Original subtitles

the course of HP Lovecraft's life was altered by an unfortunate madness

in April of 1893, his father

a commercial traveler from the vicinity of Boston

was on business in Chicago

it was there that Winfield Scott Lovecraft

experienced the general paralysis of the insane

Winfield's violent hallucinations

were soon placed him in Butler Hospital

his troubled wife, Susan Phillips Lovecraft

was forced to return home to her family in Providence, Rhode Island

with Susie was her two-year-old son,

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

today, the man readers of weirdfiction known as HP Lovecraft

is ranked alongside America's best writers

20 He defined the themes and obsessions of 20th century horror

21 and as we chug on into the 21st century, he doesn't seem to be going away

he let drop away all the trappings of what is called "horror"

and he moved into some narrative peculiar to himself, invented his own genre really

Lovecraft tells you about the scale of man in the cosmos

and also he is really the most articulate about saying, there isn't any indifference from the ancient gods to man

Lovecraft takes that optical empty to the cosmos

If you could think of a kind of supernatural horror fiction

it's almost certain that at some point in his career

Lovecraft applied himself to it

and when he got it right that he often did, nobody could beat him

��

these are the unspeakable names of the Old Ones

the very heart of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos

a loosely connected canon, which has gone on

to became one of literature's most influential creations

I don't know that Lovecraft ever set down initially and went: "I'm going to grow a grand mythos"

I think that, yes it begins

and then everything else sort of fits in it

it's a very complex sort of inbreeding of mythologies and what

essentially the pitch would be what, things much older than mankind

things much older than earth are gazing upon on us

with indifference and cruelty

those Old Ones were gone now hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world

until the time when the great priest Cthulhu

from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise

and bring the earth again beneath his sway

these kind of being are you know that demons coming from hell

there are these wired tentacle creatures coming from other worlds into ours

and that they have been banished and that they will return someday and regain what was once theirs

the Old Ones of the universe, the Old ones of the Cosmos

so that's force beyond us that we are incapable of controlling and that force

there is the universe that is vaster than we could ever comprehend

prior to Lovecraft, if you read horror, if you read ghost stories

you'll always have a vision of a world which is fundamentally hospitable:

"god is looking after you��"god is looking after the good people"

good people will probably survive horror stories or ghost stories or whatever

Lovecraft redefined things

He took it away from the ghost story away, from the gothic and into this vision

of a malign world, this place surrounded by

evil mad horrible monstrous things always trying to get in

who frankly don't really care about us

But what lied in an old world xenophobic gentleman

to write these tales of unknown abominations and cosmic gods

where bay and tranquil river blend

and leafy hillsides rise

the spires of Providence ascend against the ancient skies

and in the narrow winding ways that climb o'er slope and crest

the magic of forgotten days may still be found to rest

I AM PROVIDENCE

1890820

454 the Phillips' house at 454 Angell Street

was a vast-stage of old American values

Lovecraft's family was very well to do

and I believe they consider themselves to be of the Providence aristocracy

the Phillips line goes back very far in Providence history all the way

17 as early as the late 17th century

the Lovecraft side originates in England, and you could trace that all the way back to about the 15th century

there were Lovecrafts or Lovecrofts in Devon

he was a truly, almost a "Mayflower"specimen

preserved in the formaldehyde of New England you know

and he was an Anglophile that definitely did not get laid much you know

and the guy that was an alien amongst us, in the sense that he was not a very masculine child

1898719 after Winfield's death from syphilis on July 19th 1898

young Howard was all Suzie Lovecraft had left

she mothered her child incessantly

so much so, that she was known to make friends stoop when walking hand-in-hand with her son

for fear his arm would be pull from its socket

despite her over attention

Suzie Lovecraft's near puritanical views restrained any physical affections toward her son

Lovecraft would later admit to his only wife

that this form of mothering was a devastating to him

his grandfather Whipple Phillips, was a very impressive industrialist

Lovecraft remembers Whipple telling him oral ghost stories

at the age of 4 or 5

he tutored him in a number of other ways, trying to take an interest into his education

in the attic was an immense library presumably collected by his grandfather

and Lovecraft went up there as a boy with a candle secretly and started reading these old books

and fell in love with the 18th century

Lovecraft is more than a product of his time

he is a product of a couple of centuries earlier, so he was born out of time

18 one of the important things for the 18th century was the code of a gentleman

to live as a gentleman with dignity and honesty and integrity

1819 he read the literature of the 18th century and the early 19th century and said

"I want to be like those people I want to be like Alexander Pope"

��who wrote poetry just for the love of it"

I've always had this subconscious feeling

that, everything since the 18th century is unreal or illusory

a sort of grotesque nightmare or a caricature"

Lovecraft learned a lot in his grandfather's house

in fact that all the learning that he had I think came from there

his schooling was intermittent at best apparently he had various of

nervous melody that had kept him out of school

this was a time before education was mandatory

you didn't have to send your child to school if you didn't want to

8 at the age of 8 he would became filled with burning love of chemistry

shortly there after that he discovered astronomy, which I think was an even more important influence he says

it was through astronomy that he gained a sense of the boundlessness of the universe

and the insignificance of humanity within the cosmos

there's a phrase that generally I only encountered it when talking when reading or talking with people like paleontologist or geologist

the kinds of "Deep Time" which is pretty alien to most people, most people tend to

think of history and terms of��years��

"Deep Time" is that time before, before the comprehension of man

the geological time

is a way of thinking about it where you are working on a time scale where you talk about things like mountains are pushed up in row, continent shift

spices evolve and became extinct

but it is not something you could process

humanity was limited to earth

which made humanity itself small and threatened and fragile, so because

he was a frightened and fragile being himself

he populated that emptiness with monsters

frequent visits to the attic gave Susie the impression that

her son was trying to hide from the world and others

that he was a vulnerable child and comfortable with himself

the relationship of Susie Lovecraft with her son was problematical at best

clearly she loved him but I think because of what had happened to her husband, Lovecraft's father who had died of syphilis

I think she developed some weird love-hate relationship with Lovecraft

called him hideous, said to a neighbor that he had hideous face and that's why

he wouldn't go outdoors much

Susie repeated these opinions enough times that her son actually grew to believe them

insecurity mixed with classical tendencies

segregated young Lovecraft from others his age

but this solitary childhood, only kindled his imagination

I used to be tormented constantly with a peculiar type of recurrent nightmare

in which a monstrous race of entities, called by me 'Night-Gaunts'

usedtosnatch me up by the stomach, they carried me up through infinite leagues of black air

over the towers of dead and horrible cities

with vast aggregations of night-black masonry

embodying monstrousperversions of geometrical laws

feeding his taste for the macabre

was the recent discovery of tales by Edgar Allan Poe

Lovecraft is the most significant descendant of Poe

and you can see that heritage most clearly in those early stories that

evoke affects such as those in "The Tell-Tale Heart", say

"The Tell-Tale Heart" could have been written by Lovecraft

he may have wanted to be a little like Edgar Allan Poe

but he went into a whole different direction with his imagination

you know Poe talked about how short stories should be

everything should be there to create one particular affect

whereas Lovecraft I think goes for much moresort of a bigger canvas somehow than Poe did

in his teenage years, Lovecraft would attempt quiet a few of stories in the Poe style

most however, were destroyed by Lovecraft

I think too many writers are too hard on themselves had to be said that,

you know Lovecraft epitomized this trend

and I actually thinks that there's one positive thing to be bought from that, he was a great writer

