r/Lovecraft

>The decision to change the name of Shub-Niggurath to Shub-Gorath came from a few different considerations, both in and outside of the game’s world.

>One reason was the feedback we saw online. Some people pointed out that “Shub-Niggurath” could be hurtful to some audiences, particularly when considered alongside Lovecraft’s own views. We want everyone sitting down to play our games to feel welcome at the table, so this was something we took seriously. Although Lovecraft scholars concur “Shub-Niggurath” was not derived from the slur, unfortunately it is one of those words that sometimes triggers automatic content filters. This is something known as the “Scunthorpe Problem”. Since our games and campaigns are promoted and discussed across many different platforms, we wanted to avoid creating an unnecessary obstacle for players and the community simply because of a character’s name.

>There is also a little bit of in-world reasoning behind the change. Old Ones Origins takes place in an age long before humanity, when these entities existed without the names and titles that human cultures would later give them. Names such as Mother of All or Black Goat are therefore not necessarily the names these beings would have used for themselves.

>So why Shub-Gorath? The name comes from Shuma-Gorath, a name associated with Robert E. Howard’s contributions to the mythos. Bringing elements like these together feels very much in the spirit of how Lovecraft, Howard, and other writers built these interconnected worlds in the first place: borrowing ideas, adapting names, and combining elements from one another’s stories and mythologies. Shub-Gorath grew out of that same creative tradition.

>We feel like names given to beings that existed long before humans—and long before the languages we use to try to describe them—can evolve. Shub-Gorath is still Shub. She is still the same Old One, with the same place in the cosmic conflict.

>We also understand that for some players, staying as close as possible to the original names is an important part of preserving the legacy of these characters. We don’t have a simple answer that will satisfy everyone, but we felt it was important to be transparent about why we made this decision rather than leave the change unexplained. We’ll continue listening to the community as we consider the best way forward.

If you were making a Lovecraft game, which creature that rarely shows up in games would you choose as a boss? What would the fight actually involve?

Cinematic badass and Metallica.

Cthulhu:
Civilization collapses under Cthulhu's psychic madness in a week, max. Humanity mostly reduced to terrified remnants that praise and fear their new master apart from a harried minority who try to resist. Someone tries to ram a boat into it again.

Dagon:
Ocean falls under the control of Dagon with his Deep Ones but they have a harder time with human technology and firepower whenever they're on land for too long. Cold war between land and sea ensues. Air movement and seafood become 10,000% more/less popular respectively, plus a thousand other things related to the sea becoming off-limit (Aquariums??). Yes, I've seen CthulhuTech.

Azathoth:
Earth and humanity now irrelevant, assessment above my pay grade.

Nyarlathotep:
The human species is conquered through manipulation and terror (helped along by at least one increasingly powerful cult). It continues in some horrible form under Nyarlathotep's control.

Shub-Niggurath
Biosphere becomes way, way too fertile with horrifying life proliferating across the planet. Humanity is displaced or transformed, reduced to a minor, low trophic species doomed to extinction despite the worship of its remnants.

The Mi-Go:
Mi-Go occupy Earth to gather resources and do human experimentation. Humans remain as an semi-domesticated species though large scale resistance and rebellion is common, maybe even successful.

Yog-Sothoth:
The key and gate truly become one and the Old Ones break through to walk Earth again... where they've always been but unbeheld? Look, it's not good - see Azathoth.

Hastur:
Human concepts about perceiving reality fall apart under Hastur's influence. Civilization *technically*survives while becoming unrecognizable. Theatre kids do okay.

The Great Race of Yith:
Humans lose control of its own institutions through the Yith's manipulation of their minds. Conquest is low key enough that most people don't even realize it's happened. Opposition is quickly subverted EXCEPT for 3-5 plucky scientists, military personnel, and an eccentric who team up to defeat the threat while coming together as an unlikely family.

