Why You Should Read: H.P. Lovecraft (Spoiler-Free)

when I think about HP Lovecraft I think back to fifteen-year-old Mike first discovering some Lovecraft in his high school library and being like holy hell do they know that this is in here so before we talk about a little Lovecraft and why you should read them let's take a look at what makes Lovecraft so special I have seen the dark universe yani where the black planets roll without aim where they roll in their hour unheeded without knowledge or luster or name creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and was not meant that we should voyage far the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents searchers after horror haunt strange far places ultimate horror often paralyzes memory in a merciful way life is a hideous thing and from the background behind what we know of it peered demoniacal hints of truth what makes it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous [Music] [Music] the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown fear is our deepest and strongest emotion and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature defined illusions [Music] Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence Rhode Island after an unusual childhood marked by tragedy he became an avid reader of Edgar Allen Poe Lord Dunsany and developed a special interest in astronomy before riding for Weird Tales magazines will be introduced and readers dominium supernatural beings that would wreak havoc on humankind he went on to create his Cthulhu Mythos and establish himself as the 20th century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale so how is it that almost 100 years after Lovecraft creation that the Cthulhu Mythos still endures today and why should you read his weird tales let's talk about it [Music] you you hey what's up bookworms Mike here today to talk about a little HP Lovecraft and why you should read him now if you don't know by now I am a humongous horror fan I've talked many many times on this channel about my love for Stephen King and no fan of Stephen King I don't think they've ever been like you know what I love Stephen King but I don't like HP Lovecraft these two always seem to get mentioned you know side by side by this generation because I feel like Stephen King is the closest thing we have to a American master of McCobb kind of like kind of like Lovecraft was you always see this comparisons to Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft from Stephen King now while King has kind of went away from horror the past 2025 years or so you can obviously see the influence here and that is actually how I discovered HP Lovecraft when I first really dived into King as a teenager whenever I would read any kind of interview or see him on TV and he would talk about his influences the name HP Lovecraft always came up okay I'll figure this out I thought for sure at the high school library they weren't gonna have anything by this this fella that Stephen King said scared the pants off of him and I was surprised to find at the mouth I'm sorry at the Mountains of Madness in there and I read that that my very first dive into Lovecraft and I was like wow they can't know that this is in here because this is this is there's some risque stuff you'd be surprised you can't tell you get does you know some of these classics banned from your high school libraries but you get some really dark and sinister stuff that just kind of fell by the wayside nobody really paid attention to it but what this is about in case you don't know my why you should read segments they are knows they are not spoilers they don't spoil any of these stories or anything about the author really for you it just is kind of this is author that I really like and I think it's one that you should probably give a try for for many many reasons and we're gonna get into that with HP Lovecraft here if you don't know by now ah Lovecraft is basically the trend setter for all things American horror yes he wasn't the first yes there was some Michalek everybody always goes back to Edgar Allan Poe stuff like that but with Lovecraft I feel like he did this it's like a man at a time he wrote these cosmic horror stories it scared the pants off of people so much that it was really hard to find anyone to publish his stories because we're talking this the 1920s here you know I talked to my Robert E Howard video about how you know he wrote a lot for Weird Tales because it was hard to find a publisher that didn't find his stuff too risque for the time Lovecraft and Robert E Howard were actually pen pals so you know they actually kind of had some similar struggles especially the main one being in that they never neither one of them really got huge huge success until after their passing Lovecraft I I always joked that more people have profited off his works than he ever had it he never did I think I want to say like the most he ever got from one of his stories was like $500 he got so many classic stories rejected and they actually had to make like their own publishing house just to publish some of his stories after he died and that was when his stuff B got more and more popular but what makes him so different and so special I got this version of the Necronomicon in 2008 because it's a basically a collection of everything that he did for Weird Tales magazine and a few things from amazing stories he had a really really bad experience with uh the editor an amazing story so he only did I think the color out of space with amazing stories it's really the biggest one that you'll know of and III did a review of color out of space right here in case you guys missed that I did both the book and the movie adaptation that just happened but uh I know I'm kind of derailment here but when I first discovered Lovecraft I was just kind of blown away that this guy was able to pack so much content in a short story and I know I said the same thing with Robert E Howard but this is something that I've read all of you know the Robert E Howard was just I'm going to read his stuff now but these stories 2530 pages some of your very very favorite classics by him call a Cthulhu especially like 25 pages you know you you're just amazed that some of these stories have the legacy they do and so short and I think that's because fantasy and horror and and science fiction have gotten to this point now where they feel like they have to world build and and do inner monologue so much that sometimes they lose sight of the story now I'm all for those things hello Stephen King fan I don't think he's got a book under a thousand pages there for a while that's okay I'm not saying that long stories are bad I'm saying sometimes you can go to these stories that are 25 30 pages long and they will really hit that sweet spot because