I think you know, any writer who feels down about their own work

should read Lovecraft's comments about his own work

he almost never has a good thing to say about his own work

this may be a kind of version of what he perceived as "good manners"

because there's no doubt that he would have thought

it's very ill-mannered to praise his own work

I think that Lovecraft was full of insecurities at that time, he really didn't know what to pursue in terms of a career

maybe he didn't feel that he needed a career

at least in terms of the money because he felt that the money would always be there

but shortly there after he discovered that the money wasn't gonna be there

in 1904, Whipple Phillips was already suffering from poor investments

in a failed dam project

1908328 the stress of it all no doubt tribute to his death on March 28th, 1908

the house on Angell Street was sold

12 the library that schooled Lovecraft for 12 years went with it

he loved that place, it was there he knew the only security he ever had

even though with only 3 blocks away, the new home Susie had picked for her son was an unknown country

though high-school would offer some enjoyment

Lovecraft was vexed by the subjects that escaped him

Lovecraft said he had a full scale nervous break-down

we don't really know what that means

I personally believed that it was the result of his discovery that

his lack of knowledge or lack of proficient in mathematics

prevented him from pursuing a career as astronomer

1908 in the summer of 1908, he simply left school and never returned

19081917 Lovecraft's reclusion would last from 1908 until 1917

judging from his letters, this break-down

had all the remarks of a deep depression

I shall know human society that had givenmyself too much but a failure in life

to be seen socially by those who had known me as a youth

they foolishly expected great things of me

Lovecraft himself was a pretty crazy person, he was kind of nuts, wondering around

I don't, I don't mean, I think "eccentric" is a better word

even for his time, he must have been not only a recluse but an oddity

he would go out occasionally apparently, and people saw him walking down the street in a raincoat

with the flapps up to his collar and

and looking straight ahead not try to make eye contact with anybody

one activity that endured through this period was his reading

this exposed Lovecraft to the amateur pulp magazines

that would one day be the ablert of his own work

I think amateur journalism saved Lovecraft both as a writer

and as a human being

19131914 there was Lovecraft in 1913, 1914 basically rotting away, he clearly didn't know what to do with himself

and then all of a sudden here was this small world of amateur journalism where there are other

people like him

trying to be writers but not writing for money

and I think for that moment, that was important to Lovecraft

because amateur journalism was a kind of school for writers

Lovecraft went on to publish his own amateur magazine "The Conservative"

in its pages he exhibited a strong passion for the beliefs he formed during his isolation

including a pronouncedxenophobia

the most alarming tendency observable in this age

is a growing disregard for the established forces of law and order

weather or not stimulated by the noxious example of the almost subhuman Russian rabble

the less intelligent element throughout the world

seems animated by a singular viciousness

every artist with every work of art is a product of his or her time

and he reflected that a lot of very American feelings

the feelings he had intellectually with beliefs in racism and so on

are reprehensible they were then as they are now, and yet in a sense

you can't expect the guy to leap out of his skin at modernsensibilities

he has this really, this really archaicbudging idea that

for society to be stable then it had to be homogeneous

he just didn't like to see the culture he knew go down to drain which he felt would happen

just by erosion as more and more immigrants came

sort of a "Pat Buchanan" kind of a thing

this absolutely genuinely worry of the evils of breeding, of mixed breeding

and breeding in general I suppose

you know the evils of taking purity with an almost Aryan sense of pride

regardless, "The Conservative" attracted fellow amateurs

both sympathetic and contrary

they were attracted by Lovecraft's erudite mind

and as a result Lovecraft developed very close ties

to a number of these amateur journalists, and these became life-long friends of his

they exchange many many letters even after they had left the amateur journalism movement

and he kind of found his home in a magazine like that

or another magazine, fan magazines that he wrote for

and he found a lot of like-minded souls out there would read his stuff and really love them

and he developed followers, I mean it's almost like a cult to them and himself

he wrote so many letters in such white heat and such intensity and such length

that it's easy to suppose that he sacrifice stories to his correspondence

12 I believe he had token like over 120000 letters written

and these letters are in short pieces too, I mean

they are copious, and pages and pages of details and notes or suggestions

on how to improve their own writing

as the web of his correspondents grew

it also allowed Lovecraft to test early stories on respected readers

1919 in 1919, an armaturejournal called the "The Vagrant" took notice

"Dagon" was the first of Lovecraft's stories to be printed

a captured sailor escapes German sea-raiders

only to come aground on a stretch of sea bottom forced up ,

by a volcanic upheaval

the region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish

and of other less describable things, which I saw

protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain

it's got this awful sense of atmosphere that this poor guy

is out in the middle of nowhere

surely doomed with a black sun scouring on, what an image

as the sailor explores the riff, he discovers a cyclopean monolith

whose carved surface depicts a race of an ancient fish-man

they were damnably human in general outline

despite webbed hands and feet

shockingly wide and flabby lips,glassy, bulging eyes

and other features less pleasant to recall

Suddenly all hell breaks loose with this huge "Charlie Tuna"character coming out and embracing this monolith

and then at the end what happens is that narrator just demented

he is now on the other side of the world but afraid old Charlie's following him

and he is: "Oh my God! That thing in the window!"

well, has this creature followed him, or is he just plain nuts, we don't know

but either way it's a great little story

but you know, you have it there, you've got the creature from the cyclopean creatures from the sea is virtual Cthulhu in miniature

"Dagon" and other stories from this period would set the Lovcraftianmodel

scholarly people discovering violations of natural law

and being driven towards madness or death

it's also exhibited Lovecraft's use of baroque description and subjective adjectives

one of the clich�� notions of Lovecraft propounded by people don't very like his work, usually

you know is that he only has one style that consisted mostly or partly on the adjectives

��like, um, "Over the eldritch town of Daleech"

the gibbous moon hung illuminating the squamous and batrachians inhabitants��"

what he is saying that is just that, um, you know the moon was nearly full

over the weird town of Daleech, and

everybody who lived there were bloody peculiar frogs

what Lovecraft is, a baroque writer as that he goes in and carefully modulates

these over ripe incredibly complicated physiologies and sentences and style

but it's all his own

if you meet Lovecraft for the first time as an adult you do kind of have to learn how to read him

it's not a modern style it's not a strip-down style

it's not a very efficient style and there are many many things about it that is erasable

He will pick a few words and over use them appallingly

"Eldritch", "Gibbous"

a lot of his stories are ??? nothing happens

especially nothing happens to the narrator

they are just people who start terrified and they end up terrified

And there are other things you can make fun of him for:

the tendency to write in the first person,

and to keep writing

the ultimate parodic Lovecraftian phrase is

somebody going mad while writing and something's coming up:

"I can hear them now coming up the steps��

��their hellish tentacles are scrumming at the door��

ah, Shub-Niggrath, the beast with a thousand young��fhtagn fhtagn"

and it's done, dot dot dot

you disappear in a burst of ellipsis of italics

it's a style that incredibly anal retentive

and you know this guy went over it and over it and over it until he made the combination that to his taste

which maybe gaudy to some it wasn't a perfectbalance

one thing that influenced this purple style

was Lovecraft's current fascination with the writing of Lord Dunsany

Dunsany wrote these magical little tales of dreamlands and gods and

he has this amazing prose style influenced by the King James bible

and apparently nothing else

Lovecraft was very taken by Dunsany's creation of a mythical pantheon of gods

and Lovecraft eventually admitted that, that's how he come to write the stories of the of the Cthulhu mythos

he took those Dunsanian gods which are setting in a fantasy world

and put them into the real world, and that's how he came up with his own cosmic mythology

though Lovecraft was now a published author

pursuing payment for what was only to be a personal pleasure

was far from his idea of a gentleman:

an existence that enjoy "being " rather than "doing"

his fellow amateurs urged Lovecraft to go against his anti-commercialism

and higher out his skills as a "ghostwriter"

19191920 as an invisible author, Lovecraft would be published many times between 1919 and 1920

with no practical experience in commerce however, Lovecraft charge rates much lower than the standard of the time

15 barely clearing a minimum goal of 15 dollars a week

despitemeager returns, this was a prolific time for Lovecraft

1921 17 by 1921 he had written close to 17 stories

unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood

bring only fear and sadness

wretched is he who looks back upon

lone hours in vast and dismal chambers

with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books"

the glory of the "The Outsider" is that it is the story of the thing beyond arcane

briefly coming into the file light into that circle

and then fleeing back into the darkness,

A lone narrator emerges from his crumbling castle

after a long seclusion

he comes on to the surface of the earth to find people fleeing in terror

from a monstrous thing that the narrator can plainly see before him

I love the twisted ending so to speak

and the you're reading the story, in the very last line of the story it scares you

I was proud of this guy as he escaped from his catacombs

and the moment that the real people saw him and screamed and he saw his reflection

and in horror he stenches out his hand and touches the mirror Boom! That's the end of the story

"oh my gosh, he is a ghoul, he is a creature from the darkness, now we must go off with him"

and I went back and reread it just to see how he done that

At his best, Lovecraft is as much as an existentialist as Albert Camus would be

I know always that I am an outsider

a stranger in this century and among those who are still men

this is as a strong as a statement about

how I felt it in my teenage years as anything

his writing wasn't may very possibly be disguised autobiography

He does seemed to be somebody who had an unhappy childhood and who felt he was physically repulsive

But did he feel that because of that he was an object of horror, that everybody shunned him

Certainly in terms��his physical appearance he was sort of embarrassed about a number of things

he felt he had this ingrown facial hairs and that he felt that it's a disfiguring factor

so in a way, he's kind of using himself as a jumping-off point

but I think he would come off much more as the weirdo

that Colin Wilson makes him

if he really were like these characters in the stories

ultimately I don't think he was

when Lovecraft emerged from his own isolation, the consensusof the Providence was that

the house on Angell street was one to be avoided

and that Lovecraft and his mother were eccentrics

thought this view could be argued in the case of Lovecraft

Susie was indeed cause for concern

her home life was one of hypertension, where Susie was known to

cause major dramas over the slightest thing

on March 13th, 1919

around the same time her son was emerging as a writer

Susie Lovecraft had been admitted to the same institution that

claimed to her husband years before

Susie Lovecraft passed away on May 24th, 1921, not from nerves

but from a botchedgallbladderoperation

Susie's death was hard on Lovecraft

both emotionally and financially

she left her son a meager estate

which was already meager when she inherited it from her father

that inheritance plus an equally paltry income from ghost writing

barely met Lovecraft's expenses

he made little enough money himself and used to survive by hideous cans of beans

but I have to wonder about Lovecraft whether or not he would have taken any odd job, just to be able to make money and

I don't think he would he had a certain set of standards and again being, you know, he had a love of old pride

that he was a gentleman, he's an author and he was not just gonna take any odd job

���� Lovecraft moved in with his aunts, Lilian Clark and Annie Gamwell,

But aunts were no substitute for a mother

his fiction writing waned

relieve came from Lovecraft's fellow journalists,

"Herber West, Reanimator" actually is a very funny story and

Lovecraft intended it, I think, to be funny

it was commissioned for a humor magazine

5 for which Lovecraft received all of 5 dollars per installment

keep in mind it was a humor magazine called "Home Brew"

founded and edited by one of his armature friends, George Julian Houtain

Houtain said: "You can't make them too horrible!"

so clearly Lovecraft is encouraged to write

just the most outlandish flamboyant horror that he could think of

Lovecraft chafed on to the reflections of the episodic writing

19221 still the series debuted on January 1922

under the banner "Grewsome Tales"

later to be titled "Herbert West, Reanimator"

Herbert West

who was my friend in college and in after life

can speak only with extreme terror

Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process

and that the so-called "soul"is a myth

my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead

can depend only on the condition of the tissues

I love this sense of atmosphere on the "Herbert West" stories

the sense of flays

evidently were not in the movies but

the sense of history it gives you, a sense of place and context, that is extremely strong

now a lot of people feel that the influenceof ��Frankenstein" is heavy on that story

I disagree, because remember what Victor Frankenstein was doing was

creating an artificial man from different parts of human bodies

what Herbert West is trying to do is reanimated an entire living body

after it has theoretically dead

a very different conception, I think

West's adventures in reviving corpses were not

among Lovecraft's favorite works nor his most profitable

nevertheless, it was a small milestone in his career as a professional writer

during this time, Lovecraft also developed two fascinations

incongruent with his xenophobicpersonality:

Travel and a woman

Lovecraft had been lured away from Providence for a gathering of amateurjournalists in Boston

the prospect of intellectual discourse with his compatriots

was too rich to refuse

rare trip soon became a habit

even if Lovecraft preferred to stay within the northeast

where familiar traditions prevailed

on one such visit in 1921, H P Lovecraft met Sonia Haft Greene of New York

1883316 born on 16th, March1883

Sonia was far more experienced in the ways of the world, having being married once before

he met this woman who was a Jewish

one of the things that I found reading the letters, Lovecraft's letters

was how anti-Semitic he was

and the idea he ended up marring a Jewish woman I think is pretty extraordinary

and she must have looked at him with the side she wanted him

he wasn't the worst catch in the world I supposed he had a certain dignity

he was kind of tall and thin and bonny

she is just the opposite of him, she was very out-going and very social, and she sounded like she was fun

and you know she was the one of��as I understand, introduced him to sex

it was the shared passion for the literary however that attracted them most

during one of many moonlit walks together,

Lovecraft and Sonia encountered a weird gruntingnoise in the night

it was an obvious inspiration for one of his stories

but Lovecraft encouraged Sonia to write it instead

this encouragement earned Lovecraft a kiss, his first since childhood

and that, a rare sign of physical affection from his mother

Sonia's story became "The Horror at Martin's Beach", and was published in 1923

by that time she had convinced Lovecraft to ��test the waters�� of New York city

with a prolonged visit

she knew that Lovecraft had to be taken out of Providence,

that if he was really gonna had a life that he had to go out into the world, and she knew how talented he was

and she felt if he went to New York, where the magazines were actually published

and could meet some people and he could become a success

but in a growing metropolis teeming with immigrants,

an acute xenophobic like Lovecraft would soon experience problems

for the moment though, Lovecraft had every reason to be hopeful:

Sonia had entered his life, and in March 1923, "Weird Tales" magazine was born

as much as science fiction and fantasy might be marginalized today

it was certainly a lot more marginalized in the 1920s and 30s

"Weird Tales" was very influential as it happened

it was the best of all the "pulp" magazines, devoted to weird fiction to horror stories and a certain kind of sci-fi

tales of the fantastic had been increasing in popularity

publisher JC Henneberger saw potential

and dedicating an entire journal to the genre

there was a market there, as little paying as the market might have been,

as marginalized as the magazine might have been,

even though it's being printed on horror paper, it doesn't matter, there is a market there, there are readers

and there was a place for you to start

at the best it was virtually a roll-call of the great pulp fantasy writers

and much better than "pulp" implies

many masters of the imaginative fiction got there start in the pages of "Weir Tales"

H.P.Lovecraft was no different

Lovecraft regarded "Weird Tales" as his single market base

it was one magazine he was, well relatively proud to write for even though it has to be said

that he believed that the average ��Weir Tale�� stories possibly below average ��Weir Tale�� stories was not that great

it took a great deal of convincing from Sonia and other friends

but Lovecraft finally relented and sent in a selection of stories

"Weird Tales" bought all 5 submissions, thus began a lifelong relationship

192433 on March 3rd, 1924, Lovecraft embarked on another relationship:

after an aggressive campaign from Sonia

Lovecraft finally asked for her hand in marriage

41 33 the bride was nearly 41, the groom was 33

his aunts were outraged by this

you know, they thought the girl that he married was completely beneath him

at huge risk to a sense of security

Lovecraft would leave Providence to live with his new wife in New York

for a virgin reclusivepuritan moral standard

marriage promised to be an interesting experience

sometimes I feel like that she just must have been something just short of a sane

because what she married, was a guy who refused to work,

except on the stories

this is the one area which I think that Lovecraft really failed as a human being

I think she acknowledged in her own memiors at some point that she felt like she could change him

she couldn't change him

19221924 between 1922 and 1924, Lovecraft's narrative aplord was on another upswing

this included the creation of three reoccurring elements

of Lovecraft's gestating mythology

Miskatonic University

the dark town of Arkham

and literature's most dreadedgrimoire

written by an alter ego from Lovecraft's childhood

one inspired by his reading of the "Arabian Nights"

the mad Abdul Alhazared

the Necronomicon has become this strange sort of combination of

urban legend and bad joke

first of all it existed in the mind of Lovecraft, and then other people used it

it was one of the easiest things��"The Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazared"

"Yes, this is the book of all of the forbidden things"

the Necronomicon was a book that collected all manner of summoning spells

spells that would cause the return of the ancient creatures from unknown worlds and dimensions

well the Necronomicon is yet another of those Lovecraftian concepts with, you know

never meant to be fully bodied force

it's a series of references that began imply this much larger tome

with more terrible secrets and Lovecraft couldn't even hint at

so then other people would use it, you got Fritz Leiber, you got Bloch

you got Manly Wade Wellman, and August Derleth

all these other writers putting it into their stuff

so now it feels a little truer, like maybe it ought to exist

another story from this period that can be seen as one of Lovecraft's early best," The Rats in The Walls"

"Rats in The Walls�� was one of two stories that I read when I was a kid

my father bought me a book called "Great Tales of Terror And the Supernatural" and it had

all sorts of stories, two from Lovecraft: "Rats In The Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror"

and he read them aloud to me when I was a kid, it was mind boiling

a gentleman of the De La Poer family

returns to his ancestralestate in England

there he and his black cat, Nigger-man

are disturbed by verminousslitheringbehind the walls

Lovecraft was great at depicting the moment of this

convey by sound or by a fleeting shadow and it really put you there

�� and made you almost empathically experience the moment where you heard the noise behind the woodwork

more than a lot of his stories literally embodies that sense of "Deep Time "

in the sense of as De La Poer is trying to investigate the source of the

of the phenomenon in the house begins to go through this sub-basement down into this

vast subterranean caverns beneath the house

that exploration into the depth of the castle is simultaneously

an exploration into the depth of the past and the horrors that comes out of the history

I seemed to be looking down from an immense height

upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth

where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff

aflock of fungous,flabby beasts

whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing

Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task

a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss

and fell to devouring beasts and man alike

it's one of the stories where Lovecraft is playing with the classical gothic tropes

you know you have the family with the hidden things

18 you have all of this sort of early 18th century gothic elements to the story

all of these strange stuff about the "Exhume Priory"

and this lost world under the cliff there

and these squealingwhite flabby beasts

and the people are - the characters in the stories being descendants from different lines

of the bad guys, that bred these things

and the things having evolved, what a brilliant brilliant work

it's really creepy stuff, it gets under your skin

but I think it's kindda obvious if you turned down the walls of��of any kind of civilized person

behind there something is really abominable works

"Rats" was snatched up by "Weird Tales" in 1924

the first year and a half of Lovecraft's marriage was like a tonic

it was grand, it was a new adventure for him

um��he also made lots of friends there too Frank Long, for example being one of his best friends

works however, even Lovecraft's drive to find it, was limited

I think A: he didn't want a job

and B: He knew that any employment he could find in the city of New York or elsewhere

would be really bruising for him

the longer Lovecraft stayed in New York, the worse his xenophobia became

almost as a retaliation against the immigrant outsiders

flourishing around him

the unrevealingof the grog, so to speak, happened you know because of financial reasons

Sonia lost her hat shop and eventually had to look for work in Cleveland

a job offer was agreed with an enthusiasm by Sonia and lothing from Lovecraft

there was too far from Providence

Brooklyn was unbearable, but at least it was just a train right away

1924 by the end of 1924 Sonia had no choice but to leave for the mid-west

alone

Sonia would be back and forth to support her husband

but her influence over Lovecraft's mood was waning

his ridicule of the melting pot that was the New York city

reach manic even racist levels

I certainly hope to see promiscuous immigration permanently curtailed soon

heaven knows, enough harm has already been done by the admission of limitless

hordes of the ignorant superstitious and biologically injurious scum

of southernEurope and western Asia

for the most part, Lovecraft kept these views to himself

knowing full well that his friends and correspondents did not share his views

it wasn't long before his fiction give voice to these demons

Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor

near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence

the blasphemies of a hundred dialects assail the sky

Policemen despair of order or reform

and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world

from the contagion

I don't think you can ever curlywhat people think or believe with what they write

or at least I don't think you can do it on the one to one basis so beloved

of literary scholarsacademics and amateurpsychologists

for modern standards there is plenty of racism in Mark Twain

there is plenty of racism in Edgar Rice Burroughs, there is plenty of sexism in Edgar Rice Burroughs

