I like the way the future happens in front of other stuff... like today and yesterday.
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Great Woods, Narnia
Earth: near Werda,...
“Since the wholly unexpected awakening of my blasphemous creation, I have confined my scribblings to the realm of melodious birds and frolicking kittens. Indescribable kittens, perhaps. But, they do frolic.”
HP Lovecraft, “Fiction” writer (portrayed by Leeman Kessler)
hp Apology (by quantumcat42)
“Providence, which spurn’d Eddie living, now reveres him dead, and treasures every memory connected with him. The hotel where he stopt, the churchyard where he wander’d, the house and garden where he courted his inamorata, the Athenaeum where he us’d to dream and ramble thro’ the corridors—all are still with us, and as by a miracle absolutely unchang’d even to the least detail.”
HP Lovecraft on Edgar Allan Poe in a letter to Frank Belknap Long. Feb 1924. Via the Necronomicon Providence newsletter.
Wilum H. Pugmire describes his reaction to HP Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space in a Feb 15 2013 interview.
And I couldn’t read Lovecraft’s fiction for a long time after I first read The Colour Out of Space. It just so affected me and tormented me. It tormented my imagination. I just went, “Wow, this is too heavy. This is so sad and tragic and terrifying.” It was terrifying! People say Lovecraft’s fiction isn’t scary. Excuse me girlfriend, YES it is! It’s very potent fiction.
One critique aimed at Lovecraft is that he is very poor with creating characters. He does not create characters in the usual way. But, the characters that he creates… they’re almost like emblems… icons. And they are profoundly touching, mysterious. I find Lovecraft’s characters bewitching.
Wilum H Pugmire in a Feb 15 2013 interview.
The exploits of Brown Monkey and Sherman in the Lovecraft classics: Call of Cthulhu, The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror and Herbert West—Reanimator.
Professor Armitage, Sherman and Brown Monkey prepare to battle the Dunwich Horror.
Professor Armitage: I’ll need a large quantity of foot powder, Dr Scholl’s preferably, and a couple of bottles of the best rye whiskey you can find. Foot powder contains a large amount of starch, but it also contains acrylamide copolymer, also known as “the bane of Nyarlathotep”.
Brown Monkey: That’s neat! And the whiskey has arcane properties, too?
Professor Armitage: Sure. Let’s say that.
Brown Monkey: Sorry, did you just say something, Sherm? I didn’t hear you cuz I passed out from hunger.
Sherm: Why don’t you try passing out again, Brown…?
Brown Monkey: What?!
The Dunwich Horror by HP Lovecraft as performed by a stuffed monkey and a polar bear in Brown Monkey’s Dunwich Horror. More from Brown Monkey Audio.
I have seen the dark universe yawning,
Where the black planets roll without aim;
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
Nemesis by HP Lovecraft
“I certainly do not disagree with you concerning the essential solitude of the individual, for it seems to me the plainest of all truths that no highly organised and freely developed mind can possibly envisage an external world having much in common with the external world invisaged by any other mind.”
HP Lovecraft in a letter to August W Derleth in December 1930. From Lovecraft Quotations on the excellent HP Lovecraft Archive.
“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.”
-HP Lovecraft.
From his excellent essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature.
“Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters.”
The Night Ocean by HP Lovecraft & RH Barlow
Beautiful image from theirsnolimits.
“Then, too, there was a damnable slithering, as of a vast serpent or sea-beast dragging its monstrous folds over a paved floor.”
The Diary of Alonzo Typer by HP Lovecraft & William Lumley
Sea beast by TaitaViracocha
“Ne raillons pas les fous; leur folie dure plus longtemps que la nôtre…. Voilà toute la differénce.
Do not mock the insane; their madness lasts longer than ours… that is the only difference.”
High-res
This is a screenshot of the best character sheet ever, which was designed by Cheyenne Wright specifically for Realms of Cthulhu. Click through for the pdf.
“Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.”
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee roots for the “unknown force” in The Shadow out of Time by HP Lovecraft. Cuz it ain’t gonna be pretty if the fumbling “something” scores.
