Lovecraft And Priestcraft

[poliphilo]

A friend of a friend is frightened of demons. He puts it down to being a fan of Lovecraft's. And he puts the Lovecraft thing down to his good, old-fashioned Catholic education.

I can't be doing with Lovecraft. I find him completely over the top. He doesn't frighten me because I  don't believe in his mythos.

Maybe you need to have been brought up as a certain kind of Christian- traditional Catholic or hell-fire Protestant- to find Lovecraft frightening.

I was brought up as an Anglican with an elusive God who "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" and so the spook stuff that ruffles my feathers is the hinty, blink-and-you'll-miss-it English ghost story, as purveyed by the likes of M.R. James and Robert Aickman.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

When I was young I was afraid of the demonic, not because of my Episcopalian background but because my young and paranoid husband not only believed in them, he was determined, via some spell or other, to raise one! He wasn't planning to do this at our own little cottage, thank Heaven, but with some of his "friends."

During the time he was brooding and planning this project, we began to have cockroaches invade our house, and he did some research and came home with sulphur candles that he'd bought at the drugstore, so he said. He lit them all over the house, and they exuded the most hellish stench. Our cottage seemed (I expound the obvious here) to be overtaken demonically, what with my husband coming his hair down into a point over his forehead and reading The Golden Dawn and talking about his plans, while the house reeked of sulphur.

I began to be terrified and jumpy, unsure if my husband was overtaken already by a demon or whether the babies and I would be--he looked so odd with his pointy hair...

He told me he would be driving down to Atlanta and joining his friends to raise a demon in October. Naturally. I dreaded being alone in the house, with the closets still smelling (and they probably still do) of sulphur...

Close to Halloween, he told me that the plans to cast their spell were off. He didn't explain. I believed everything he said in those days, and I was utterly relieved, because I thought he really could have done it, and maybe brought something unholy home with him.

Now I know that he'd probably made up the entire story.

God, those were dark days. The cockroaches were with us until we moved, and the house still carried its sulphurous odor in deep closets.

I took the children and left him soon afterwards, leaving him and his Golden Dawn books behind in Florida, in a cottage infested with palmetto bugs, which are cockroaches that can fly.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

As a genre, horror is not well known for the calibre of its writers. Its works tend to succeed in spite of, rather than because, of their authors. In the case of Lovecraft, the author triumphantly managed to drag his work down with him though...

[forestdweller.livejournal.com]

I didn't grow up christian, but oddly enough I have a serious fear of demonic possesion. I can't even watch movies concerning the subject.

Ancestral memory perhaps? Haven't the Irish/Scots been Catholic for many many generations now?

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

After about age fifteen I began to find Lovecraft a comforting old eccentric, not the least bit "horrifying". He's America's genteel poverty-stricken old peculiar for most of his fans, I think.

But before fifteen I couldn't read him at all. Too scary.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

As a young kid reading lovecraft, I found the atmosphere of his stories pleasantly creepy without being directly scary at all, and I was fascinated by his sense of history and learning -- his fascinating (to me) discussions of the textual history of the necronomicon, for example, probably have something to do with why I eventually went into academia.

And now I find lovecraft comforting -- even his most intentionally horrific stories read more like fantasy for me, like tolkein or something. Innsmouth and Arkham are as romantic and strange for me as Lothlorien.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

Also, on the issue of Lovecraft and god, I've always thought of him as much more of an atheist horror writer -- his sense of man's unimportance in the face of an uncaring universe populated by vast forces beyond his control seems like the dark side of early 20th century scientific optimism.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I thought Lovecraft's Rats in the Wall wonderful until I figured out the premise, which wasn't nearly as creepy as a real ghost story.

When they broke out into the underground vista, it was thrilling!

Most ghost stories of that time (I'm thinking now of Blackwood and of a new favorite, M.R. James) tend to set up a wonderful idea and then chew it to death in long conversations...James in particular jumps over plot points as irrelevant when the transition could have been fun, and also has mysterious references that are never mentioned again, most frustrating: in one I read last week, a grave was surrounded by a high hedge so that no one could go through, but he never explained why.