you could thought those works were belongings to that time

what I believe that, it's essentially a fossil record of what a gentleman

of New England would think at the time

it's very very easy to look at Lovecraft and go, ok well

you know "Cthulhu" means the female genitalia

or all of these outsiders were really Jews or blacks

or you know, this is what the batrachian thing is all about, it's a cunningly disguised racism

he did however made a overly racist statement toward some groups and,

that certainly no surprise back in the 20s and 30s,

and it's too bad, I mean that doesn't make it right, but I just don't think you can take it seriously

it will be funny if we were not so objection, and to a certain understand it still is funny what it is even though it is completelyobjectionable

the sheltered character who took a long long time to grow

or you can say never grow up, that isn't true

and so is that reacting in adolescence fashion

to the streams of people who flooded the street in Brooklyn in "Red Hook" Brooklyn

and I think when he refer to himself as an unassimilatedalien

I think he understood that when he was in New York on some level he understood despite all these detestations

that New York worked

you know, despite his perceptionof it, its horrid chaotic sass pool, it were something that worked

he didn't work

it became clear to his friends that Lovecraft's exile in New York

was leading to a breakdown

some even feared a suicide attempt

help came from Lovecraft's aunts, Lilian and Annie

who found a small home for their nephew back in the safety of Providence

Sonia offered to buy the house for him, but this was not New York

in Providence propriety wouldreign

if Lovecraft could not support his wife, he would distance himself instead

19264 in April of 1926, Lovecraft returned to his beloved city

He was released from Brooklyn and he went back to his immense�� to his almost unimaginably immense relief to Providence

1926 that summer of 1926 was the start of Lovecraft's riches period

it started with an idea he had outlined during those fearful days in New York

an idea which became the most notable addition to Lovecraft's fictional universe

the story of Lovecraft, the first one I read was "The Call of Cthulhu", like most everyone, I would imagine

and it just struck me because it was an combination of cosmology and anthropology and horror that was all melded into one

George Gammel Angell, professor emeritus ofSemtic languages

at Brown University

is mysteriously murdered on the streets of Providence

sometime earlier, Angell had come into possession of a troubling clay sculpture

it represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline

but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers

a scaly, rubbery-looking body,prodigious claws

on hind and fore feet,and long, narrow wings behind

the description of the monster is probably better seen on paper

than it would be visualized

there's a thing about Lovecraft, all his creatures are really interesting

when you read them because your imagination starts to work on it

and you keep it amorphous and disgusting with the seafood variety that H P Lovecraft describes

I mean that he must have something about fish

really bothered him, you know squid and octopus and stuff like that

Angell's investigations of the graven image are taken up by his grand nephew

here is this guy, whose always, his eccentric uncle died and he was looking through all his papers and

as I did when Lin Carter died it made it kind of a chore

but you never know what kind of good issue you gonna find and he sees all these crazy things: ��What the hell is he into?��

when you read it's sort of an incredibly clumsy story

here is a lump of this and here is some newspaper reports

and here is a �� it's sort of a part journalism and it's almost anecdote like, and it doesn't really have a plot

it's assembled in fragments, in a very interesting way and also a modernist way

what that technique does, is to suggest an aura of mystery in itself

and before long his intuitive and before long his expecting

the secret agents of Cthulhu to come and get him and

why is he even writing these things since he doesn't want anybody else to know about it

it's about that reoccurring thing in Lovecraft

that fear of science or just human knowledge

going where it doesn't necessarily go ofaccidentally recovering things that

either it was not much point knowing them or knowing them could lead to our destruction

the nephew endeavors to connect the reports of vivid dreams across the world

dark practices in the bayous of New Orleans

and the discovery of a corpse city by a band of innocent sailors

there lay great Cthulhu and his hordes

hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,?after cycles incalculable

the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive

"Cthulhu" is almost like the Paul Revere of all these deities, you know, [��Paul Revere ]

or the King Arthur waiting to come back, you know and take over

he's just a general evil that existed in another place

but it's like Christianity in the sense

in sense of our creators he's our destroyer

he's kind of another version of the devil I suppose, except thatslimier

as elaborate as this story was

the spelling and the pronunciation of the ancient names was even more so

Cthulhu

of course, the association of the name this is my fourth language

Poppy Z Brite makes fun of the way our pronounce "Cthulhu", but I don't know another way

look at the way Lovecraft tries to pronounce it I can't pronounce it

many of his colleagues apparently didn't know how to pronounce it, or pronounced it wrongly

1934 and, so finally in a letter in 1934, he tells a colleague, well, it's really meant to be two syllables

you are supposed to put your tongue at the roof of your mouth and cough it out like "Clu-lu"

but he says, you know the name is entirely alien name

not design to be pronounced by human vocal course

the word is only a symbol for something that is entirely beyond the ability for humans to make the sounds

so there is no incorrect way to pronounce it, because there is no correct way to pronounce it

despite Lovecraft's effort to wave a rich narrative

"The Call of Cthulhu" was initially rejected by "Weird Tales"

this was common practice of the anthologist editor Farnsworth Wright

especially when presented with a story as original as Lovecraft's creation

one of Lovecraft's tricks of course was, was to take the rejected story sit on it for a little while

sent it back to Wright saying I've made the changes you asked for, having not done a single thing with it

and more often but not apparently, Wright would fall for this trick

"The Call Of Cthulhu" was eventually printed

19282 in February 1928's issue of "Weird Tales"

Lovecraft's fee for such a seminal work of fiction, 165 dollars

as Lovecraft's writing began to blossom, so did the man

I vastly regret the absence of traditional accomplishments

fencing, horsemanship, military service caused by my early ill health

and lack of appreciation of the quality of the well-roundedness

Lovecraft began to entertain his friends once more

including them on long walks through Providence and other New England excursions

Lovecraft was even beginning to evolve a form of tolerance toward the outsiders around him

especially the many cultures now living in Providence

in February of 1927, it was time for his writing to expand as well

"Charles Dexter Ward" is the novel in which he applies

all these sense of structure to that long walk and the effect is tremendous

The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists

Dr Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920

this is certainly borne by Ward's altered habits

especially by his continual search through certain grave dug in 1771

the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen"

Joseph Curwen was an obscure individual

who flight from Salem to Providence around 1761

now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen

was that he did not seem to grow much older than he had been on his arrival

at length, when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's advent

and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his face and physique

the people began to whisper more darkly

alchemy and the black arts proved to be Curwen's secret

I think one of the flaws in that story, and maybe only a flaw to me, is that

he uses this kind of pseudoscience that is actually a little bit beneath Lovecraft's acumen, it's a

it explains the mysterious and horrifying events by reference to certain ��essential Saltes ��

and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may,

without criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour"

and that's a little third grade, it's like bad science fiction

a band of raiders confront the doom man and his unhallowed wizardry

that night was never remarked on again

until Charles Ward learned of his descent from Curwen, in 1918

and continued his ancestor's experiments

connecting the past with the present, summoning the unspeakable to life

it's almost like a detective story, you know

Dr Willet is really discovering what happened to Charles Dexter Ward

discovering about Curwen, about the unfortunate accidents

from the efforts to basically bring demons down from the stars

and when they didn't have all the pieces, when they didn't have all the remains, you know

terrible awfulness would be brungup and they'd had to be put somewhere, of course