Ithaqua:
Supernatural cold spreads across much the planet causing massive crop failure and starvation. Humanity responds by turtling up in the tropics and throwing all the ordinance, heat intensifiers, and infiltration teams they can at Ithaqua. Don't act like you wouldn't watch a movie about this.

I know he never planned he’s stories to be part of a shared universe and the “Cthulhu Mythos” is created by his colleagues after he died. And he’s writings were very influenced by his morbid interest of science, like obviously astronomy (also the nightmares he had since he was a child). Which naturally lead him to writing comic horror rather than ghost stories. But I still wonder, if he ever on rare cases wrote stories where the supernatural horror is spiritual. Rather than the advance aliens from a higher dimension?

The plot of this adaptation in Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is mostly an in-name-only revision of the story, but that's somewhat understandable given its unusual POV.

However, what is not okay is failing in every way to communicate the horror of the unexplained. In THIS story, the main character sees demons everywhere in connection to a depiction of a witch's coven. This refocuses the story onto her, completely, and optically diverts the definition of reality away from the story's true revelation: this subject is REAL.

From this version, there is no way to know that the demon in the basement is real because we've been hallucinating weird creatures the whole time, nor is there much reason to think that's significant. This version might as well be called "Pickman's Paintings" or "Legacy of the Witch" or something.

The entire premise of capturing the liminality of great evil in the crevice of the world and that being almost too horrifying to bear, is TOTALLY undermined by the narrative of these paintings turning people into "demons." I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I'm shocked it's THIS far off on a comprehension level.

Picture an isolated mining town, miles of open desert, and no help coming. A shoggoth in the mine is an easy pick, but what less obvious creature would you choose and why?

Earlier today, I saw a post about Del Toro's recent adaptation of "Pickman's Model" and someone complaining that it is not the best adaptation. I haven't seen it yet, but a comment chain I was involved in on said post brought up the 2019 adaptation of "The Color Out of Space," and how some people dislike certain aspects of it because of reasons I think are quite silly. Then there's the idea of adapting it in other ways, such as a Mockumentary... and I just... wow I found myself genuinely a bit annoyed by a general lack of understanding in filmmaking. While I'm by no means an expert, I have a good understanding of the fundamentals due to people I know who've done work for studios before, and my general love of learning "how the sausage is made," so to speak.

Lovecraft's work is something a lot of people have voiced wanting to see adapted in various forms, because of how iconic his work is, but they often struggle to because of inherent qualities of it. Del Toro himself, on multiple occasions, has expressed interest, but also how challenging it is to do justice. He acknowledges a lot of the material Lovecraft made is better suited to shorter productions, like episodes of an anthology show, or shorter films. He's focused primarily on getting the most out of a story without diluting it, and how hard that is because of the adaptation process (something I've spent a very long time learning about over the years).

I wanted to go over a set of fundamental reasons I believe, based on personal areas of study and understanding. My perspective is in part informed by media studies classes I've taken over the years, being part of friend groups with film students that go on to work in film and TV, and just general free study, among other things. It's also based on my fundamental knowledge of writing and love of analyzing stories, which I do as a writer myself (I'm currently working on a submission for a novel writing contest as I type these words, though it's decidedly not a Cosmic Horror story). Again, I'm by no means an expert, this is just something I like doing, and I felt motivated by some discussion on that "Pickman's Model" post. Just a heads up, this is going to be long, and it's going to be a bit rambly. I spent close to 3 hours writing this, and I don't want to go over it to make it less of a ramble.

