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Message: <blockquote data-quote="VelvetViolet" data-source="post: 8363730" data-attributes="member: 6686357">I understand that modern stories like The Sick Land love to wallow in surrealist incomprehensibility, but a lot of the HPL stories are largely explainable. Largely. Like, we know what the mermen want because they explain it to the human characters: give them sacrifices, marry them, convert to their religion, etc and they'll give immortality and gold jewelry in return. We don't get much detail, but what little we do see appears pretty comprehensible.The whole "you can't understand it" thing seems to be more a part of what fans think HPL's work is more than what it is actually is. (I recall that several Lovecraft scholars have complained about Chaosium messing up fandom's perception of the mythos, but I don't recall much of what they said.) There's this fascinating online article on <a href="https://www.andscifi.com/writing/2018/4/9/creating-a-lovecraftian-creature" target="_blank">how to write a Lovecraftian monster</a>, and most of HPL's stories actually break the rules it sets (whereas a military scifi story like Knights of Sidonia follows far more).That's the entire reason that Hahn was able to write such detailed analyses in the first place. One story that Hahn notably <a href="https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/lets-read-everything-howard-phillips-lovecraft-ever-wrote.19724/page-51#post-10966456" target="_blank">went full Derrida on</a> was "The Whisperer in the Darkness." Although HPL's tone says one thing, the actual events of the story say something completely different. The fungus crabs come across as (by HPL standards) incredibly moral and restrained beings, but also as incompetent morons more appropriate for slapstick comedy.Let that sink in for a moment. When I said Hahn was the most original take on HPL since HPL, I meant it. Hahn was so somethinged with the story that no analysis was made of the fungus crabs, even tho xenology posts were a regular part of the Let's Read.</blockquote>

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