/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14269827]

Is there a required reading order for Lovecraft, where I won't understand what he's talking about unless I've read some earlier thing he wrote, or can I just jump around to whatever interests me? I particularly want to read about Nyarlathotep.

[Anonymous No.14269840]

Glance at some Doré paintings and skim some Poe and you'll be good to go!

[Anonymous No.14269941]

niggerman

[Anonymous No.14270020]

>>14269827
There is no order to his writings. As you keep reading more, you will obtain a more complete picture of the lovecraftian universe.

[Anonymous No.14270028]

Don't read Lovecraft. I fell for the meme and regret it. Read Dagon, Tomb, and Innsmouth and I want to shoot myself for being such a sucker.

[Anonymous No.14270032]

Read his poetry last.

[Anonymous No.14270101]

need someone with graphic design talent to make a Lovecraft reading guide featuring the entire 18th century philosophical canon, old guidebooks to New England, the entire supernatural literary tradition leading up to him, pulp magazines of the early 1900s, his own amateur astrological publications, etc.

[Anonymous No.14270244]

>>14270101
Why? Just do it in paint.

[Anonymous No.14270408]

>>14269827
AHHHH I'M GOOINNGGG TO GOOOO INSANE! I'M GOING INSANE! ARRRGGGHHHH I'M FUCKING INSANE! I'M INSANE! CTHUULLLHUUUU FTAAGGGHNN

[Anonymous No.14270457]

What's his writing style like? Is it even worth looking at?

[Anonymous No.14270474]

>>14269827

I find the chronological approach most rewarding. You could read every story he wrote that mentions Nyarlathotep in the order he wrote them. That'd be a fine way to do it.

[Anonymous No.14270480]

>>14270408
Kek

[Anonymous No.14270483]

>>14270457
>Is it even worth looking at?

He's one of the the few divinely inspired writers of the modern age. His stories are full of gods. They are real, and he could hear them.

[Anonymous No.14270516]

>>14270457
Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.

[Anonymous No.14270553]

H.P LOVECRAFT NAMED HIS BLACK CAT NIGGER MAN

[Anonymous No.14270580]

[Anonymous No.14270604]

>>14270516
Ok not going to lie this dose pull me in (I don't have a better way to describe it) what's the title of this one? Were should I start?

[Anonymous No.14271016]

>>14269827
No, but don't read the Quest for Unknown Kadath before the Dream cycle.
>>14270028
You made poor picks. With the exception of Innsmouth. How the fuck did you not like The Innsmouth Horror?
The Music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls, At the Mountains of Madness, the Lurking fear etc. are all excellent stories.

[Anonymous No.14271032]

>>14270604
That one's from Nyarlathotep.
Try the Outsider and the Music of Erich Zann, for a beginning. Both are very short, and both are very dear to me.

[Anonymous No.14271055]

>>14271032
Thanks man I will

[Anonymous No.14271208]

>>14271016
>the Lurking fear
This paragraph is an absolute blast to read out loud. It embraces all the worst aspects of him going into full adjectival diarrhea mode in the best way possible.
>Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky . . . formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion . . . insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation. . . . Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.

[Anonymous No.14271684]

>>14270408
The Cthoomer