[Severian]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

devils dictionary used to sell as those $1 dover thrift editions and had a red cover and you could pick up anywhere. the internet i think killed that business model.

anyway i agree with you that horror is whatever scares you but i have a bone to pick with the notion that hatecraft is at the root of every horror story one has ever read. i mean this statement:



we’ve had stories and myths of ghosts and demons and monsters and evil gods and witches and fairytales and scary religions since the dawn of time.

hatecraft himself cites poe and some bulwer dude i had never heard of, then invokes polyphemus and used the world cyclopean because obvious cyclops. and that’s just on page one.

regarding modern fiction, books like frankenstein and dracula were way before and vampires are now everywhere.

i mean even wuthering heights is a fucking work of horror. come on.

but before?

the myth of orpheus is fucking horror.

the book of revelation is a work of horror.

the book of job, where satan and god make bets on the life of some dude. talk about out of control cosmic shit.

the twelve stations of the cross, horror

the snake in the garden of eden

little red riding hood

the divine comedy

the punishments of the titans defeated by the olympian gods

the myth of ragnarok

the popol vuh

etc etc etc

(existence itself is a work of horror, and we’ve been telling stories about that since forever)

however influential the guy might be today (e.g. he’s clearly a big influence on joss whedon) he didn’t come up with his shit from the vacuum. if anything it’s a pastiche of previous attractions. huge demons from under teh sea—hello, leviathan? the kraken? captain nemo fighting a giant plate of calamari? (ha ha). sailors since time immemorial have been terrified of giant underwater creatures which have accrued layers and layers of significance in their evolution. oh, the mesopotamian goddess tiamat is the oldest i know of.

the more i read about this the more i see demonyo’s point. looks like he was a kind of seed for a very large fictional universe like the one tolkien begat in the fantasy genre. (but tolkien also borrowed from earlier mythologies and sagas and a lot more). and it’s become large and coherent in a way he never intended. but to paraphrase obama, he didnt do that.

anyway seems like lovecraft has had a lot of homages and imitators in our day, but he himself was paying homage and imitating his predecessors. who are legion.

which, you know, is perfectly fine, because it’s what literature always does anyway.

i understand that he can be an important nexus in the genre, but that’s not the same as him having invented everything.

Ok ok, I was exaggerating for effect. What I really meant was modern horror owes a lot to Lovecraft. Stephen King, Clive Barker, who’s the other one? The other “big” one? Whatever... anyway, all of them just worship on the altar of Lovecraft. But of course not all horror is influenced by him, because he was not the first horror writer (or anywhere near the first).

If he actually *pioneered* anything it was the Weird genre, along with Mervyn Peake (in a much different way), and some others who have really excellent anthology SF/horror stories from the 20s-50s whose names escape me at the moment.

I exaggerated. Sorry. Blah.