I wasn't quite sure why they just didn't destroy them, but maybe it was for sport, who knows

it's one of those case where his detractors say what he's writing about "unspeakable horrors"

and simply telling as that, they are unspeakable

in fact that's only get out at the moment when Dr Willet looks down the well and see something

that Lovecraft actually certainly found a metaphor for it

that's "tremendously" more than just the "unspeakable": that's the cosmic in bodily form

though completed, the lengthy tale of Charles Dexter Ward was never typed or submitted

he just left it in a drawer, he didn't think it was worth a bothering with

it was the first draft amazingly I believe "The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath" was also

how he didn't see the meridian in this stuff, it's just amazing

I don't think he was built to write longer narratives

He went as far as he could that way and it did press the envelope

some of the those letters are really rather long

but they are also "inert" in the certain way that a novel can not afford to be

there was another tale written during this time on which Lovecraft held an entirely different opinion

"The Colour Out Of Space" is just a great science fiction movie

um, story, it should be a movie

although I don't know how you'll do the colour, it's unlike anything we seen, I don't know what that is

There is a type of story where you go to the minimal setting:

a household or a farm a far field, and you

unleash upon them a cosmic melody, you know, a cosmic curse

1882 it all began in 1882, with a meteorite

and by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky

and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place

they had uncovered what seemed to be

the side of a large coloured globule embedded in the substance

the colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum

was almost impossible to describe

and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all

and "The Colour Out Of Space" it is as the story has it

just a colour out of space, it's literally indescribable in prose terms

it's something that almost impossible to even detect

it's something that so incredibly insidious, there is no escaping from it

except by geographically removing yourself as far as you can from the place

by the next harvest, flora and fauna are found deformed

and the Gardner family is infected with unexplained madness

6 it happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall

and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe

in her raving there was not a single specific noun

she was being drained of something

something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be

it wasn't just the meteorite, it was something that inside the meteorite

That begins to spread and poison the landscape and mutate the landscape and the people

it's one of those stories that Lovecraft moves into physical gruesomeness

the effects on the unlucky family that in the farm house

but it passes beyond that into absolute awesomeness, a kind of real transcendental quality of terror

the best Lovecraft had achieved

though "The Call Of Cthulhu" looked to the stars

"The Colour Out Of Space" was clearly set in the realm of science fiction

for this very reason, Lovecraft submitted his tale to the new journal "Amazing Stories"

19279 though they would eagerly publish this story in September of 1927

their lack of payment convinced Lovecraft that he should never stray far from the known quantity of "Weird Tales"

they would be the only magazine he formally submitted to for the rest of his life

1928 during a 1928's excursion to Massachusetts, Lovecraft happened on a ring of stones

oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops

more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers

along with talk of witch blood, the eerie cries of the whippoorwills

and the ever present Old Ones, Lovecraft shaped "The Dunwich Horror"

it was in the township of Dunwich, that Wilbur Whateley was born on the 2nd of February 1913

Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region

made no attempt to disavow the child

there is an inbreeding between, you know, gods and man, and they produced

you know, whatever you produced, you got this ��half-god half-man�� thing

Wilbur Whateley's grandfather is old wizard Whateley

he's an eccentric New England hick, what's his motivation is he trying to end the world

because he is some kind of sadie and nihilist, no, he just needs a few extra bucks

- And Yog-Sothoth agrees to give him a pirate blossom fee to pimps out his daughter to him

At the age of 10 Wilbur Whateley attained an unnatural size, that of a fully grown man

his facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity

exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy

there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips

large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair

and oddly elongated ears

what troubled the residents of Dunwich even more

was a number of cattle purchased by Old Whateley without ever increasing the size of his stock

and the dreaded something being kept in the upper part of the Whateley farm house

they are twins when they were born to Lavinia and that, you know

one is a normal, mostly normal looking, you know, 8 foot tall goat-ish looking man

and a half thing, you know, an invisible half brother which is much more like his father

soon, a mysterious thunder was heard in the woods

livestock and eventually entire family's disappeared

and Wilbur Whateley was discovered breaking into Miskatonic library

in search of a complete "Necronomicon", one that contains the rites for the Old Ones' return

Yog-Sothoth knows the gateYog-Sothoth is the gate

Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate

past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth

"The Dunwich Horror" earned Lovecraft his biggest pay day from "Weird Tales": 240 dollars

but again, Lovecraft failed to capitalize on his success, and would not write for more than a year

this time Lovecraft's reticent was due to a desire for artistic growth

There are my Poe pieces and my Dunsany pieces, but alas, where are my Lovecraft pieces

Lovecraft's writing on the surface appears to be imitations of other writers

if you see the early stories, there is a much more constrain sense of scope

and towards the end of his life he was gaining as a writer I think, and gaining as an artist and as a human being

and his view of the world became more ample

and I think when Lovecraft shed the influence of Dunsany

and started writing like Lovecraft that's when things take off

he was writing much better fiction, he was witting much more contemporary fiction

in many senses, I mean in the sense that the language was more contemporary and the settings were more contemporary

you can even see how some of his descriptions has started becoming more specific, you know

they go from being "unnamable of seen things" to being described as

a cucumber body with thrones or tentacles with proboscis

you know he really started relishing that and

he started to give a sense of dignity and history to these creatures that I think is unique

with Providence as a life line, Lovecraft was emboldened to venture further and further in art and in life

hHis correspondence engaged in healthy discussions

on race, man and civilization

the more Lovecraft exposes himself to other opinions and places

the more his views and phobias began to soften

this self improvement did not extent to his marriage, however

since his return to Providence, Sonia has seen very little of her husband

while she remained in New York for the sake of a career, Lovecraft favored his cherished city

on March 25th 1929, after constant pleads from Sonia, the Lovecrafts filed for a divorce

Sonia went on to Europe, a place Lovecraft had always long to visit but never did

later she moved to California where she remarried and led a full life until 1972

in 1930, Lovecraft had begun work on a new tale

by the time it was published in August of 1931, the changes in Lovecraft could be glimpsed on the page

well you need to celebrate "The Whisperer In Darkness"

because the astronomers now have taken the planetary status away from Pluto

which is to say, you know, ��Yuggoth, Black Yuggoth on the rim��

and in fact, "The Whisperer In Darkness"

this was Lovecraft's reaction to the discovery of a new planet

after a rash of unprecedented floods in Vermont

misshaped cadavers washed up along the river banks

they were pinkish things about five feet long;

with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins

or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs

Albert N Wilmarth, of the Miskatonic University

begins to investigate the origins of these alien things

the blasphemies that appeared on earth, came from the dark planet Yuggoth

but this was itself merely the populous outpostof a frightful

interstellar race whose ultimate source

must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum

it's actually one of Lovecraft's most restrained stories, there are very few that runs of agitates

most of it is done as a sense of letters, um, something I imagine

he probably learned, there's some example there from the novel Dracula, which he greatly admired

through the first hand contact with his colleague Henry Akeley,

Wilmarth learns of the dark intention behind the buzzing creatures

what Akeley deems are deadly danger, however turns out to be something else entirely

in the last stage of Lovecraft's career, when he began to write the best stories, in spite there being

what I called "inert" earlier, you can see him taking a different angle of vision

