Mythos Monday - At the Wuthering Heights of Madness

Great, I'm in for it now...because of H.P. Lovecraft, I have to read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. How in the name of Yog Sothoth did this happen?

I vaguely remember the circumstances. It was yesterday, but it seems like a strange aeon ago. We were driving back from Fall River to Boston after visiting my ailing grandfather, and NPR's story on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came on. I think I snarkily remarked about that being the only way pieces like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights could possibly be made interesting to me, because it's just a bunch of ye olde British people saying (insert blustering, throaty British sounds here).

My better half was quick to defend both books, stating I would probably like them, and mentioning that we have a copy of Wuthering Heights at home that I should read. I snickered, and tried to make like I was only joking, but I had already mentioned that I hadn't been reading enough fiction lately, so I was running out of escape routes.

"I'll tell you what," she says as I claw for a way out of this. Shit. I'm cornered now. She's gonna' challenge my manhood or something, "if you read Wuthering Heights, I'll read Lovecraft."

I smiled, because I'd been trying to get her to read Lovecraft, and also because I knew I was locked in, "Just tell me what I should read." I couldn't resist. It's a deal.

So I decided she'll read the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos. Much, much much easier said than done. There's about 4,000,000,000,000 different ideas of what stories and what authors make it up, so I had to narrow it. I decided to make her reading syllabus approximately as many pages as the Penguin Classics' version of Wuthering Heights (story text only), about 330 pages give or take. I would also limit her reading to stories written by Lovecraft.

Here is what she is reading:

At the Mountains of Madness
The Call of Cthulhu
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Dunwich Horror
The Colour Out of Space
Dagon
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Shadow Out of Time
The Whisperer in the Darkness
The Unnamable

Not completely complete...there are quite a few more, depending on how you slice it. I could have added The Nameless City simply to show where ideas for later stories like At the Mountains of Madness came from and it is, I believe, the first of his stories to mention Abdul Alhazred and the "That is not dead which can eternal lie..." line, but it shows up elsewhere. I could have easily added The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and/or The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath but it would have been almost another 200 pages, and would have necessarily meant cutting out many of the stories listed above. So the best I can hope for is that she reads the above and gets more interested. Not likely, but you never know. She resisted Patrick O'Brian for more than a year, and then got hooked. I know, I know, different genres, but one can hope.

When we got back I made one last attempt to find an easy way out of my part of the deal. They did it for Austen, maybe someone did it for Brontë. Could there be an At the Wuthering Heights of Madness? Maybe The Call of Catherine? Wuthering Heights and Fungi from Yuggoth?

No luck. Oh well, I guess I'd better grin and bear it. Stiff upper lip, you know. Wot-wot?!?!

Yokels Gone Wild...

Aaaah, the local St. Patrick's Day Parade...the Sunday before St. Paddy's Day, it is the quintiessential reason for tens of thousands of people to line the streets, drunk, and scream "WHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" at anything and everything that walks by. It's such an amazing behavior...


They're just dumber (looking), drunker and have fewer teeth...but hey, they're standing around, with drinks, holding their hands up in any one of several gestures meaning anything from "Number One" to "Hang Loose" to "Sign of the Devil", and they're screaming. So they must be cool.

As it so happens, this year it fell today - the 72nd anniversary of the death of H. P. Lovecraft. Oh, and it's the 2053rd anniversary of Julius Caesar getting stabbed to death. Hmmmmm...Caesar stabbed, Lovecraft of intestinal cancer, the common thread? Massive internal organ damage. I think there's a connection here...but I digress. My point? None, really. I just wanted to do this...


Happy Death Day, Howie...

Ruminating Through The Smell of Puke

Nothin' ... I got nothin'. I mean, I don't even have a stream of consciousness right now. That's bad news, as I still have today and one more day to go. And my daughter's Wednesday night puking has turned into my oldest son's Saturday night puking and my and my wife's not feeling so hot. Ugh.

Oh the humanity. Or lack thereof. I know, I know, I'm probably the last guy in the blogocrap to mention it. Lack of a reasonable plan or security on the store aside, how people could just leave their decency and humanity in the car like that never ceases to amaze me. It shouldn't, but it does. Fuck people. This is the only Black Friday I care about.

I'm finally reading my Lovecraft again. I just finished At The Mountains Of Madness after not having read it in some two decades. Still reading the paperback edition I bought back in college, too.


Love the mixing of sci-fi and horror, the describing of the Old Ones in human terms (or us in their terms?) and the author's realization and attempt to deal with the upheaval of all he thought to be true and mankind's being taken down a peg as the "most advanced" to ever walk the planet.

Speaking of dealing with things...how is the Kentucky State Office of Homeland Security dealing with the terrorist threat? By acknowledging, first and foremost, that

"The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God."

Dunno' about that. Think a certain Great Old One who dwells in the mountain realm of Kadath overlooking the desolate Plateau of Leng might have an opinion. It makes about as much sense. He might even loan you some shoggoths - from what I've read they'll keep the terrorists decapitated and covered in black putrescence fairly cheaply.

Urgh! Just threw up in my mouth a little bit! Mmmmm, Turkey-Day leftovers! It probably won't be long before I'm spewing noisome secretions full bore. Need to wrap this up.

Cthulhu's Tentactles - Serious and Silly Lovecraft

A day late, but never short. I can't take credit for finding these, as all these links and many more were found PMOGing my way through some of the excellent Cthulhu and Lovecraft missions there.

1. The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, mentioned in my last post. It's kept fairly up to date, and a good broad resource on Lovecraft, his life, his place in pop culture, etc. It brings the serious and some of the silly sides together well.

2. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS) Cell phone ring tones, prop downloads (Insanity Certificates, Lovecraft Stamps), Sanity Tests, and "live radio" adaptations of Lovecraft's stories. Cool, pop-culture.

3. Arkham House Publishing founded by August Derleth and another of Lovecraft's freinds after his death. Intended to keep Lovecraft's legacy alive, it has ended up being as much or more Derleth's.

4. The Misadventures of Hello Cthulhu is an attempted merger of "Hello Kitty" and the Cthulhu Mythos. It's decidedly silly, but not good parody, in my opinion.

5. H. P. Lovecraft on Scriptorium. A fairly lengthy study of Lovecraft by his "Leading biographer and critic". This guy shows me just how silly I was trying to do my humanities "Sufficiency Project" on Lovecraft at WPI. I was too busy thinking about monsters.

Shoggoths Don't Surf!

Or maybe they do. It seems that most bands that try to work Cthulhu and the "mythos" into their music also use "D-e" words. There are, of course, exceptions. Which is good because death metal sucks.

The H.P. Lovecraft Archive describes The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets as:

A Vancouver “punky surf” band whose lyrics don’t just make passing mention to Lovecraft—their entire existence seems to revolve around him. Their name is taken from a sentence near the beginning of Lovecraft’s “The Tomb”: “I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets...”

I describe this song, "Yig Snake Daddy", as rockin!

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets – Yig Snake Daddy

Am I mistaken, or does this almost have a little bit of a Dread Zeppelin feel to it?

Another song for the little flip-style jukebox in your booth...