/lit/ - Literature

>>11513488
I even really wanted to like him but I just don’t find any of it particularly horrifying.

>>11513488
It can't be written because it would drive the reader mad.

>>11513488
No, Lovecraft fans are the brainlets. Even Lovecraft himself thought his own work was shit

Traditional tales of horror traffic in localized dread. In Lovecraft, the dread merely presages something deeper and decidedly non-local. For Lovecraft, the entire cosmos is suffused with horror. His stories are like so many floating icebergs with vast unseen masses under the surface.

The best horror movies keep the threat hidden and out of sight. Lovecraft is like that, but for literature.

I haven't read a lot of Lovecraft, but in his most interesting texts, the terrifying thing is inside the terrified character himself - at least that's what seemed to me and could be a not-so-common characteristic.
Freud would have loved him - or maybe he did.

The idea that you would be unaffected by his stories is deeply disturbing. Were you speed-reading them while waiting for a bus?

>>11513488
He rarely dares to be and even then he usually holds back.
Try The Curse of Yig and The Dunwich Horror.

Mostly his writing is really elaborated descriptions of fascinating places, engaging world building and creepy atmosphere.

>>11513504
Name a single author who didn't

>>11513504
t.brainlet

>>11513533
I don’t know I just didn’t find much scary about
>wow there’s a really old city behind these mountains lol
And
>woah these dudes are sacrificing people to Cthulhu that’s crazy

i prefor goosebumps book

>>11513497
At the Mountains of Madness is actually full of descriptions, please don't post in threads about things you ignore

>>11513497
My eldest cat, NIGGERMAN xDDDDD

__________

Biographies
__________

>Adolf Hitler - Youth (Age 0 - 25)
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/86086584/

>Adolf Hitler - First World War (Age 25 - 29)
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/134340484/

>Adolf Hitler - Rise to Power (Age 29 - 43)
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/150760491/

>Joseph Goebbels
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/142878351

>Rudolf Hess
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/152757392/

>Ted Kaczynski
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/154963372/

>Timothy McVeigh
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/118541028/

>Anders Breivik
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/87875112/

>H.P. Lovecraft
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141773539

>Vincent van Gogh
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/173716710/

>William Cottrell
https://desuarchive.org/r9k/thread/30930679

>Richard Proenneke
https://archive.nyafuu.org/out/thread/1307019

>Adam Lanza
https://desuarchive.org/r9k/thread/24985710/

>Christopher Thomas Knight
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/122023099/

>Christopher McCandless
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/122167113/

>Christopher Harper-Mercer
https://4archive.org/board/r9k/thread/31293613

>Bill Hicks
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/128627797/

>Dylann Roof
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/139008559/

__________

Books
__________

>Julius Evola - Ride The Tiger
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/147654247

__________

>>11513523
>implying he doesn't frequently describe his monsters in detail, but with additional mysterious adjectives like "non-euclidean" and "cyclopean"

But his horror is rooted in his own feelings of inadequacy. He saw himself as an educated superior dude, but he was always kind of a loser. There was always the underlying insecurity that maybe he was completely impotent and unimportant in the world, since objectively he'd have plenty of reason to believe so. So he wrote a lot of stories of dread and terror about cosmic unknowns, things that people could never have any power over (him), though I think he projected it onto his antipathy for modern society by suggesting that modernity thought it was moving towards something, or that it was in control, when he felt IT was the thing that was impotent.

>>11513488

>>11514017

>psychological interpretation

>>11513488
Read this. It's on libgen.

Basically, we as evolved beings are built modularly on previous adaptations.
We have the same brain structure at the core of our brain as lizards and amphibians.
This is the reactive, unconscious, autonomic system. It's responsible for all the most instinctual impulses.
All of our fucked up compulsion like fucking sluts with VD, getting drunk and fighting people over jealousies, running away from fights, pissing our pants, or similar, all that is coming out of that Ancient Reptile brain.

When he uses fungus and cephalopod and reptilian imagery, he is tapping into the fear and loathing of that animal part of us that is so distant from who we feel we are now that it totally repulses us.
Like when you jerk off to something weird and icky and you hate yourself afterward

At the Mountains of Madness is one of his weaker stories IMO

As a pulp artifact it is acceptable. The imagery and the general mythology is interesting but the narrative itself is flat. The discovery that all of humanity is a deformed slave race for hollow earth aliens, that is entertaining. But the way in which it's discovered is not. Very tedious and flat, and the penguin bit is inexcusable

I suggest The Colour Out of Space for a story that is viscerally scary to read. Biological horror, physical and mental disintegration, and some of his best prose

>>11513523
This is a bit of a meme. Lovecraft is actually incredibly descriptive; yes he insinuates, but is very careful about what he insinuates. His imitators often struggle with this because they simply do not have his creativity and delicacy

>>11514653
>Like when you jerk off to something weird and icky and you hate yourself afterward
Yes, this. Lovecraft was terrified and disgusted by his own humanity as a biological phenomenon

>>11513488
you're misunderstanding the word 'horror'. Its not jump scares and ghosts and demons. Lovecraft's horror is the fear of the unknown. Its the fear that there are things all around us that are so far beyond our own comprehension that it drives people insane when they even bother to notice and interact with us.

>>11513488
>phased me
>Am I just a brainlet?
Yes

>>11513488
I read it when I was like 11. A couple of tales (like the one where the cops find and read the texts of a blind man writing everything that happened to him before dying) gave me some creeps, but it was more about my own mind expanding this ideas