![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt was, I suppose, the comparison that both got me interested in the book and thinking it would be easy enough to read it. When ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
incisivis mentioned having read "The House on the Borderlands" and said that it read like "Lovecraft before Lovecraft," remembering when H.P. Lovecraft started writing made me think books that preceded him had to be in the public domain, and perhaps even available on Project Gutenberg. The title turned up almost at once, and eventually I had the time here and there to get through the electronic copy. There were most definite resonances throughout, with horrors both cosmic and lurking... but at one point, a description of time speeding up until the sun became a continuous streak of light started me thinking not of H.P. Lovecraft, but of H.G. Wells and "The Time Machine." I started wondering in a somehow uneasy way just who had preceded who, but eventually a little searching suggested William Hope Hodgson had followed Wells, which was somehow a relief. Perhaps that would have been a "crumbling certainty" worthy of the themes of Lovecraft's work. In any case, Hodgson, as ought to be obvious enough, seemed to play up the "horrific" possibilities as compared to Wells's scientific vista, and push things that much further on. Still, having been affected in that way may have left me thinking by the end that the book somehow seemed "one thing after another," and I wondered if separate stories visting final horrors on different people ("Terror of the Swine Things," "Plunge to the End of Time," "The Deadly Hand") might have been just that tiny bit more impressive to me. It's probably entirely my own fault.
In any case, this does bring my mind back to wondering if my interest in H.P. Lovecraft is also just a little "wrong" somehow. The real horror of his work might well be the vast scales of space and time science unlocked, and yet when it comes to two later stories of his, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time," his narrators continue to plead with mankind not to take another look at the discoveries they fled broken from but I just think they "doth protest too much"; I've internalised enough science fiction to see "species in Earth's past" as intriguing. No doubt, of course, this would just make me the first to get gobbled up, and I can wonder if characters with that delusion might be worthwhile additions to current "mythos" stories.
incisivis mentioned having read "The House on the Borderlands" and said that it read like "Lovecraft before Lovecraft," remembering when H.P. Lovecraft started writing made me think books that preceded him had to be in the public domain, and perhaps even available on Project Gutenberg. The title turned up almost at once, and eventually I had the time here and there to get through the electronic copy. There were most definite resonances throughout, with horrors both cosmic and lurking... but at one point, a description of time speeding up until the sun became a continuous streak of light started me thinking not of H.P. Lovecraft, but of H.G. Wells and "The Time Machine." I started wondering in a somehow uneasy way just who had preceded who, but eventually a little searching suggested William Hope Hodgson had followed Wells, which was somehow a relief. Perhaps that would have been a "crumbling certainty" worthy of the themes of Lovecraft's work. In any case, Hodgson, as ought to be obvious enough, seemed to play up the "horrific" possibilities as compared to Wells's scientific vista, and push things that much further on. Still, having been affected in that way may have left me thinking by the end that the book somehow seemed "one thing after another," and I wondered if separate stories visting final horrors on different people ("Terror of the Swine Things," "Plunge to the End of Time," "The Deadly Hand") might have been just that tiny bit more impressive to me. It's probably entirely my own fault.In any case, this does bring my mind back to wondering if my interest in H.P. Lovecraft is also just a little "wrong" somehow. The real horror of his work might well be the vast scales of space and time science unlocked, and yet when it comes to two later stories of his, "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Shadow out of Time," his narrators continue to plead with mankind not to take another look at the discoveries they fled broken from but I just think they "doth protest too much"; I've internalised enough science fiction to see "species in Earth's past" as intriguing. No doubt, of course, this would just make me the first to get gobbled up, and I can wonder if characters with that delusion might be worthwhile additions to current "mythos" stories.