[fungi from Yuggoth]

Originally Posted by AnkhGoddess

I'm also a fan of Nyarlathotep as well...perhaps because there's something so familliar about him, with his ability to shift into human form as needed, and him being the one to take any sort of interest in men's affairs at all...makes him a bit more solidified and easier to grasp, as a result.

Strange. I've always found Nyarl one of the less nerve-jangling of the Mythos, pretty much for the reason you find him so horrible/excellent(?). The creatures that I could grasp or understand in some aspect ceased to retain their hold over me. Still unnerving though.

The fascinating thing to me, as well, about the mythos is that so much of what Lovecraft described were from dreams he had...he was absolutelly plagued by nightmares for a good part of his life...tons of them...and often exactly what you read in his stories were his attempts at getting onto paper the very images he had dreamed about only moments before, and to me lends itself to the fact that what with these beings being the bizarre, pandementional creatures that they are, it adds a really wonderful aura of fear and mystery when you consider that the very way they communicate to humans is through the very dreams Lovecraft had...

I agree. Lovecraft for me captured the essence of nightmare perfectly -- the feverish visions in "Dreams in the Witch House" with their mad and indescribable shapes and cacophonic screaming being perhaps the prime example. His best work seems to perch teetering on the brink between the possible and the impossible, a sort of dissolution of logic and meaning, with the potential of a plunge into madness at any moment. It's the unknown, but an unknown with sentience and menace pulsing at the edges.

Incidentally, I think many of the creatures of the Mythos work so well because of their nightmarish surroundings. We have the non-Euclidean underwater city of R'Lyeh in "Call of Cthulhu" where the very laws of physics seem to be defied, the howling pit of Shub Niggurath in "Thing on the Doorstep" seemingly out of place or time. In Lovecraft's work I've always (subconsciously) associated the creature with the lair. Take the creature out of its surroundings and it turns to nothing more than a Geiger-esque abstraction.