to play the Call of Cuthulu role playing game. Which always adds a bit of extra spice when exploring an author's work. Similar to what Stephen King has going on with his books. Also, his stories take place within the same universe. A real tragedy for the literary world as he'll have just been getting into his writing prime. What I do know of Lovecraft is that he passed away at the age of 46 from cancer. Well time to put that glaring omission from my C.V. And with myself, liking to think of myself as somewhat of a consummate horror fan with a good background in the genre, I'm ashamed to say I've never read his work. The guy is embedded in our pop culture with his Cuthulu mythos. You'd have to be living under a rock if you have any interest in the horror genre and not come across him. "The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams."Įvery man and his dog has head of Howard Philips Lovecraft. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.Īlthough Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
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