they get right to the meat and potatoes for you and I don't think that there was a heavier hitter than Lovecraft because not only would he do it in a way that would absolutely terrify you he would do it in a way that would make you think afterwards because some of these stories are open-ended and there's so much left to interpretation and I know a lot of people think that's a cop-out but I don't I believe it was Lovecraft's way of if he was Nietzsche that said God is dead it was Lovecraft that said no God is alive he just doesn't care about us because we are completely insignificant in the greater cosmos and that is the biggest theme of his stories is that we are insignificant in these old ones these ancient beings are basically I don't want to say too much because I do want you to read some of these but uh yes there is a connected universe here which is now known as his Cthulhu Mythos and I talked before about Stephen King having to connect a universe obviously you can see the influence very early here you got some great tales like Dunwich you got at the mouth of madness that was the very first one that I'm sorry I keep seeing at the mouth it the mountains of madness I think there was a movie called in the mouth of madness is that what I'm thinking of don't know why I keep saying that rats in the walls was one of the very earliest ones that I read that really just kind of opened my eyes but yeah Colorado space obviously is one of the classics there's there's so many that you've heard of Dunwich horror and you probably don't even know this him and that's the thing is his influence runs so deep is that you've seen a lot of these things in movies and stories and you don't even know they came from him I gotta say he's probably one of the most ripped off authors of all time I feel like it by now everyone even if they've never read a single or but Lovecraft knows what Cthulhu is I feel like he has become a pop culture icon be it from every time there's an election you see the vote for a Cthulhu you know why vote for a lesser evil you see that just about every election now you see cartoons you see hats I'll leave my wife even dissing crochet that's like a mask of with with with the the tentacles uh something as simple as pirates that Caribbean you look at Davy Jones and his face is very much Cthulhu based it's really easy to see this influence and there's this documentary out there called Lovecraft fear of the unknown where it is basically told by John Carpenter a Neil Gaiman and God who was the third guy Gilmore de Toro obviously you can watch any Gilmore de Toro movie and see that this guy was a Lovecraft fan right and I I'd want to just kind of touch now about if you're looking for someone who's gonna come on here and tell you why Lovecraft was such an awful person because of his uh his racial and his Zen afib Zeno Phebe xenophobic beliefs geysers plenty of channels out here who do that this and this channel all I like to talk about is the this the fiction the stories and talk with you about it if you want some kind of narrative about you know the way that people fought in the early 1900's as compared to today this ain't it but again there's plenty of avenues for you to find that especially here on YouTube you don't have to look very hard or just get a Twitter account you'll be able to find it I wanted to address that elephant in the room because I know people are waiting for it I don't do that I know that beliefs as as far away as fifty years ago we're different than they are now and I don't try to apply today's thinking to things that happen then if that bothers you I do apologize that's just not my brand I don't do that I just like to talk about the fiction okay moving on again I think the real difference here between someone like Lovecraft and a Stephen King is that Stephen King kind of started to go more towards the thriller and the drama and now he's pretty much just you know crime based non-supernatural stories and and that's just part of his growth I feel like love crap maybe it's because he died at such a young age I think he was like 46 and yeah I like 41 I like to consider that young oh I feel like that is part of his legacy you know because right when he was really really really just picking up some stuff the shadow over Innsmouth that was probably one of his later ones where you saw what he was actually trying to grow his riding a little bit and you know then he got sick and passed away and after that that's when his legacy kind of started to grow after all these publishers and his peers really started working really hard to make sure that his stuff got out there and it just really like I said I kind of really helped his legacy to grow as this this just basically the pinnacle of 20th century horror and I feel like every author that askance calls himself a horror author today it was influenced in one way or the other by Lovecraft I mean he is really what everybody goes back to and you can't watch a single movie that has a single kind of tentacle in it that isn't anime that wasn't influenced by Lovecraft this guy I think he has some kind of fear of fish because a lot of his stuff is just creatures from the sea tentacles octopus kind of kind of thing but it's the cosmic horror of it that makes it so unique and different from everything he does a little bit of body but not as much as you would see in some of these other authors but man he's just got some dark and twisted ideas that I can't believe came out almost a hundred years ago that it was still just as shiver up your spine today so what is my biggest takeaway from Lovecraft it's very easy when I was like I said first discovering Stephen King and I thought there's no one who could scare me like this and I read Lovecraft and I was actually like having to sleep with a light on because I'm 14 years old you know I was just I was the first time I really had books able to actually frighten me because it was that's nothing where you'd be reading it and you swear to God what was that sound that I just heard I was starting to ramble there's had to cut myself off and get focused back on again why you should read this I think it's very good for every one who has okay if you have any interest in for whatsoever and you haven't read Lovecraft yet you're doing it wrong if you have very you're not really sure how you feel about horror but you like the astronomy of it all I feel like this was a very very approachable author for you that will probably change your life just a little bit because when I first found that first book and then I went and discovered more of them more and more my mind was just opened to her and nothing was scary enough for me you know I really felt like I got to that point where III even if it was a really good horror story if it didn't make me think afterwards