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H. P. Lovecraft

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Author Topic: H. P. Lovecraft  (Read 684 times)
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« on: August 20, 2007, 03:07:36 am »

Influence

Beyond direct adaptation, Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture and have been praised by many modern writers. Some influence was direct, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many of his contemporaries, such as Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, author of Psycho. Many later figures were influenced by Lovecraft, including author and artist Clive Barker, prolific horror writer Stephen King, film directors John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon, game designers Sandy Petersen and Keichiro Toyama, and artist H. R. Giger. H. P. Lovecraft’s name is virtually synonymous with horror fiction; his writing, particularly his so-called “Cthulhu Mythos”, has influenced fiction authors worldwide, and Lovecraftian elements can be seen in novels, movies, comic books, even cartoons. Batman’s nemesis “The Joker”, for example, is said to be incarcerated at Arkham Asylum; Arkham being an invention of Lovecraft’s. Many modern horror writers — such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, F. Paul Wilson, Bentley Little, Thomas Ligotti, T.E.D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Joe R. Lansdale, to name just a few — have cited Lovecraft as one of their primary influences.

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges dedicated his pointedly Lovecraftian short story "There are More Things" -- a reference to Hamlet's "...in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" -- to the memory of Lovecraft. Contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq wrote a literary biography of Lovecraft called H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. Shades of Lovecraft surface throughout Houellebecq's work. Prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction for a collection of Lovecraft stories. In 2005 Lovecraft was somewhat controversially given a volume in the Library of America series, essentially declaring him a canonical great American writer. While he's invoked as a godfather to fantastical genres, his thematics -- surely some of the bleakest "realism" ever conveyed -- have also sown strange offspring.

Other authors have written stories that are explicitly set in the same reality as Lovecraft's original stories. Lovecraft pastiches are common. Lovecraft's characteristic devices -- like the object that drives one insane upon seeing it -- are now eponymous.

He has also been held responsible for the invention of the philosophy "Cosmicism" which was reflected in many works beyond his own, including the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series and movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A number of heavy metal bands, including Behemoth, Symphony X, Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Dark Moor, Metallica, Morbid Angel, GWAR, Nile, Adagio, Electric Wizard, Philosopher, Aarni, Dragonland, Bal-Sagoth, Crypticus, 1349, Therion, Yyrkoon, Manticora, Azathoth, The Axis of Perditon and Vesania have been influenced lyrically by Lovecraft's work. One band chose its name from a chapter title in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, A Nightmare & A Cataclysm. British metal band Cradle of Filth released an album in 2002 entitled "Lovecraft and Witch Hearts." On the inside cover is part of a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, and reads as follows:


For here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought

Strange eidola that chill the world with fear;

Whose graven runes in tomes of dread have taught

What things beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer.

Dark Lord of Averoigne - whose windows stare

On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!"

The British punk band Rudimentary Peni in 1987 released "Cacophony," an album wholly structured around H. P. Lovecraft and his works. The songs are alternatively pseudo-biographical (e.g. "Better Not Born," about the young Lovecraft's contemplation of suicide) or directly inspired from his works (e.g. "Nightgaunts," "Drinking Song from 'The Tomb'"). The spoken-word track "Twitch" in particular is a curious tribute to Lovecraft's work. It begins, "Howard Phillips Lovecraft, heaven knows, had a talent for writing which was of no means proportion: only what he did with this talent was a shame, and a caution and an eldritch horror," and becomes progressively more sinister. He is accused, for instance, of "rewriting (for pennies) the crappy manuscripts of writers whose complete illiteracy would have been a boon to all mankind... and producing ghastly, grisly, ghoulish, and horrifying works of his own as well."

The Live After Death album from Iron Maiden shows Eddie the Head on a stormy night rising from his grave. His gravestone has a quote from Lovecraft: "That is not dead, which can eternal lie. Yet with strange eons, even death may die", a quote also present in the lyrics of "The Thing That Should Not Be", by Metallica. The quote is also used in "Poet Laureate Infinity", a song by rapper Canibus.

A few non-metal bands have also used Lovecraftian sources, including The Vaselines, Fields of the Nephilim, and The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Australian hiphop group Nick Sweepah & Aux One include references to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos on their self-titled EP of 2005. And the band "Living Colour" derives its name from "The Colour Out of Space".

Lovecraft's style of horror has been implemented in Call of Cthulhu and other roleplaying games and many video games, including Clive Barker's Undying, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Alone in the Dark, and more explicitly in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and the MMORPG Cthulhu Nation.

There have also been detailed references to the Cthulhu mythos in current and near current science fiction (for example, "Babylon 5 Thirdspace" and the Doctor Who new adventures novels.)

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