Self-confessed fan-boys Chris Hose and Thomas Morton delve into Lovecraft's gibbering, eldritch world to ask why a writer of pulp short stories is held in such reverence. The surprising philosophical depths of his world view and his wide-reaching influence on modern pop-culture. Hmmm Squad regulars will have heard the name often whispered furtively by acolytes lurking on the threshold - here's your chance to find out why. Biscuits, beverages, mind-paralysing horror, etc.

2. Biographical
• Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in
Providence, Rhode Island
• Raised by his mother, two aunts and grandfather. His
father went psychotic and died when Lovecraft was very
small.
• From a well-to-do family that fell on (relatively) hard
times.
• Wanted to be an astronomer, but had a “nervous
breakdown” before he graduated.
• Plagued by “Night Guants”
• Unsurprisingly was a strange, imaginative child and become a strange, reclusive
young adult.
• Was brought out of his shell by developing contacts and correspondence with
other writers, that shaped and encouraged his own career as a writer.
• Married in 1924 and moved to New York, but it wasn’t a happy time – financial
troubles, lack of work, and prolonged separation led to divorce a few years later.
• Returned to Providence to live with his aunts for their (and his) remaining years.
• Lovecraft died early, of intestinal cancer, in 1937 aged 46.

3. • He wrote 50+ stories Between
1905 and 1935, many
published in pulp magazines
such as Weird Tales
• Influenced by the gothic horror
of Edgar Allan Poe, the fantasy
stories of Lord Dunsany and
ancient-arcane-evil stories of
Arthur Machen
• Stories divide roughly (but not
neatly) into standard macabre
horror (earlier stories) dream-
world fantasy pieces (mid
period) and proper Lovecraft
(Cthulhu) mythos stories (later,
longer stories).

4. • Lovecraft was certainly a horror writer, but
the term doesn’t really do him justice.
• He developed his own “world”, the details of
which were revealed in small chunks and
mysterious hints in his stand-alone stories.
• He himself described his genre as “Weird
Fiction” and his form of horror as “Cosmic
Horror”.

5. “Lovecraftian”
• Weird/bizarre
• Other/Otherworldly
• Mysterious/Hidden/Forbidden
• Ancient/Arcane
• Interdimensional/Cosmic
• Dreams/Madness

6. So what’s different here?
The “evil” in Lovecraft does not come from any traditional,
recognisable source, human or paranormal – his horror is
not fundamentally about murder, torture, gore, ghosts,
ghouls, death, demons, hell, etc – at least not in a
conventional sense – though many of these things do
feature in his stories.
In his best works the “evil” is something on the edge of our
world, mysterious and unknown, alien and “other”,
possibly incomprehensible - which is precisely why it’s so
terrifying.
The evil in Lovecraft isn’t even “evil” as such – it’s a-moral. It’s
simply utterly indifferent to the wants and needs of human
life - hostile, chaotic, “other” and “unnatural” to us.

7. • “Like many of Lovecrafts stories this movie
has that feeling of going into the unknown,
of discovering an otherwordly thing that has
existed for eons yet we know nothing about.
Of knowledge of the universe that could drive
you MAD!”

8. “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that
common human laws and interests and emotions have no
validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the
human form – and the local human passions and
conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other
worlds or other universes.
To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or
space or dimension, one must forget that such things as
organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local
attributes of a negligible and temporary race called
mankind, have any existence at all.
Only the human scenes and characters must have human
qualities.
These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-
penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the
boundless and hideous unknown – the shadow-
haunted Outside – we must remember to leave our
humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.”
H.P. Lovecraft in note to the editor of Weird Tales on
resubmission of "The Call of Cthulhu"

9. H.P.Lovecraft
Madness and an Irrational Universe

10. “The most merciful thing
in the world, I think, is
the inability of the
human mind to correlate
all its contents. We live
on a placid island of
ignorance in the midst of
black seas of infinity,
and it was not meant to
voyage far.”
(The Call of Cthulhu –
1926)

11. Encounters With The Old Ones The Thing Cannot Be Described
“Of the six men who never reached the
ship, he thinks two perished of pure
fright in that accursed instant. The
Thing cannot be described – there is
no language for such abysms of
shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such
eldritch contradictions of all matter,
force, and cosmic order. A mountain
walked or stumbled. God!...Then, “If I say that my somewhat
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great extravagant imagination yielded
Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and simultaneously pictures of an
began to pursue with vast wave- octopus, a dragon, and a human
raising strokes of cosmic potency. caricature, I shall not be
Briden looked back and went mad, unfaithful to the spirit of the
laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing thing…but it was the general
at intervals till death found him one outline of the whole which made
night in the cabin whilst Johanson was it most shockingly frightful.” (Call
wandering deliriously.” (Call of Cthulhu of Cthulhu – 1926)
-1926)

