Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Not all that long, or so it seemed, after I‘d read Gou Tanabe‘s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dark Horse announced another adaptation was going to be translated and released over here. This time it would be “The Call of Cthulhu,” significant enough for providing the name for the whole “Mythos.” I got around to buying and reading a copy.
( Conceivably a survival )

A lot of "popular" references to the work of H.P. Lovecraft do seem "joking" (as opposed to the introductions written by academics who proofread errors in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and sniff that trying to fit his cosmic horrors into a "mythos" misses the real point of his stories as postmodern commentaries on materialist malaise), and his elaborate prose and the way his horrors wound up more "strange stuff piled together" than variants on physical dissolution might make those cosmic horrors more comic from a skewed perspective. I can't seem to shake the feeling, though, that not taking the mythos seriously is taking it seriously, that the humour winds up very much the "gallows" variety. As much as I can imagine a "self-aware" take on the mythos making those who prefer to take a more positive, perhaps even "science-fictional" take on cosmic depths and that which might follow different patterns within it just the first to get eaten, I guess I'm not quite inclined to grin at "The indifferent immensity of the universe will drive us mad before it drives us from existence? Now that's funny!"

When I saw a link to a webcomic series by Patrick Dean getting under way that pushed beyond mere "underwhelming" depictions of the Lovecraft anti-pantheon to six-panel adaptations of his early short stories (where some of Lovecraft's personal hangups about "the other," knowing about which may help me think he's not necessarily revealing some hard "universal truth," weren't quite so coded), though, I started thinking there might be something I could enjoy about it. I suppose it does help that I've read the original stories and can contrast them against their lightweight compressions, but the comics are fun in their own way. That the series has just completed a six-part adaptation of "Herbert West--Reanimator" (which I've seen described, in academic notes no less, as Lovecraft getting to the point of parodying himself) may have helped produce a positive impression too. I am wondering how much further the adaptations will go and whether they'll get to the more famous yet longer later stories.

It was, I suppose, the comparison that both got me interested in the book and thinking it would be easy enough to read it. When 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.