First up, I want to establish the key factors themselves. There are 3 fundamental elements I think inhibit the creation of more Lovecraft film adaptations:

1. The length of the stories themselves
2. The way Lovecraft generally writes them
3. The needs of film vs. prose

The first factor is one I've already alluded to, and it's the one Del Toro brought up: Lovecraft's writing is mostly comprised of short stories. Of the ~100 stories he wrote (accounting for the stories juvenilia stories that have been lost, as well as co-written stories, but not including posthumous collabs), only 7 of them were of a length that exceeded the "short story" classification. 6 of them are novellas, with "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" being the only proper novel he ever wrote. While Lovecraft's short fiction was fairly long for the format, due in no small part to the man's verbose vernacular, most were all short enough to be printed in a magazine alongside his contemporaries like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

Short fiction has been adapted to screen before, and done so relatively successfully at that. Another of my favorite authors, Philip K. Dick, for instance, has had films (and TV shows) adapted from several of his short stories, and not as many from his longer ones. "Total Recall," for instance, is an adaptation of his story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which was a short story. The movies (both the 1990 and 2012 versions) are technically loose adaptations, as they greatly expand on the concept shown in the short story, but at least one of those is fondly remembered. While I can't say every Dick adaptation is "good," or even super "accurate" a lot of them are entertaining. But a lot of the ones based on short stories, like "Total Recall" and "Minority Report," expand on the source material to some success.

With Lovecraft, however, we only have a few reasonably successful ones (at least off the top of my head: The 2019 "The Color Out Of Space," and the 1985 and 1986 cult classics "Re-Animator" and "From Beyond." Would I call the latter two super accurate? Not particularly. Would I say they're good movies? Yeah. They're good in the same way the 1990 "Total Recall" is, at least to me: take what made the stories interesting, expand on the concept, and make a solid movie with what you end up with.

"The Color Out Of Space" though? I think that's easily the best one of the lot, because, while it changes the framing device (which I'll get to later), it ultimately does the original story justice by being faithful in the ways that matter.

Lovecraft is no stranger to "faithful" adaptations, sure. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has made fairly faithful adaptations of "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness," both of which are well received indie films, but they are decidedly low budget and have a more niche appeal, as many indie films of it's ilk do. The fact that funding is a particular struggle for said films to be made is something I'll bring up again later, but it shows in these two in particular. The former of which is also very short compared to modern films, which will factor into things later in the post.

It's not that short stories can't translate to film, because as I've just demonstrated, they can be. But they do, inherently, come with several caveats that make filming them less than ideal, one of which is the following question: do you want accuracy or a good movie, because it's hard to get both?

Adaptation is where things get murky. A lot of people have an inherent expectation that the more accurate something is, the better is ought to be. This is a view held in, say, the anime/manga community, and it's one that I, as a member of that community, have repeatedly found myself at odds with, because, in fact, no, that's not always the case. In adaptation, accuracy is only good up to a point, and that point is determined by the medium change itself, which I'll circle back to later.

For now, let's shift gears into the "how." Specifically, how Lovecraft generally wrote his stories. Lovecraft's writing is, for a large chunk of it, a character recounting events that either they themselves experienced, or having our POV character learn about things that happened from someone else. This is the case for "The Color Out Of Space" and "The Call of Cthulhu," among many of his other popular stories. Generally, Lovecraft almost presents these stories as written accounts of things that happened before our narrator happened to find a pen and paper to jot down the horrors they experienced. Sometimes, this can go multiple layers deep.

For a simple example, "The Color Out of Space" is a story told to us by an unnamed Land Surveyor, who learns about what happened to the Garnder Family Farm via a key third party, Ammi Pierce, via asking about the "blasted heath" due to, y'know, needing to know what happened for his job. It's through talking to Pierce that he is told the story of the Gardners, albeit not through a means where we are in the "eye of the narrative storm," so to speak. So we are reading a story recounting another story. And this only gets more complex with something like "The Call of Cthulhu," which itself does this multiple times, which is why it was thought to be "impossible" to properly adapt.

In the 2019 adaptation of "The Color Out of Space," instead of being told the story by a detached third party (the unnamed land surveyor), we are instead told the story from the perspective of the Gardner Family. As in, we see the horrors of what the Color does first hand, as it's happening, rather than being told what happened by someone else. This change was likely done because of reasons I'll get to in a little bit, but it's a change that ultimately does sacrifice a bit of accuracy to the source material in service of making a better film. I think this is for the better, as trying to be accurate does lead to complications with adapting things.