13. That Which Causes Madness Through Cosmic
Horror is Better Left Unseen
“The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest What Unimaginable
fringe of this abhorred area, but the location was bad Connections?
enough…Only poetry or madness could do justice to
-A Deranged Artist
the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed
-A Voodoo Cult
on through the black morass toward the red glare and -A new Island
muffled tom-toms…In a natural glade of the swamp.
On this now leaped and twisted [an] indescribable The strange links
horde of human abnormality…void of clothing, this between the three
hybrid spawn were braying bellowing and writhing…It stories of ‘The Call
may have been only imagination and it may have only of Cthulhu’ serve as
been echoes which induced one of the men, an a model for the
excitable Spaniard, to fancy he had heard antiphonal strange connections
of the entire mythos
responses to the ritual from some far and
and the reality
unilluminated spot…to hint of the faint beating of behind it.
wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a
mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest
trees. (Call of Cthulhu – 1926)

14. The Geometry Was All Wrong Azathoth – The Ultimate Irrationality
[Wilcox] talked of his dreams in a Outside the ordered universe [is]
strangely poetic fashion; making that amorphous blight of
me see with terrible vividness the nethermost confusion which
damp Cyclopean city of green blasphemes and bubbles at the
stone – whose geometry, he oddly centre of all infinity—the
said, was all wrong… (Call of boundless daemon sultan
Ctthulhu -1926) Azathoth, whose name no lips
dare speak aloud, and who
Parker slipped as the other three gnaws hungrily in inconceivable,
were plunging frenziedly over unlighted chambers beyond time
endless vistas of green-crusted and space amidst the muffled,
rock to the boat, and Johansen maddening beating of vile drums
swears he was swallowed up by an and the thin monotonous whine
angle of masonry which shouldn’t of accursed flutes. (The Dream
have been there; an angle which Quest of Unkown Kadath – 1933)
was acute, but behaved as if it
was obtuse. (Call of Cthulhu –
1926) http://vimeo.com/9405378

15. The “Great Texts”
• The Call of Cthulhu (1926) - the most famous, (but I actually
think one of the weakest) of the core stories... mainly famous
for Cthulhu himself and his "wrong angled" city (R’lyeh) under
the sea.

16. • The Colour from Outer Space (1927) -
*FAVOURITE* - The story that hooked me on
Lovecraft - fallen meteor/disease and
mutation analogy, and yes, it is about an alien
"colour".

17. • The Dunwich Horror (1928) - backwards
country folk, "strangely domed hills", hints of
demonic cults, un-nameable blasphemous
spawn ect. ect.

18. • The Whisperer in the Darkness (1930) -
Strange, alien goings on, rasping inhuman
voices heard in the woods, weird forms seen
in the river - revealed to be bizarrer than you
might imagine.

19. • At the Mountains of Madness (1931) -
*FAVOURITE* - A Novella. Ancient fossilised
things discovered in the Antarctic. Ancient
ruins, frozen and buried. Extremely influential.

20. • The Dreams in the Witch House (1932) - Talk
of weird maths and geometry (angles again!),
inter-dimensional travel, dream/reality
confusion, the perils of student digs. And a rat
with a human face. Excellent.

21. • The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1932) -
*FAVOURITE* - Fishy decaying sea side town
where something is seriously not right with
the locals. You will never look at sea side
towns – or fish – quite the same again.

22. • The Shadow out of Time (1934) - Ancient lost
cities (again), dream/reality confusion, cosmic
scale, a lot of mythos hinted at and tied
together, remarkably sci fi.

23. Mythologising
• Necromonicon, Pnakotic Manuscripts, Book of
Ebion etc.
• Arkham and Miskatonic University

24. Language
http://cthulhuchick.com/wordcount-lovecraft-favorite-words/

25. Creatures
• “They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and
ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic
matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members,
each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones
themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to
nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet.
Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a
third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an
irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three
great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this
head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst
from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The
great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance
which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.”

26. Sea Creature
~or~
Lovecraft Fan-Art

47. ~End~