Purgatory? Dreamlock? Living in Hell? It's really left vague.

In a surprising twist this is probably most popular because it lacks most of his usual collectoral racisms. There is also a matter of only he could pull something like this off. But that's not true entirely is it? Anybody in the horror writing surrealism genre could easily write about a man who steps out of a castle after climbing to the top and realizes he's inside of Earth's crust.

Stephen King has a written equally weird, Ray Bradbury has written weird bizarre scenarios, even Michael Crichton has hit the odd moments. It's so surreal that Lovecraft is always credited as only he could pull this off. I think it's a little bit telling that this is his homage to Edgar Allan Poe.

And in being a homage to the great man, it lasts. Because it's not a true Lovecraft story.

The true markings of a Lovecraft story are the ones that we don't like to talk about. The little things like how he always brings up disdain for the African-American and African race, for example. The non-answered questions. The lack of telling anything that really helps and leaving the mind to wonder what they even read. Those are all Lovecraft trademarks.

When you read a Stephen King book you step away knowing basic outlines for what happened. A clown that's actually a giant spider lures children into the sewers and consumes their flesh while fighting a turtle who yawned and created the world. It's a bizarre story but everybody knows the tale of IT.
Hey girl hits puberty late and has sudden psychic powers present while being bullied in her school and finally gets revenge. It sounds utterly unplausible but that's Carrie.
A large dog gets rabies and struggles with the idea of being good while it's brain is slowly infested with the urge to be bad. It then mauls everyone in it's path. Wild and crazy but that's Cujo.

Michael Crichton is not exempt from this, nor Ray Bradbury. Michael Crichton writes about an animal that is given speech and it goes crazy, does the animal deserve human rights because it has speech, or does it deserve to stay in the lab and be experimented on even though it has sentience? This is Next.
Mankind uses frog DNA to fill in the gaps of dinosaur DNA and creates gender changing eruptiles that have been extinct for millions/billions of years. You guessed it, that's Jurassic Park.

There's been a lot of bizarre plot lines and weird crazy things like monsters and such. I feel like in a way both Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury were doing the same thing and somehow didn't get recognized on par with the man who created Cthulhu.

When we think of monsters we don't usually think of Ray Bradbury or Edgar Allan Poe, even if these books are often homages to these people or even nods to other people who inspired lovecraft, they are footnotes in our mind. We think of Lovecraft, we think of that giant squid face creature that is shown in so many movies. And yet the actual source material is often just there. Lovecraft doesn't bring a lot to the table and as much as I like his work I don't think it's up to date.

This isn't just Lovecraft, the Jaws book has similar racism problems, likewise, many horror books focus on pushing the black people aren't people and are monsters narrative. It's not Lovecraft if it's not racist, and that's a problem.

The bricks that built our buildings should not be favored as greatly as they are. ( )

Outsider eftir Lovecraft er með magnaðri hryllingssögum sem ég hef lesið.
Stutt saga sem lýsir manni sem elst upp í algerri einangrun í kastala. Ekkert fólk eða skepnur nærri en hann getur lesið sér til fróðleiks en fer að lokum að leita leiða til að komast úr þessari prísund. Hann finnur að lokum leið til að rjúfa einangrun sína en uppgötvar um leið hræðilegan sannleik. ( )

'Who is the beauty, and who the beast?'* Wasn't obvious to me until he got to the revel. Kind of liked this.

*Stevie Nicks

(Moved 2015 review to the individual work Sept. 2017 to make room to review the collection under its own entry.) ( )

A re-read.
It doesn't get any more gothic than this!
Alone in a dreary dark castle, a young man has no memories of every being anywhere else, of ever seeing another human soul. He learns of the outside world from the castle's extensive libraries, and develops the desire to see the light. Thus, he embarks on a dangerous excursion to try to reach the exterior.
This story is a classic example of the paradox at the heart of Lovecraft's art and life: He was xenophobic well past what was considered average at the time, but yet he writes of horrors - "outsiders" - from an inside perspective, with remarkable sympathy. ( )

Um homem solitário durante toda a sua vida resolve sair de seu confinamento e descobrir quem é de verdade. ( )