Joshua Dyal said:
Y'know, I've been meaning to ask for a long time -- what's the deal with gamers and Lovecraft anyway? I don't think I've ever heard that horror fans, or fantasy fans or sci-fi fans, or other "geeks" particularly think anything at all about Lovecraft -- unless they're also gamers. Gamers, for some reason, seem to love Lovecraft.
Me -- I read Lovecraft long before I was seriously gaming regularly. I like some of his stuff well enough, but I don't think he's a particularly good author, and many of his ideas of what is horrific were just too strange to be horrifying to me; they left me scratching my head rather than feeling disturbed.
My love for Lovecraft predates gaming. Well, it's after my childhood 1e slugfest gaming years but before my modern gaming years -- a lapse of over a dozen years, so pretty much completely unrelated to gaming.
Take Lovecraft in context and consider some of the contemporaries that are most reflected in his stories: T.S. Eliot and Albert Einstein are two of the big ones. His "cosmic horror" derives from two sources. The first is the emergence of relativity, modern technology, and the sudden opening of the vast vistas in science. This is very evident in his choice of adjectives. The Music of Eric Zann, the Colour Out of Space, and Call of Cthlulhu are all good places to see this influence.
The second has to do with Modernism and the collapse of the Hegelian dialectic. The dialectic of European imperialism is collapsing, indeed to the European world it almost seems that civilization itself could be in regression/collapse. There were also the theories popular with Yeats and others at the time by which history became viewed as more cyclical than progressive. The Rats in the Walls, the Dunwich Horror, the Outsider, the Mountains of Madness, the Doom that came to Sarnath -- these are just a few of the good examples of these thoughts.
This is where Lovecraft, and I would argue T.S. Eliot as well, begin to show their inability to deal with the new world of pluralism and subjectivity that was emerging at the time. These things are terrible horrors that threaten to destroy the world order. Of course other authors at the time, like William Carlos Williams, seemed to recognize that it was more the birth of a new world order, but that's a different topic. This trend is often interpreted as racism, but while the elements are there, the issue as a whole is much more complex. Where T.S. Eliot handles this issue with a stoic retreat into the trappings of patriarchal oligarchy (both in his work and in his life), Lovecraft, by exploring and obsessing on the issue directly -- confronting his demons as it were -- seems somehow to unintentionally foreshadow the existentialism that would eventually emerge in reaction. In the process he utterly emasculates himself by almost invariably stripping all sense of power and control from his characters.
In this context, can you better see how the concept of pure irrationality can become pure horror? I think Lovecraft's writings are fascinating when looked at within the Modernist tradition from which they were born. However, since his collected works are one of those intricate webs of symbollic relationships that can be constantly reinterpreted from different frameworks -- Freudian, Modernist, Existentialism, Post-Structuralist, Marxist, Humanist, etc., you can read him from all sorts of perspectives. It takes a good writer to produce something with these "timeless" qualities.
rounser said:
It appeals to gamers because it was only consolidated and presented as a whole in their media.
I must, unfortunately, disagree with this. The Cthulhu mythos were well explored in the 30's when various authors (many published in Wierd Tales magazine -- including Robert Howard) all shared and expanded on these mythos. In some sense, the mythos were similar to an open source project. Arkham House Publishing later led a revival of HP Lovecraft that spawned the modern interest in his works. H.P. Lovecraft's own books, as a collection, have a pretty fluid cosmology that didn't need clarification via rpg materials. I understood all of this just from his books and before ever reading the CoC rpg.
P.S. For what it's worth, I also think that Lovecraft's writing style is great. Instantly recognizable, his grotesquely baroque ornamentations were perfectly matched to his subject matter. As Skade said, H.P. Lovecraft seemed to write like a fevered madman (Byronic, perhaps), which was exactly the mood and tone that his stories needed. Lovecraft's words have the quality of making me think in a different way while reading them.
P.P.S. Another reason that Lovecraft might be popular among gamers is simply that he is one of the primary forefathers of the modern fantasy genre and has been very influential, even if he is not quite mainstream (on the cusp though, I'd say). His influence is there in a lot of Gary Gygax stuff - Tharizdun, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, all of the strange cults everywhere, and he's one of the recommended authors in the 1e DMG.
P.P.P.S. I agree that he is inconsistent. All of his dreamworld fantasy stuff is crap, for example.
