Today being the birthday of Howard Phillips Lovecraft – his 135th, to be precise – I would normally dedicate a post to him and his memory. This year, because I've already devoted the entire month of August to that purpose, I thought instead I would simply link to my previous HPL birthday posts, especially for the benefit of those who weren't reading this blog years ago.
- Father of Us All (August 20, 2008)
- Happy Birthday, Ech-Pi-El (August 20, 2009)
- Lovecraftian Inspirations (August 21, 2010)
- 121 (August 20, 2011)
- The Man Behind the Madness (August 20, 2012)
- "Thou art not gone ..." (August 20, 2021)
- We Love Crafts (August 20, 2022)
- H.P. Lovecraft and the Evolution of Genre (August 20, 2023)
- The War Against Lovecraft (August 20, 2024)
The Shadow over August will continue for another eleven days. I've still got quite a few more posts that I hope will be of interest to everyone reading, including more interviews with RPG writers whose work either directly or indirectly relates to Lovecraft. There's also an additional post over at my Substack for those of you who've enjoyed the Dreamer and Moon Prowler classes I posted here recently. Though Ben Laurence is the true Master of the Dreamlands, this month has inspired me to dabble a bit in the Realm Beyond the Veil of Sleep. I already have too many other projects on the go to spend much time there!
Regardless, today's the day to celebrate Lovecraft's memory as you see fit (or not). I myself will be re-watching the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's excellent films based on "The Call of Cthulhu" (which I strangely have never reviewed here) and The Whisperer in Darkness (which I have).
Clever title, from the blogger known for his Fatal N: Elicitations.
ReplyDeleteHPL is my birthday buddy.
ReplyDeleteFor what they are, those HPLHS films are pretty great!
ReplyDeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteI shall play the HPL-referencing portions of Fallout 4 tonight in homage to the birthday man!
I decided to read an HPL story and since the Library of America volume didn’t have any of the Silver Key stories, I ended up rereading “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. An early piece, and not one of his best (why did Peter Straub choose it for inclusion?), what I find interesting is that it was based on a dream, with the titular character a stand-in for HPL himself.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that’s why he reused the character for both Dream-Quest and The Silver Key, which both seem personal. Otherwise, there doesn’t seem like much of a connection between the guy in The Statement and the master dreamer of the later stories.
(And I would rank Dream-Quest as among his best, and certainly the most oneiric. Like VanVogt’s best, the logic is that of a dream, notably with Carter’s visit to Oriab and escape from the Underworld totally exchangeable with his being shanghaied in Dylath Leen and escape from the Moon. The lack of any quoted dialogue (and just one quoted monologue at the climax), with conversations being merely described, mimics the half-remembrance left when you wake, not to mention allowing events to be compressed, with the novel having a remarkable amount of action for an HPL tale. And the theme and conclusion is foreshadowed in the episode with King Kuranes and where he ended up. A terribly unsung work.)