And masters of the heart what is known as "The Mythos"

"The Whisperer In Darkness", probably the first story in which one begins to see this shifting attitude

They are still frightening, and

and when their voices are recorded on tape ,they are intensely scary beings

but they may not be completely inimical to the human race

in fact the fungi from "Yuggoth" wish to expand man's senses

to enable his exploration of the cosmos and its secrets

this process however, involves removing the brain and placing it in a cylinder for the journey

all in the spirit of discovery, but hardly harmless

it's all a scam it's like people today that say, oh there is no problem with these lamofascism

where is the problem, these people are merely misunderstood

now you are wrong, and you better hope you don't pay with your life for this stupidity

and Wilmarth getting sucked into this thing and it isn't even Akeley anymore

His brain's in a can somewhere and he's being

a "led off the path" by the buzzing lobsters and all that

so that you being set up, if you think that's the case

still, "The Whisperer In Darkness" could be seen as a sign of tolerance to come

during the last years of his life

Lovecraft's travels continued to expand his first hand knowledge of changing world around him

he was making up for last time

but this long differed semi-introduction to the world, did not take

as thoroughly as it might have done, had I being chronologically anger

Lovecraft's fans could not keep up with his thirst for growth

ghost writing continued, but it's anonymity was becoming unattractive all the more

1931 so in early 1931 Lovecraft began work on another original story:

A tale of ancient Antarctic horror

it is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated

invasion of the antarcticwith its vast fossil-hunt

and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap

to deter the exploring world in general

from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains ofmadness

some of the descriptive passages in "At The Mountains Of Madness"

seemed to me to rank with the great geographical fantasies of literature

actually I just think it's a paintly quality in that novel you probably don't find so much in his other work

it is one of those places where all of the different influences come together

the idea of you are trekking across the ice, it's quite horrible, it's Antarctic

and it is science fiction and you know it's about an incursion by aliens

in the foot hills of this towering cliffs

an expedition discovered the fossil remains of a pre-Cambrian race

found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature

in furrows between ridges are curious growths

combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans

arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth

especially fabled Elder Things inNecronomicon

supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake

one of the most horrific ideas was that

the things that descent us were astounding starting almost dissecting them

you know, that is, that is a revelation of intelligence and curiosity

the sense of curiosity these things have leaving little trails around the equipment down so forth

that was what was so scary to me Something terribly and horrifying chased these men out

you know, something that was supposed to be a fossil record is after them

after the mysterious and utterly violation of the advance team

the survivors of the unfortunate expedition discovered a cyclopean city

hidden among the peaks

there, they learn the tragic history of the star-headed Elder Things

their shaping of life on earth

surviving war with other races of cosmic infinity

and falling prey to their slave race of Shoggoths,

protoplasmic masses, capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of forms

you know in the 60s there's an idea that aliens had come here and had kind of created the human race

but that idea really was old, compared to what Lovecraft had trimmed up:

which is the idea of these battling alien forces, you know on earth, and that man ended somehow inheriting this thing almost by default,

because these two major presences had sort of wiped each other out

the Old Ones in "At The Mountains of Madness��, are scientists they were artists, they were architects

yes, they are tentacled cucumbers with wings but

they are sentiment and intelligent beings

and that sense of intelligence make the evil at work in Lovecraft's story

much more intense

"At The Mountains of Madness" also displayed two new reactions to the fictional "unknowns"

fellowship and empathy

the real imaginative achievement for him

to have seen these threatening beings in a warmer light, eventually He kind of fell in love with them

he's been in love with them all along, actually

the Old Ones they may have been crinoid pickle shaped barrels with wings and starfishes for head

in a bad sense of humor, but they were man

but why is that

because now, they got the rebelled slaves the Shoggoths to worry about

so as Lovecraft seen a different group as same as him

because all people are equal

or he sympathized with them as slave owners who are now on the run

from a even weirder race, so I don't know what that means really, you know, they are not so bad

there's lead a sly guy aim against the opody bad guys

I think there is a huge Lovecraftian influence, a huge "At The Mountains of Madness" Influence

on the first Ridley Scott "Alien"

the idea of a ship that essentially lands on a planet

and they find out there lived city sized ship

and dead ancients in it and something that is very much alive and waiting

and then takes over the humans,

that's essentially you could say very much ��At The Mountains of Madness��

it has influence the story that ��The Thing�� was based on, which was another rip-off of ��At The Mountains of Madness��

so, I think its repercussions are very cinematic

this was the crowning jewel of the "Cthulhu Mythos"

it clearly came out as the crushing blow when Farnswoth Wright

editor of "Weird Tales", rejected it

by then sadly, Lovecraft had really decided that you know he no longer had

any ability to express and convey the kind of thing he wanted to convey

he was to write very little prose fiction for the last few years of his life

thought more stories were attempted over the next few years

most, like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", were problematic for Lovecraft

Lovecraft himself seemed almost embarrassed by "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

and I think probably he understood, he undoubtedly understood that it was

in a sense, kind of a reversion, a hearkening back to the same sort of xenophobic prejudices

that he had embraced in his youth

and why is everybody so down on Innsmouth

some of the stories would make you laugh

about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil

and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth

some of 'em have queer narrow heads

with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut

and their skin ain't quite right

these things are creatures that are born looking normal and the older they get, the stranger they become

until eventually their transformation will be complete and they'll slither off into the sea where they will live forever

it's definitely a sort of biological horror story

where you have the break down of the, not just the human society but of the human body

but I think the over writing concern is actually about culture, you have

the culture of the "Deep Ones"coming up and over the decades

eating away the culture of Innsmouth and so that finally Innsmouth will vanish

there is to be sure a kind of racist or xenophobic under current to that story

but I think it's very subtle and very indirectly expressed

I'm now begin to think it must be one of Lovecraft's one or two best stories

and he does something that you don't see a whole lot of Lovecraft doing: writing action scenes

I still think the escape from the Gilman Hotel is a marvelous action scene and running across

and running into the parade of horrific frog-fish things

it's it's just wonderful and not the sort of thing that he did a lot

Lovecraft never formally submitted "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" for publication

partially, Lovecraft marginalized himself

cause he was never become merry of his own work

but I think readers and critics neglected to see

the imagination worked behind what he wrote

it would be a few more years before modern tastes turned in his favor

at the end of 1935, New York agent Julius Schwartz

was able to sound the previously rejected "At The Mountains Of Madness";

thanks to the efforts of Donald Wandrei,

"The Shadow Out Of Time", sold soon after,

giving Lovecraft his highest combined payday a total of 595 dollars

by the end of 1936, just as success seemed a possibility

Lovecraft's health began to diminish

in many ways I think if Lovecraft had preserved his health

he would have become a well-known writer in the 40s and 50s, if he had lived that long