Now, retrospective storytelling can work in film, but the framing of the retrospective story needs to be relatively straightforward, which it often isn't in Lovecraft's work. Lovecraft does this primarily to build dread, and because he has the space to have several people recount things to the reader without losing much of the story's flow... but translating it 1-to-1 in film is difficult to do when you're working within a less "freeform" medium like film. The best example I can think of, in terms of a successful retrospective storytelling oriented movie is the critically acclaimed "Forrest Gump." That movie is framed around a simple idea: "Forrest is recounting events of his life to strangers at a bus stop." It's a story told largely from Forrest's perspective, and no matter how whacky Forrest's life gets, he is still the focal point of the narrative. Lovecraft stories aren't really that straightforward or simple, in this respect, and thus, are harder to adapt properly in this aspect. I wouldn't say it's impossible, per say, but it's much, much more difficult to do than adapting something straight forward like Forrest Gump.

The problem that Lovecraft's prose style tends to bring to people aiming to adapt his works faithfully, at least in the ways that matter, is that the framing device he often uses limits how things can be adapted. Certain stories, structurally, are easier to adapt than others, and this is, in part, to how they are framed. For instance, many people say "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is prime for an adaptation, because it's narrative is straight forward, and is presented as something directly happening to the protagonist. This is true, but it then begs the question of "why hasn't it been done yet?" It has been, and often quite poorly, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that the framing method Lovecraft loved to use often makes adapting things faithfully difficult for a standard film production. This leads into the final bit, where I can elaborate on why this specific issue is a thing at all.

When it comes to adapting things from page to screen, the needs of a story shift dramatically. A basic example of this principle is the idea of how a book has to establish what a scene looks like via description for you to picture in your mind's eye, but a film just needs to show you a simple set of shots of a location for you to know where the story is. Neither is inherently superior to the other, it's just a different means of conveying the same thing across two mediums. But films have more liberty to show you things, rather than needing to describe them.

Lovecraft is, as previously mentioned, extremely verbose in his prose. Even in his letters, he can be fairly wordy. I'm honestly kind of the same way, as I'm sure you can see, but that's beside the point. What matters is that, when you strip away the fluff of Lovecraft's prose (that is to say, the amount of words used to describe things, or otherwise make up sentences), you're left with less to chew on as a person adapting his work into a screenplay. If a good chunk of his work is describing things, which can be done in a much shorter time visually than in written form, you don't have a ton to adapt, depending on the story. This is often why short stories are expanded upon in adaptation. But in doing so, you're loosening the grip of "accuracy" with each added scene and line of dialogue, and this is done because it makes for a better film, or in some cases, show.

I mentioned "Total Recall" earlier, and it's source material by Dick. That story is about ~30 pages, which is a similar length to "The Color Out of Space." Both, for the sake of adaptation, expand on concepts, recontextualize others, and shift elements of the stories around to make something that is around 110 minutes in length. The former changes the elements of the story, as well as it's tone to make it fit it's lead (Schwarzenegger) better, which results in a fun action movie. The latter changes things to make for a better representation of Cosmic Horror for the screen, whilst keeping the spirit of the original more intact than the aforementioned Schwarzenegger film, and it's still enjoyable as a movie to boot. The adaptations changed things for the sake of a better on-screen experience for the audience, and are better for it. As a fan of Dick, I'd love a more straightforward, accurate version of the story, even if it was just part of something like "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" (great show by the way). Hell, I'd love a similar show for Lovecraft, but I feel it'd struggle more than the Dick show did, simply by virtue of how Lovecraft wrote his stories.

