The Campaign Builder's Guild

Yeah, I was already afraid to answer it anyway (due, in course, to the episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" called "Conversations with Dead People"), and that story certainly didn't help my anxiety.

Just wait until the new generation ruins text messaging and the internet forever.

What do you guys see in the Rats in the Walls that I don't? I always thought that story was boring, and had one of the most lackluster endings of all of HPL's stories.

I rate At the Mountains of Madness as my favourite tale. I really love the fact that the "monsters" actually turn out to represent a great civilization and the perspective of how terrible the encounter with humans must have been from their point of view. And you just can't go wrong with a Shoggoth. Ever.

I also enjoyed The Reanimator, The Colour out of Space, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, Shadow over Innsmouth and Pickman's Model greatly.

To bring up a couple of stories that haven't been mentioned here yet: The Quest of Iranon is an interesting piece. Not horror at all, but I liked the twist at the end. Imprisoned with the Pharaohs invokes a nice athmosphere although the scene where the monster appears is a bit disappointing.

I think the Quest of Iranon is one of the few not in my collection. Imprisoned with the Pharaohs was in it (although renamed). I liked it, but i agree that the monster was disappointing. It would have worked much better if nothing much had been revealed.

Quote from: Cataclysmic CrowI personally think that he's a good writer with a very impressive vocabulary and language (i think he is the only writer i have ever seen use the word "teratologically"...), but i must admit that I was slightly disappointed. It's not that the stories weren't good, they just failed to impress me as i believed they would, but that might just be because of my high expectations.

I have a large collection of his works and am still pouring over it (though most of these I have already read a couple fo times).  It is worth noting, though, that many of his stories seem hackneyed because he has been copied so extensively.  Most of the strange ideas, when fist published in Weird Tales, were the first time the public had ever seen them.  As a result, they were extremely bizzare and horrific at the time.  I think his true genius lay in consieving of such singular things in the first place.  That is hardly to say that his literary skills were lacking, of course.

It also bares mention that there are two Lovecraftian cycles.  Those of the Cthulhu Mythos and that of his Dream Cycle.  While they bare a sense of interrelation and in some cases may share places adn names, they are usually treated as seperate.  It is my understanding that the works by other authors that sprung from Lovecraft's brainchild were predominantly if not exclusively based on the Cthulhu Mythos.  I could be wrong as I have not yet delved into these writings.

Either way, I will say that I do truly adore his work and consider him the last noteworthy author of horror fiction.  I get just as creeped out by "The Music of Erich Zhan" as I do by Melmoth the Wanderer and find "The Cats of Ulthar" just as surreally dark as "The Maelstrom."  I suppose I look to him, in many ways, as Heinlein looked to Edgar Rice Borroughs.  If only I could so skillfully steal his ideas, file off the serial numbers, and give them a paint job!

- The Rats in Walls is perhaps his most chilling work.

- I think that At the Mountains of Madness is his best work. It reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing- which is a great movie.

- The first piece of his that I read was The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath... I thought it was relatively poorly written- BUT it was evocative and strange. I think that it would only appeal to a very certain type of reader... one who likes some of Le Guin's work (which I do not), who likes Lewis Carrol (I am neutral) OR someone who is excited to see the DnD influences (which I was).

- Call of Cthulu was really weak, I thought.

- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward reminded me of some of Nathaniel Hawthorne's weird fiction. I thought it was fairly solid.

I feel embarrassed to admit that I, someone obsessed with reading, have never read any of his work. I suppose this would be a good incentive to pick some up.

You can find Lovecraft's work on the internet if you are Canadian, I believe his work is in the public domain in Canada.

I'm not awesome enough to be Canadian so the stork rerouted me to the US.

Quote from: Raven BloodmoonIt also bares mention that there are two Lovecraftian cycles.  Those of the Cthulhu Mythos and that of his Dream Cycle.  While they bare a sense of interrelation and in some cases may share places adn names, they are usually treated as seperate.  It is my understanding that the works by other authors that sprung from Lovecraft's brainchild were predominantly if not exclusively based on the Cthulhu Mythos.  I could be wrong as I have not yet delved into these writings.

Also one can't forget that Lovecraft's dream setting owes a huge debt to Lord Dunsany's similar setting in Gods of Pegana, Tales of Three Hemispheres, etc. (there are three stories especially applicable starting with "Idle days on the Yann".. the other two I can't remember the names of.)

Additionally I think that Lovecraft's own Cthulhu mythos might've taken some cues from The King in Yellow by... Chandler was it? It's been a while.

Rats in the Walls echoes a few Poe stories, or the Yellow Wallpaper.

Lovecraft maybe defined and popularized a certain genre of horror/fantasy, rather than inventing it so much. Although his monster descriptions were pretty unique in his day.

All that said, Colour Out of Space, Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, and Whisperer in Darkness were my favorites.

Lovecraft never tried to hide that he was heavily inspired by especially Poe. What Lovecraft created that no one else has in any recent time is an entire Mythos which wasn't only his creation, but a collective creation by many authors started by him. They write in the same world, adding to each others versions of the Mythos to expand it beyond what a single person could ever achieve. This is what Lovecraft made. For example, some of the arcane books mentioned in his later works are actually creations of other mythos writers.  

The problem though is that most of their work is junk compared to lovecraft. I have only read a few "mythos-inspired" works but nothing really seems to compare.

All of them either border on humorous, or try to throw in too many strings of names.

The most Lovecraft-ish thing I have seen was not even fantasy or sci-fi; it was a few of Borges' works. I find him to be the most Lovecraft inspired literary author who was not in Lovecraft's circle- He was a very intriguing fellow.

I haven't read anything by other Mythos authors, and i probably won't as I've had my share of Cthulhu for now, but there are supposed to be some good ones in between. Lovecraft himself even read them and took inspiration from them.  

Really? I thought the extent of his being inspired was by the inventor of Conan. I thought for the most part that Lovecraft edited the works of the "circle" authors and made them better rather than gleaned ideas from them himself?

He did do editing as well, but he also included the creations of the others in his own work. Okay, i'm admittedly no expert on him, but i know that some of the arcane grimoires he mentions in his books are made by others and i think it goes for some creatures as well. Of course, there is no doubt he was the mastermind.