I think Lovecraft really dead at the pinnacle of his talent

Lovecraft had been suffering from a small collection of ailments, including digestive trouble

by the time he submitted to a doctor's diagnosis, the cancer has spread through his small intestine

H.P.Lovecraft died on the morning of March 15th, 1937

he was 46 and a half years old

although he knew himself celebrated in a small circle

he never broke through to the public in any sense at all, and

therefore when he died he would have been justified and thinking himself as a failure or as a very very obscure writer

if it weren't for Lovecraft's disciples he would have been forgotten

it was people like Derleth and Robert Block and so forth that kept Lovecraft alive and

they went out and actually got his books published

in 1939, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei

two of Lovecraft's most earnest supporters

achieved what known had been able to do in Lovecraft's life time:

they founded "Arkham House" and released a selections of stories entitled

"The Outsider And Others" by HP Lovecraft

well "Arkham House" came into being virtually out of Lovecraft's death, I mean

almost immediately on the news of Lovecraft's death reaching August Derleth

it existed initially to publish Lovecraft

and then continued with an astonishing record as a small press

falling down a bit and decided to do more Lovecraft and then indeed to do

and more of the other great writers form ��Weird Tales�� Fritz Leiber for instance And Donald Wandrei himself

you know the "Arkham House" books became, for the most part incredibly valuable incredibly quickly that was sought after by book collectors

not because they were rare, but because they were good

for certainly over a decade or more there was no publisher other than the ��Arkham House��

specialized in mainly supernatural horror and

very small snatch in science fiction

it was a cheap, disposable literature

and "Arkham House" was one of the very first places

to actually say some of these stuff needs to come out, respectably

since the success of "Arkham House"

many writer have continued to expand "The Cthulhu Mythos"

in fact this was a practice Lovecraft encouraged when he was alive

it's part of the Lovecraft game:

it's you know, it's like, you get it, and you want to add to it and passed it on

and it's been part of the Lovecraft's game from the very beginning

that Firtz Lieber's, the Bloch's, umall of these people and August Derleth

they took a little of this, took the story added to it, passed it on

and so then we started doing it

the problem when I was a teenager was, you know I read Lovecraft, I thought, this is how you'll do it

but unfortunately what I meant by this to myself was, you know, this is how you limited it

and were still, I'm the one never been more than twenty miles away from Liverpool, in England

I've set these stories in Massachusetts,you know, in Arkham and places like that, in Kingsport

and it was painfully obvious that I've never been very far from Liverpool

particularly when the, the rustics opened their mouth

if you read story like "The Mist", King's novel, that's pure Lovecraft

it's about these tentacle things breaking through from some other dimension

and terrorizing grocery store guests in Maine

that's pure Lovecraft, I am sure

I did this story called "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"

in which I have two Loveraftian spices complaining about Lovecraft as a writer

but the truth is, that we only parody things that have life

there is no point in parodying something dead, there is no point in parodying something in which one has no interest

and there is no point parodying or making fun of something that doesn't matter

and almost 100 years after his death, Lovecraft still matters

and it is a passion that continued to this day

even in the face of criticism

well, there's always gonna be a kind of snobbery about supernatural horror fiction I think

you know, I mean the writer needs to be dead for maybe 100 years before he is fully taken and associated

every creator that dwells in the genre, must assume

his work will not be appreciated as if he was doing ��straight�� stuff

it's been ghettoized

it's really not the proper the proper occupation of a serious writer

I mean look at what happened with Stephen King with that war with him years ago

people, I mean they started to put him down, cause he wasn't writing serious stuff

it's very easy for us now to forget

in a world in which you know, as a fantasy horror science fiction whatever the hell I am, author

my books are gonna come out in the hum back just like anybody else is and

they gonna be on shelves like anybody else is, that didn't used to be the case

but I think probably at the moment we saw Lovecraft

in the Penguin Modern Classics I think

there is no question whatsoever that is fully established and about time too

he is being translate into something like 25 languages around the world, from Czech to Polish

to Japanese, Korean there's a Bengali edition

a lot of people had kind of being introduced to Lovecraft without even knowing it was Lovecraft, you know, you've got things like

you know, "Hellboy", which is you know which is borrowing very heavily you know from the Lovecraft mythos

and even things like "Pirates Of The Caribbean", Davy Jones looking like you know, he had just crawl out of Lovecraft's

you know, looks like "Cthulhu"

you look around these days and you got the plush Cthulhu phenomenon

you get Cthulhu slippers, you get funny Cthulhu hats

one of the things I think is so amazing is, I've met a group of people who

were into playing these Lovecraft "The Call Of Cthulhu" games and so forth

and they know all of the Lovecraft creatures but they had never ever read Lovecraft

and they don't know what his other stories were

his images are so utray and ghastly and macabre and colorful

that they influenced all kinds of rock n' roll bands

I think he also, literally appeals to the outsider

and the person who is not well-accepted in society, who is a little bit of a loner

I think one of the reasons of Lovecraft is so popular today

is that his view which is a very dark one, you know that man is lucky to be ignorant

I think it's what he used to say Because if he knew the truth he could either go crazy or he would kill himself, it's one that

everyone can relate to these days

Every election, you'll see the bumper sticker saying: "Vote for Cthulhu! Why settle for the lesser evil!"

such is Lovecraft's fame, that some occultists insist that the Cthulhu mythos

is no myth

I know every religion begins as the delusion of one or two people

and once enough people sign on, it's become the world view and as if you can inhabit in it

and live everyday life and no longer seemed sane and

when you are one of the very few who have believed in it there is a kind of intensity

that results in unbalanced character and that sort of

what I'm afraid of with cultists that

actually believed there are Old Ones

I think that every time somebody comes out with a world that's fully flashed on as Lovecraft creates

you are bound to find people that will start to speak in Klingon

or dressing like a "hobbit" to go to the supermarket or

believed they could really channel in a couple of Old Ones into their living room

You know and I believe that somebody have actually even died trying to evoke some of the Ancient Gods

I knew people that handled "Star Wars" this way

they were so absorbed in it, one of them wished it were true, you could tell

and another believed it was all true in a parallel world

and you know you began to go off to the deep den

so ,you know, I would defiantly not advised to put too much money or effort into

invoking that"Shoggoth" into the kitchen but, it's up to you

The oldest and strongest emotion of man kind is fear

and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

we live in a world in which

even if you don't know who "Cthulhu"is,even if you've never read any Lovecraft

you can kind of get the jokes

and well certainly far too many people not limits me imitating him too closely

he also had a profound influence on people divers as

Fritz Leiber, as Poppy Z Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, T.E.D Klein you name it

for me what the brilliance of Lovecraft, what so important about Lovecraft is, um

Is simply his imagination

it's incredible, to think that this guy who was this recluse living in this you know little house

In Providence, Rhode Island ends up spawning you know essentially modern-day horror

it's the duality of Lovecraft:

it's the fact that people can take the ideas almost as the basis of a religion

People can take the ideas from a serious academic point of view

or for a writing point of view and then you can

Then if you are just drawing great big monsters

Lovecraft has waiting for you to