If we are to use a more contemporary author, at least when it comes to Lovecraft, we need look no further than Robert E. Howard. Howard's work is no stranger to the silver screen either, and as a fan of his work too, I can say with confidence aspects of the movies based on his works trade accuracy for an attempt at bring better as movies. We once again bump into Schwarzenegger with the best known "Conan the Barbarian" adaptations, and how they differ in a lot of ways from the source material. Particularly, the way Conan himself is portrayed. This is likely due to the limitations of Arnie's acting, especially at the time (his acting in his earlier films is rough to go back to), as well as to be more a reflection of the geopolitical climate of it's time. It's aged kind of poorly as a result, but it's still somewhat enjoyable. We can also look to the less than favorably received 2011 adaptation, which also traded elements of accuracy to the source material, but this time in an effort to capture the feeling of the 80s films (at least, that's what I got out of it).

Howard's Conan was largely part of short stories, as the stories were published in Weird Tales alongside Lovecraft's works, but because he had multiple stories told about his exploits by Howard, there's less issue with material to adapt per say. Still, we got some sub-par accuracy there too, because the studios decided to make things that worked better as films more-so than adaptations. This is an approach to film adaptations we can still see today, with the advent of things like the MCU, which only loosely adapts the comic book material it often draws it's film titles from. This shows that even characters with more established histories can be hit by the "loss of accuracy for the sake of adaptation" stick.

Lovecraft's work falls into a territory where it's largely loosely connected at best, save for some recurring characters that occasionally pop up. As such, the stories are pitched by the virtue of how risky they are to adapt, and how easily you can do so within budget. Something like "Color" can be done because the effects are relatively simple for modern CG, all things considered. Even the Color itself is easy enough to do, despite being "imperceptible," thanks to the concept of "imaginary colors." If you've ever wondered why the Color is magenta in the movie, it's because magenta is a color that doesn't actually exist in the visible light spectrum, it's just one of a few "colors" that our brains created to fill in gaps in how it processes light. Because it's a color that technically doesn't exist, and our eyes and brains are incapable of perceiving things outside of what they are equipped for, we're only seeing magenta in the movie because that's our brain filling in a gap to cover something that doesn't exist in a way we can perceive. It's actually super smart on the filmmaker's part, but this flies over some people's heads because they get too hung up on the nature of the Color, and not the implications of what it represents in a Cosmic Horror sense.

This also brings up the fact that Cosmic Horror, in a film sense, is a very misunderstood genre. I'm not about to say the majority of people here don't understand the genre, but a lot of people with decision making power don't understand it. We need only look at the recent Markiplier helmed adaptation of "Iron Lung" to see how people generally react to Cosmic Horror, and how hard it is to get the funding together for something like that. While Mark was in a position to just fund it himself, and the grassroots nature of his fanbase lead to it's success surpassing most reasonable expectations, general audiences were not as in-love with it as fans of his (for the sake of transparency, I count myself among those too) generally were. That movie showed a great deal of understanding for Cosmic Horror, and it has a tepid response from non-Markiplier fans because people don't really "get it." Given a lot of Lovecraft's work falls into this genre (as he is progenitor of said genre, for all intents and purposes), it's a hard sell for movie studios. These kinds of movies often trade exciting action or immediate horror for slowly building dread and revelations that rattle the minds of it's main characters. They're often stories that are more introspective on some level than traditional horror films. One could even say it's a "thinking man's" kind of horror, but I'm not really going to say that myself.

When general audiences hear about Lovecraft, they expect big alien creatures like Cthulhu, due to how the culture around Lovecraft has evolved over time. Most films based on his work have an uphill battle to get funding, let alone filmed, by virtue of the genre niche, and the expectations of general audiences. And like it or not, but unless you're funding your film with money directly from fans, such as those reading this post, you're going to likely lose that uphill battle. There's a reason a lot of attempts get stuck in development hell, or outright cancelled, and it's mostly due to this one element alone.

