Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft

[Da Boat]

I love how someone can judge strangers they have never met calling them names, I find even more laughable when it's about people separated threw time and culture in different decades.

I hope 150 years from now someone discover who you were and call you an Evil man. lol

I mean what is this urge to hate people from the past? People who you will never trully know. So it's garbage picked up from nowhere.

[Madam-Shogun-Assassin]

I've read both men were inferior word smiths. Atrocious one critic said; but these story tellers created classic worlds, characters, and mythologies that have stood the test of time. New writers have continued to keep the spirit of Howard and Lovecraft alive in contemporary novels and short story collections. Consider the films and comic book success of Howard's Conan and the Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Even Stephenie Meyer (creator of the Twilight series) was called a dreadful writer by Stephen King, but her books sell. And the film adaptation of the novels made a healthy profit. Perhaps they too will stand the test of time. Maybe some great ideas, like seeds, grow to fruition regardless of the laborer who plants them.

I loved Robert, but hated H.P. Lovecraft's prose. I do appreciate what Lovecraft created genre wise though.

[Carabas]

I love how someone can judge strangers they have never met calling them names, I find even more laughable when it's about people separated threw time and culture in different decades.

They probably have left behind more letters and autobiographical material than stories.

[AndrewCrossett]

Lovecraft's prose could get a little on the purple side at times, but it worked.

[Old Man Ollie 1962]

I love how someone can judge strangers they have never met calling them names, I find even more laughable when it's about people separated threw time and culture in different decades.

I hope 150 years from now someone discover who you were and call you an Evil man. lol

I mean what is this urge to hate people from the past? People who you will never trully know. So it's garbage picked up from nowhere.

Time wounds all heels.

[Emperor-of-Dragons]

Tbh The Color Out of Space is the only Lovecraft story i could get into.

[AndrewCrossett]

Lovecraft's best work IMO is "At the Mountains of Madness."

I'm actually glad the Del Toro movie adaptation didn't go forward though. He's a genius, but that story in unfilmable unless you ruin it. The buildup of suspense is masterful (the story gave me claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time), but it is very much literary rather than cinematic.

[beetee]

Lovecraft's best work IMO is "At the Mountains of Madness."

I'm actually glad the Del Toro movie adaptation didn't go forward though. He's a genius, but that story in unfilmable unless you ruin it. The buildup of suspense is masterful (the story gave me claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time), but it is very much literary rather than cinematic.

I would argue John Carpenter's The Thing came close in its Lovecraftiness.

[Starter Set]

Lovecraft started out as very racist and Howard as typically (for his time and place) racist

Actually no, Lovecraft's racism for the most part really spiked to some pretty impressive level during his time in New York and when he actually started to live in kinda poor neighborhoods. Before that he was just as racist as your regular wasp was back then.

Thanks for us it fueled his writing, his imagination.

For being honest i never has been bothered by the fact that he was a racist. He always has been a discrete, humble to a fault, polite man, even during his last days when he was suffering excruciating pains. One who didn't know much of the outside world when he left his precious little Providence and went for the big city and who suffered for a time from the shock of this reality check.

I don't know if any of you have heard of this guy but there is also this man named "Celine", pen name, a very, very good french author but also happened to be furiously antisemitic. Never stopped people to enjoy most of his work.

Authors are simply people, they like, they hate. I truly wouldn't be surprised for example to hear that people like Tolkien or Lewis had also some very "special" opinions on races and people. It wouldn't change at all my love for the lord of the rings. (i don't like narnia so it really wouldn't change my opinion about that one lol)

[AndrewCrossett]

Tolkien was born in South Africa but was decidedly opposed to apartheid. He was also strongly against the Nazis and their antisemitism. I'm not sure what C.S. Lewis's views on race were. A lot of people try to infer an author's racial attitudes by looking at his fiction and trying to make connections between imaginary races and real world ones, but that seems pretty silly to me. Reality is reality and fiction is fiction.

Lovecraft's xenophobia seems to have been directed toward everyone not of Northern European extraction, including many whites. That is, everyone not like him. He seems to have had pretty severe anxiety disorders made worse by his unstable family life, sickly physical condition, poverty, and the fact that he was almost certainly on the autism spectrum. His attitudes were probably fueled primarily by terror of change and the encroachment of the unknown. This is why the sources of terror in his stories are always things from the outside that have somehow been allowed to get in.

[AmazingSpiderFan]

This is why the sources of terror in his stories are always things from the outside that have somehow been allowed to get in.

Not always. Remember, his father died of syphilis, which Lovecraft was in steadfast denial about his whole life, frequently lying to friends about how his father died. He'd say his father died quietly in his bed as a result of "exhaustion," and leave out the year or two of increasing madness that preceded his suicide. But it's clear that event had a huge impact on him and filled him with anxiety, because many of his stories involved characters who discover madness and corruption in their own blood lines.

I personally get tired of people demanding that Lovecraft be castigated for being a weird, autistic, xenophobic dude. If he wasn't those things, if he wasn't filled with this terrible existential dread and fear of others, then he wouldn't have created the Cthulhu Mythos, and imagine how much less interesting a place the world would be without the Mythos. His racism doesn't matter. He's dead, he's been dead for a long, long time, and his politics are completely irrelevant. If you want proof of that, just watch Jordan Peele's Get Out. Clearly a Lovecraft inspired story, full of Lovecraftian tropes, but done entirely in service of an anti-racist message.

---

Now, Robert E. Howard on the other hand, he does not deserve to be called racist. He was, at best, ignorant in his youth. Much like Tarzan creator Edgar S. Burroughs (who also gets accused of racism a lot), he grew up in rural Texas, in an all-white community, and only knew of other races through hearsay. Both Howard and Burroughs changed their views on other races as they grew older and experienced more of the world for themselves. If not for his suicide, Howard almost certainly would have continued along that track, growing more progressive as he got older.

[Joker]

The problem with Lovecraft's racism, is it fueled his work.

It's hard to read Innsmouth and not see the racism at play. He had interesting ideas, and a lot of good works has been inspired by those ideas, but those ideas were built out of his racism. It's hard to like racist work. Maybe that's just me. A lot of people don't seem to care, but it's always bothered me.

While his attitudes were very much of their time, and some dismissal can be made from that fact, it still tints the actual work for me when it's so present in so much of it.

Lovecraft's best work IMO is "At the Mountains of Madness."

I'm actually glad the Del Toro movie adaptation didn't go forward though. He's a genius, but that story in unfilmable unless you ruin it. The buildup of suspense is masterful (the story gave me claustrophobia and agoraphobia at the same time), but it is very much literary rather than cinematic.

Prometheus.

[GOLGO 13]

I would argue John Carpenter's The Thing came close in its Lovecraftiness.

I can't think of any remake that absolutely trounces the original as much as Carpenter's masterpiece.

Lovecraft as writer is great and tells some amazing stories. However he was a racist asshole and that seems to be ignored when talking about him most of the time.

I take great pleasure in knowing that Lovecraft died a miserable, self-loathing racist POS & that his one redeeming contribution is free to all to use as they wish. It's a cosmic kind of justice that he never knew how celebrated he would one day become.

[Carabas]

I can't think of any remake that absolutely trounces the original as much as Carpenter's masterpiece.

Carpenter's version is a remake.

[robreedwrites]

Carpenter's version is a remake.

I think that's what they meant. Carpenter's remake trounced the original film and no other remake has been able to come close to that level of improvement.