I’ve been wanting to do this for some time now. If any of you readers are familiar with or previous comic Caf-Fiends, you know that I am a HUGE H.P.Lovecraft fan. I’m a member of the H.P.Lovecraft historical society, I own several first print Lovecraft pulps, I’ve read most of Lovecraft’s individual and collaborated stories, and I keep a Cthulhu idol on my mantel at all times, and I have visited Lovecraft’s grave. Does this make me a Lovecraft expert, NO WAY IN HELL! I’m a fan, that is all. What I want to convey in this series (yeah, I’m going to be doing this for a while) is what his writing means to me, how I view the aspects of it, and how it’s influenced me. If you want historical and ACCURATE information, look up S.T. Joshi or Ken Hite. I’m just doing it for the Love (craft that is).
Forward: Why H.P.Love-Caf? Lovecraft was tea and coffee guy. Writing during the prohibition era, he wasn’t the kind of guy going to speakeasies and having bootleg liquor under a loose board in his kitchen. He saw it as law and it was to be followed. Also, I don’t know about you, but a lot of my best inspiration comes more often from late night coffee benders, then from being passed out drunk on the floor. The H.P.Lovecraft Historical Society store sells a mug with a picture of HPL and a quote saying “I like coffee exceedingly.” I have it, I love it, and I drink from it regularly. So in honor to the master of the weird tale, I will raise my cup of joe and begin.
Part 1: The Weird Tale.
“The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.” – H.P.Lovecraft
So we start with quote from HPL pulled right off the weird fiction Wikipedia page, but it really sums up a lot. Most of HPL’s writing is going to fall in the Weird Tales category, so we will make a broad generalization that ALL his writing is “Weird” in nature (again, if you want a scholar, go elsewhere). You could go and read the full Wikipedia description of Weird Fiction, but then you’d be totally missing the point. The beauty of the weird tale is what it makes you FEEL. With Weird Fiction the reader often doesn’t know if the events they are reading about are truly occurring in the story, or of they are in the mind of the narrator. The narrator is not always reliable, the situations could easily be misinterpreted, and often the stories are being told by a raving lunatic. To me, that’s the beauty of Lovecraft’s writing. When the narrator believes so strongly that the tale he or she is telling is the truth, no matter how fantastic the story may be, you begin to think that maybe it is real, or at the very least that there is a grain of truth in what they are saying. The interesting thing is that the very moment when that shred of belief takes root inside you is the moment when you are sucked into their world and, beyond all reason, become a believer in the malign and insane. A perfect example is “The Call of Cthulhu;” the Narrator reads his uncle’s account, sees a clay tablet, examines 2 statues after traveling all over the world at great personal expense, and reads a crazy sailor’s notes. These disparate pieces of information lead him to believe that the we dodged a bullet from a giant space octopus that would have destroyed the world AND now that he knows this the rest of his life is ruined and all he can do is wait for death. Yeah…..ummm well, I’ve seen and read a lot of weird shit, but never have I traveled around the world believing that there is monsters that needs to be uncovered. As ridiculous as all of this sounds, at no point in the story do you stop and think just how insane it is. The emotion and logic of the narrator is believable, you empathize with him and you share the spirit of discovery. I think in a way that this is because we all know that there is no way that we ourselves would go into that spooky church basement, or into that attic of the haunted house, but damn it, we’d love to.
The Weird Tale, in my opinion is a mind f#@k. It’s like an M.Night Shyamalan movie (a good one…) where you’re not sure what’s going on until the very end, but the whole time you’re becoming emotionally invested in the characters. It’s not about the monster, it’s not about a scare chord, or knife in the shower; it’s about your ass slowly creeping to the edge of your seat.
Kevin /\(;,;)/\