This is why I'm somewhat baffled by things like suggesting making more niche adaptations, like a Mockumentary style movie based on "The Color Out of Space." I can only imagine the intent of that is to preserve the stylistic element of Lovecraft's prose, the aforementioned "recounting of a past event" style of his work, over all else. It would lead to just as many changed to the source material, if not more, than something like the 2019 film, because you ultimately have to change elements of the story to make something like that work in the first place. It's why stories like "The Call of Cthulhu" were considered largely "unfilmable." It's not that these ideas can't work, it's more that you're just trading one flavor of inaccuracy for another, but in this example specifically, you're limiting who'd even want to watch it. I like Documentaries and Mockumentaries and even Found Footage Horror (which I consider a sort of mockumentary-adjacent type of filmmaking), but you're riding a fine line doing them, as they have less appeal than things like the 2019 movie, which could at least garner interest by virtue of it starring Nicholas Cage.

Another thing I see is "why don't they just make shorter adaptations? Not all movies need to be 90 minutes long." While this is true, and it's a valid thing to bring up, you need to consider how you'd sell that to an audience that isn't people who already like Lovecraft, such as the people on this sub. That's still a niche audience, and unless you have the backing of a big name behind it, it'd struggle to gain traction outside of our circle. Some may see this as a good thing, but if the fact that the H.P.L.H.S. have encountered numerous budget issues with their adaptations of "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Whisperer in Darkness," say anything, that's not something that's going to lead to much better adaptations. Heck, the latter of those two needed a financial contribution from Sandy Peterson to get over the finish line.

I feel as though too many people get hung up on "accuracy" to the source material and it's original vibe, and they don't really care to actually think about how that would work. The complaints about the "Pickman's Model" adaptation tell me this is still a problem. I feel like if I were to watch it, I'd understand the changes made, because it was likely done in service of the screen, at the cost of some level of accuracy, because that's what you ultimately have to do when adapting something.

Lovecraft didn't write his stories with movies being made based on them. I doubt the thought even occurred to him, as he was alive for the early days of cinema. As such, his stories being adapted to film will require some level of sacrifices to be made to the original structure, tone, or some other component to bring to screen at all. "Re-Animator" is decidedly funnier than the source material, for instance, and it's a better movie for it, at least in my opinion.

In conclusion: Lovecraft's stories are hard to adapt because their general length means you have to change the material to bring it to a acceptable runtime, you have to change the framing device considerably to make a film that flows better, and you have to make concessions about what and how things are translated to screen to ensure your end film is actually good to begin with. His work also struggles to be adapted because Cosmic Horror is a niche genre in film that is often misunderstood by general audiences, which harms the potential for a decent budget, and as such, leads to less films adapting his work getting made. You have to be willing to accept that concessions are going to be made to get even faithful adaptations. Faithful, in this case, is "films that are accurate in ways that matter, and change things for the sake of being a good film where it doesn't matter." Sadly, this is a fine line to walk, and is often met with failure, or pushback from fans who care too much about "accuracy at all costs," and as such, do somewhat poorly.

This took a while to write, and my brain probably jumped around more than I'd care it to (thanks ADHD), so I hope it's at least comprehensible. I get the idea that this post might be a bit divisive, but I guess we'll see.

I’m just about to start Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Dr Raymond Thoss.

This was shared with me unexpectedly by Jon Padgett and I’m really looking forward to it based on what I know of Ligotti’s work.

Very very grateful for this and I’ve used the meta tag deliberately because this is entirely bizarre.

Just an idea that popped in my head and i am curious of what the world would look like if Shub-Niggurath, somehow, is now the prime ruler of the world.

So, after much given thought, I decided to read Dagon as my first Lovecraft story. And dayum, I actually liked it! The way it started was just a little confusing, but I think it was great by the time it ended. It took me a little time to get used to the writing, but given the fact that i had read these type of writings b4 for my English class helped me get a hang of it faster than I expected.

