H.P.Lovecraft

 

Today's CBC introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft and his works. It started with *Dagon*.

Someone said "It was my introduction to _H.P. Lovecraft's_ works. It's a horror short story that heavily relies on atmospheric horror. The story is basically a few hastily scrawled pages from a sailor who wishes for forgetfulness or death after what he has witnessed on a venture through the deep sea (NB: Trying my best to make it spoiler-free 😭🤌). The story discusses cosmic horror themes with monstrous, sci-fi, and mythological elements, showcasing how insignificant human beings are in the vast, unexplored world we thrive in...

  It's such a short read that it took only a couple of minutes for me to complete the whole story. But the length isn't a hindrance to the quality and effectiveness of the story. An amazing and well written horror short story. Definitely looking forward to reading more Lovecraft works and diving deep into more Lovecraftian mythos, with *The Call of Cthulhu* being my most anticipated one among them... 🤌📈

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/175863126-anaswar-vinod
Goodreads

https://fable.co/anaswar-331583837787
Fable

So  it was suggested to read 'At the Mountains of Madness' and 'The Colour out of Space'.

His world building is incredibly scary. Also Reanimator, The Call of Cthulu....

We discussed Lovecraft long ago in the book club.

I've heard that "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood is such a work... Added it to my tbr list... Planning to read it sometime soon... 🤌
It is a short story that is into a sub-subgenre of its own : wilderness horror.

M. R. James is favourite of Nandakishore Sir, among the old horror masters. Lovecraft's world building is fantastic, but his prose is too melodramatic according to him. 

PHILIP ABRAHAM CBC said Brian Aldiss ,in his great work about SF, The Trillion Year Spree, wrote that H.P.Lovecraft began where William Hope Hodgson ended. And that is high or dark praise , indeed 🙂

Hodgson wrote a very long book called The Night Land. The last remnants of humanity are in a huge pyramid, the Last Redoubt , over 7 miles high, sheltering from the darkness and the horrors that are creeping toward it, slowly but ever so surely.

The book was written for a more leisurely age, where people had far more time to read.
I didn't read the entire book, but chose to read only the chapters concerning the Last Redoubt.

"The Last Redoubt" is a core concept in William Hope Hodgson's novel The Night Land. It refers to the colossal, pyramid-shaped fortress where the last remnants of humanity reside in a distant, post-apocalyptic future. The sun has died, and the Earth is plunged into perpetual night, beset by monstrous creatures and malevolent forces.

 
"The Last Redoubt is humanity's last stand against these overwhelming threats, protected by a powerful energy field."

A short  excerpt which shows the power of his writing:

"And so, searching the road with my gaze, I passed beyond this Silent One, and past the place where the road, sweeping vastly to the South-East, was lit a space, strangely, by the light from the Silver-fire Holes. And thus at last to where it swayed to the South of the Dark Palace, and thence Southward still, until it passed round to the Westward, beyond the mountain bulk of the Watching Thing in the South—the hugest monster in all the visible Night Lands. A living hill of watchfulness, known to us as The Watcher Of The South. It brooded there, squat and tremendous, hunched over the pale radiance of the Glowing Dome.
Much, I know, had been writ concerning this Odd, Vast Watcher; for it had grown out of the blackness of the South Unknown Lands a million years gone;"

Incidentally his biggest fan was an Indian-origin american named Joshi. I've read his book about the life of HP Lovecraft.

Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith got their starts in that wonderful magazine, Weird Tales. So did Frank Belknap Long, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Robert Bloch, August Derleth and a host of others. All worth reading if you enjoy atmospheric prose and old school horror.