if three days later I wasn't still thinking about it I felt like the you know the bar had been set higher now after reading him and when they released this this Necronomicon version in 2008 I just went through and just just devoured everything that I hadn't read since then and I mean this has just about everything and I don't even know if this is still available at least this version I'm not really sure like I said came out in 2008 I had like pre-ordered this and like the day it came out and I just basically spent that next week devouring everything I hadn't read before so I talked about his influence on just about everything and it's just kind of maddening that there is you know that's Hollywood just kind of hasn't completely mined all this material a lot of stuff there's been a lot of adaptations out there and I talked to my Colorado space video about how I feel like a lot of it is unfillable because some of the stuff that he talks about this is it like this is indescribable this is not able to be pronounced by the human language and stuff like that it would have to have a few changes and you know that's gonna the word changes to a book fan when you're talking about adaptation it's not anything that usually goes over very well but I really feel like what Richard Stanley set up a Colorado space if they really want to do this shared movie universe I really just depends on how much people are gonna get behind it because I mean like this color out of space it's been it's been pretty well critically accepted and a horror fans seem to be very very happy with it and Lovecraft fans seem to be okay with it that you know that's uh that's gonna be a tough audience to please there I mean he's like I said these stories are just like eternal and classic at this point so it's gonna be very very tough to please head audience but at me being as one I was quite happy with it but yet even then it didn't get a you know a wide release you know you had to really look for this movie to be able to see it so that really makes me wonder how far they can go with this I mean apparently the studio is so happy they're gonna let him do Dunwich horror too which is really great but I don't think we'll ever get a Call of Cthulhu movie on a budget of 5 million dollars like Colorado space had so it's one of those kind of things that I always used to say about dune you know the studio wants them to add more action to it to get casual movie goers in and then you know they say okay well we're not gonna do that as they say well then you can't make the movie because you know we can't justify that budget and so you take it to TV and TVs like we have look we're gonna do a faithful but we don't have the budget it's that kind of fine line between the two where I almost feel like you got to find like a personal financier who just has too much money doesn't know what to do with it and wants to make some Lovecraft stuff so I feel like in this age of Kickstarter's I feel like this could be done you know this shared universe Kaku Cthulhu Mythos could be done on screen and if Richard Stanley is really out there and apparently Elijah what's part of it - guys if they want to get this done man I am in full support of it because I feel like we need to see some of this stuff on screen I talked about them making like a streaming series would be really cool because they're such short stories but after I saw it called a lot of space I thought you know what there is a lot of cinematic quality that you can make a lot of these stories out of so again guys why should you read this because first of all Lovecraft is an American staple I feel like everyone even if they've never read him they know who he is you know they know about some of these characters as a Thoth and you got you got Cthulhu you got all kinds of things that you've seen or heard about you didn't know it was from Lovecraft I feel like this is the gold standard of horror that any horror fans should be into and it is also just fine literature I mean he is a different kind of writer than you've probably read before and that these stories can be almost a hundred years old and still very easily digestible it says a lot about him being what I like to refer to as a man out of time you know he always like to say that he was born too late you know that he felt like he was born at a time later than he should have because he felt like he was from a different time and I like to look at that just man time is just saying he was ahead of his time I was just thinking ways that no other person was thinking at that time if they were you know they weren't getting published and and that's the thing about horror and sci-fi in somewhat fantasy is that it's always gonna be viewed as a lesser lesser genre you know you're always gonna have people being like oh you couldn't make it as a as a you know a dramatic or thematic writer or whatever so you went to you know for B movies kind of thing and obviously I've always felt that horseshit I've always felt like Horrors treated in a way as if a sudden like I got like it's not a real genre saying with science fiction and fantasy and all of us had just disagree I feel like if you don't have an imagination sure yeah you don't like these things but if you're creative in the least and you'd like to see creators create dude pick up the Necronomicon pick up anything by Lovecraft and you're gonna have a hell of a good time so if you've read any love crafter you have and you want to know more about it guys drop in the comments talk to me about it I know you guys don't like to hear too much about horror on this channel I talk about horror all the time and it doesn't move the needle at all but I want to talk about these things to get those demons outs you know so I'm gonna continue to make videos for Lovecraft for Stephen King I might even dip into some other things here coming up pretty soon that I'll be talking about but uh yeah there are plenty of horror stories that I do like and that I want to talk about and I'm hoping maybe I can find a niche somewhere on YouTube where people want to hear about the horror and don't wanna just hear about Wheel time you know so that that's my hope with doing these videos so even if you guys aren't into this you don't think you're gonna get into Lovecraft that's okay thank you guys so much for watching I'd like to talk to you about it and try to see if I could sway your mind you know you

Channel: Mike's Book Reviews

Views: 16,250

Rating: 4.9489694 out of 5

Keywords: H.P. Lovecraft, HP Lovecraft, Lovecraft, Why You Should Read, Horror, At the mountains of madness, cthulhu, reaction, review, colour out of space, color out of space, dunwich horror, necronomicon, rats in the walls, cosmic horror

Id: n5v3T-ohlPk

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020