The Shunned House--H.P. Lovecraft

Well-written story that shouldn't be as well-received as it has been, even by me.  When people think of Lovecraft's good stuff, it fits this mold: bizarre delivery of a bizarre idea; local setting; big words and even bigger sentences; vague specificity; unfocused focus--and Providence.  Always Providence.  (You can read more about the guy in a previous blog entry, here.)  Scenes that could've been very scary--the disfigured people staring; the insane woman howling in the upstairs room--are mentioned briefly and done away with.  Instead the focus is on the basement dirt, the uncle, the foul odor, the tenants throughout the years who had died or gone insane.  And the elbow, of course.  Spooky stuff that seemed vampire-like are glossed over; how we got vampires from the giant evil residing beneath the sand floor is a mystery.  How acid poured on a giant elbow can drive away a giant evil--and in the form of a misty vapor--is just as confusing.

The story simply should not work.  But it does.  And well.  It is scary.  It is catchy.  It is fluent and stylistic and creepy.  It's got style.  Creepy style.  If only all of his stuff could have this quality, he would've been much more respected, much more published...His fans have been very kind to him as they continue to strongly celebrate the good and blissfully ignore the bad.  All fans do that, of course...but there's been a lot of bad.

This story isn't one of them.  It's a keeper.

Our Literary Quests

Special thanks to Jodi Milner--at http://myliteraryquest.wordpress.com/--for including me in her Feature Friday series, and for publishing one of my posts on her website.  Go see her blog.  She has recently published her 300th blog entry, and there's a reason for that: her blog is awesome!  Her site's gotten more hits than the dark side of the moon (more hits than my right cheek during my dating years; more hits than the reputation of yesterday's celebrities; more hits than...okay, I'm done) and it has many sections for reference, including: Good Blog Reads, Places to Submit, Resources, Writers Cafe Blog (a group which she and I are members of on LinkedIn), Online Publications, Quickly Quotables, and more.

I continue to get work done on my novel(s); I will continue to wake at 5ish in the morning.  My thought now is: If I can do it during the workweek, why not on the weekends?  Write in the morning, mow the lawn in the later morning (so as not to wake the neighbors, or my better half), read in the breezy afternoon, hit the city at night for dinner...Sounds good to me.

I'm currently reading Steven Pressfield's The Legend of Bagger Vance and his The War of Art (which started all this), as well as The Secret (you can stop laughing now), H.P. Lovecraft's Letters, and God knows what else.  I spent a few hours reading outside today in a gorgeous, low- to mid-70s, sunny day, and now I'm typing this, eating two green apples with a small glass of wine, and about to watch the Sox game.  What's better than that?

Onward and forward...

Wireless Stuff, H.P. and Losing My Mind

I feel like a little randomness is in order.  Lots of separate thoughts running around in here that need to come out, so here we go:

--I just bought a wireless keyboard and mouse because my mouse had just died, and buying both was only about six bucks more than buying the mouse.  Result: I'm lovin' this.  Smoother keys and mouse, and no wires!  I'm currently typing this on a wireless keyboard on my lap, my feet stretched out on my desk, and it's so comfortable!  No awkward angles with my wrist and fingers; much more relaxed...Maybe this is the breakthrough my writing needed to really take off.  Ya never know...

--I'm going to buy the five or six volumes of H.P. Lovecraft's letters.  The ones I have read were very interesting.  He had a lot to say about a lot of stuff, and there'd be no better window, maybe, into the mind of the weird than through this man.  I'll somehow have to deal with the rampant racism when I see it.

--My local used bookstore is consistently closing at 6 when the sign and website say it closes at 7 on Thursdays.  If you're gonna close early, change those.  I drove 2.6 miles out of my way for nothing.  (For my readers from out of state, I don't expect you to understand.)

--This keyboard seems to want me to use the downward arrow key rather than the return key.  Yes, master.

--Now it doesn't.  Weird.

--I've been so unfocused lately, that I'm reading Mary Karr's Lit, several nonfiction vampire books and other stuff for my novels, H.P. Lovecraft's short stories, and God knows what else, all at once.  This is a lot even for me.  I've got to get my head screwed on straight.

--Today I forgot to take my sinus meds and had to come back home to take them.  First time in all my years of taking them.

--Every blog I read that's written by a writer complains about the lack of writing that person does.  Mine is no exception.  I used to be driven and edgy and raw, and I'd write (with varying levels of quality) all the time.  Now I've gotten soft because of my career, home, etc.  I miss that verve and I want it back.  NOW.

H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was one weird dude.  After having read a lot about him (and after having bought a collection of his works), it seems that "weird" doesn't seem to be quite enough.  And that's me saying this.  He seems to have been a victim of a sort of social anxiety disorder, except from among his letters it seems that he also had a "nervous disposition" while alone, or while living with his mother and aunts.  His mother's mental and emotional spiral wouldn't have helped, and she ended up in Butler, the same asylum his father died in--though his father undoubtedly had syphilis, while he and his mother were simply...nervous.  (Mary Karr's mother was apparently the same, and the word "nervous" was used to mean someone who was barely functionally insane.)

Lovecraft married and moved to NYC, but the marriage didn't last long, and his wife complained that he was more comfortable communicating with her through letters.  He moved back to RI; she moved to Cleveland and later to CA after she re-married.  He then proceeded to write maybe more letters than anyone else, ever.  One scholar places the number of letters at over 200,000; one wonders how much more fiction he could have written.  Yet, he was more comfortable writing letters, and getting comfortable seemed to be his life's work.  His letters, perhaps more than his writing, may prove to be his most lasting legacy.

His fame doesn't rest upon that much fiction, and much of that fiction is just plain bad.  Yet the good is very good, of its type.  Storyline and plot were not important.  More than Poe, Lovecraft was interested in atmosphere and feeling, and he got those across very well, as well as, or better than, even Poe.  Reading Lovecraft is to feel dread, even if you don't know what you're feeling dread about, exactly.  Reading his best is like having a nightmare you don't understand, but that which makes you fear and dread.

His fiction and letters had a major similarity: fear of others, or, more exactly, Others.  His most ardent fans are forced to admit his rampant racism; his racism is flat-out fear.  Scholars point to his NYC days, in which he was jobless.  He felt immigrants took job opportunities from him.  Probably it was his demeanor and nervousness.  Would you hire this guy?  Upon returning to RI, he quickly decided that he would work from home, writing, ghostwriting, editing and corresponding.  He did not ever become otherwise employed.  Due to his mother and aunts' spoiling of him, he perhaps never had to.  (To be a fly on that wall...)

When he knew that death was close by (colon cancer), he appointed a teenage fan from Florida to be his literary executor, which one scholar said was like hiring you or I to lead an army platoon into battle.  This kid promptly gave over most of the works to August Derleth, Lovecraft's aunts, and a university, thereby causing one of the most confusing copyright wrangles in the history of literature.  Who owns the rights?  The writing from the 20s, nobody, as they are now in the public domain.  Perhaps everything now is.  Or the aunts, or Derleth, got cheated.  It is further now established that the Cthulu Mythos is more Derleth than Lovecraft, which makes sense to me, as Lovecraft often stated that he was after atmosphere and feeling, plot be damned, and the Mythos stories clearly show a consistent and connected sort of plotline, in a Good vs. Evil sort of way.  Lovecraft, an avowed atheist and overall nihilist (and elitist), probably did not believe in a good vs. evil distinction.

His stories, like his life, defy simple explanation, besides to say that they are an exercise in supreme oddity.