Onto the story now!

It's a chilling story despite the fact that we never even get to know the name of the narrator. At first, we see the man drifting in sea after escaping his captivity. We watch him drift through the sea before he somehow ends up on the exposed sea floor. This is where it felt disturbing. Now, I've nvr heard of the legend of Dagon b4, so when Dagon appeared infront of him, I was already feeling chilly. The way he slowly started getting mad after seeing Dagon was disturbingly interesting. The journey after is similar. We don’t know how he reached San Francisco, except for the story he is told.

The fact that during his suicide he felt like Dagon entering his room was sooo chilling and eerie. Given it’s length, I think it was a worthy first read before committing to reading longer stories!

I hope it's not a silly question to ask, but as the title says; I bought some books of Lovecraft since I've already seen a lot of his work. Now, though, as I'm beginning to read them, I feel kinda guilty? Especially knowing about his background and how he viewed minorities. Should I feel like that? Am I allowed to enjoy his books despite that information?

Edit: Decided to read the books and enjoy his work. Thanks to everyone who was nice instead of judging me :D

Hello! I am very new to H.P lovecraft's works, and have been interested to read them for a while. So I went ahead and bought The horror omnibus of fingerprint publisher. So...I started reading the alchemist as starting with chronological order and it’s....well confusing. I understand that Lovecraft was a writer in the early 1900s, meaning his writing is definitely different, but would anyone be kind and put these stories in an order I should or could read?

Here are the stories available in the horror omnibus:

1. The Alchemist

2. The Tomb

3. Dagon

4. A reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson

5. Polaris

6. Beyond the wall of sleep

7. The white ship

8. The doom that came to Sarnath

9. The statement if Randolph Carter

10. The street

11. The terrible old man

12. The cats of ulthar

13. The tree

14. Celephais

15. The temple

16. Nyarlathotep

17. The picture in the house

18. Facts concerning the late Arthur Jermyn and his family

19. The nameless city

20. Ex Oblivione

21. The outsider

22. The music of Erich zann

23. Hypnos

24. What the moon brings

25. Herbert West—Reanimator

26. The hound

27. The lurking fear

28. The rats in the walls

29. The unnamable

30. The festival

31. The horror at red hook

32. He

33. In the vault

34. Pickman's Model

35. The colour out of space

36. Memory

37. The call of cthulu

38. The mountain of madness

39. The Dunwich horror

40. The shunned house

41. The silver key

If anyone could compile a good reading order for these, it would be really helpful!

*Ways that they did, if he hadn’t been such a deeply bigoted, hateful person during his life?

Obviously it is know that HP Lovecraft inspired most of Stephen King's mythos writing but how much lovecraftian elements is the Salem Lot story do have?

There is some informations that Kurt Barlow has a very older description that can be described but few info which it's the charm of scary creatures.

So just a fun thought question I had in my mind recently.

H. P. Lovecraft was keenly interested in the phenomenon of witchcraft and witch trials, in part because… the twisted and dark turns of history had connected his own family with the fate of the women tragically sentenced to death in Salem. To put it more bluntly, Lovecraft seems to have entertained the possibility that his family had actually been cursed by those unfortunate women. In a letter to Alfred Galpin and Frank Belknap Long from February 1923, he described his visit to the former execution site of those accused of witchcraft as follows:

“[…] Gallows-Hill is not a nice place to visit at night. […] And I was alone on that hill in that sepulchral place, where the allies of the devil had swung . . . and swing . . . and hurled out curses on their executioners and their descendants. I recall’d a witchcraft judge (Major Bartholomew Gedney) in mine own maternal ancestry, and thought of certain imprecations of the dead in fact and fiction. . . . . […] And at that moment, as God is my judge, I heard faintly but distinctly the clanking of chains in the wind . . . .“

It seems that Lovecraft transferred at least some of this fear into one of his best-known stories, “The Dreams in the Witch House”.