Quote:
Originally Posted by iansales  I read a few bits and pieces of Lovecraft before. I remember one drunken reading with some friends of the story with killer penguins and the invisible room (might have been two stories I've conflated into one). We were running out of booze that night, so mixed everything we had left together and christened it "Blasphemous Ichor" in HPL's honour :-) |
Oh, my, what a hangover that must have produced....
And, considering Lovecraft was not only a teetotaller, but a supporter of Prohibition (at least, until it finally became convinced that it wasn't going to work, and even then he supported it in theory), I'd love to have seen his reaction to this one.....
Hmmm... the penguins (though not killer ones) came from At the Mountains of Madness; an invisible room... possibly the invisible maze from "In the Walls of Eryx"?
At any rate... Hope you enjoy. Just a warning, though: read Lovecraft carefully. As was said a long time ago, "Lovecraft does not write for lazy readers"... or hasty readings. That, from talking to various people who don't like his work, is usually what turns out to be the problem: they're used to writers who were much less dense textually and required less thought on the part of the reader, and so all they saw was the denseness, not the fact that that denseness is a very carefully crafted tool for achieving a specific (and often very subtle) set of artistic goals. While he may seem to have pulled out all the stops and gone for various shades of purple at times, a closer reading proves that (save when -- as with "The Hound" or "Herbert West -- Reanimator" or "The Lurking Fear" -- he's being self-parodic) for what he's attempting to do, he's actually quite controlled and restrained.....