I think I must have read my first H.P. Lovecraft story when I was in college. It was in a round-about sort of way. I had read Robert Anton Wilson’s trippy and surreal Illuminatus! trilogy, and found out that it was full of Lovecraft references. So I bought a few anthologies to get the references.
I must have read them, or bits of them. They appear well-worn. I remember some of the stories at the beginning. But the details are gone from my terrible memory.
When I joined the cast of the Black Vault, I used it as an excuse to bone up on my Lovecraft. I decided to read all of his fiction, in chronological order… including his collaborations and ghost-writings.
A big factor in that decision is the excellent H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast at hppodcraft.com, where hosts Chris Lackey and Chad Fifer guide you laughingly through the stories. I’d read one story, and then listen to the next podcast. So in a way I was making the journey with them.
It’s been fun. Sometimes Lovecraft’s earlier stories are a struggle to get through, but it’s super cool to see his distinctive style emerge… to see certain patterns and themes come to fruition, and to watch it all coalesce in master works like The Call of Cthuhlu.
What I didn’t expect, though, was that I would lose my mind.
Everywhere I look now, things jump out at me as being “Lovecraftian”. Innocuos, interestiing articles or books that I would take a passing interest in before now seem to point at darker, more sinister things… as if they were only the beginning of something much more horrifying.
Some examples:
From National Geographic, comes The Temple of the Night Sun.
“Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.
Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists.”
This tale impressed me so much that I wound up using it as the setting for a story I narrated during The Black Vault.
The freakiest detail? In the inner, older levels of the temple, the eyes and mouth of the gods’ faces are slashed and crosse through, so that THEY CAN’T WATCH YOU ANYMORE.
Then there’s this GIANT CLAW, courtesy of Shorpy.com, taken in 1943.
Lovecraft is obsessed with the ocean, and the ancient, slumbering things that lie beneath its surface.
Just wracking my memory, I can think of The Deep Ones, who strike deals to breed with the humans in Innsmouth, Cthuhlu biding his time to rise again, a temple glowing and terrible in the sunken ruins of Atlantis, Dagon’s monolith bubbling to the surface, and on and on and on.
Ladies and gentlemen, if we are destined to be overtaken by some dark horror, it’s probably got gills.
http://www.shorpy.com/node/13696
Couple finds medieval well hidden beneath sofa
Yes, that is just a well. And those aren’t pale eyes of some giant, subterranean beast staring up from the bottom of it.
RIGHT.
But I truly knew I was cracking when while I was on vacation. My wife and I were staying at a very nice family’s house, found through AirBnB. Everything seemed pleasant, clean, and nice. But the bookshelves in the room we were staying in were straight out of a Lovecraft story. Books on physics were right next to books on cosmic awareness and the study of primitive cultures. The only thing that was missing was a Latin translation of the Necronomicon. I didn’t look too thoroughly, though, so who knows.
What really sealed the deal for me, though, were the two orange binders labeled “Strange Artifacts.”
Have a look:
There was also a book called Inner Earth: A Search for Anomalies.
What is the owner of these books searching for? What dark gates has he already unlocked, and what has he become in the process? Does he lure unsuspecting travelers like myself to his innocent abode only to feed them to the dark outer gods?
Or maybe he’s just a nice guy with a really cool book collection.
That’s probably it. PROBABLY.
Come see the Black Vault every Saturday at 8pm in September and October.