Art by Dan Hillier
“With these tentacles, I thee wed…”
Lovecraft jokes
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft
Google “Lovecraft” and “Humor” and you’ll find an astounding number of jokes and cartoons, the Mythos giving Star Trek and Star Wars a run for its money in the meme department. Here I’ve culled out a few.
Q: Why did Lovecraft go to Hawaii?
A: He wanted to learn how to Cthulhu dance.
Who writes the most frightening tales from the dark web?
… HTTP Lovecraft
Q: What does Cthulhu have for lunch?
A: Fish & Ships
Necrotelecomicon: The book of dead phone numbers.
Q: What are Lovecraft’s favorite TV subscription services?
A: Cth-Hulu and HB mi-gO.
A customer in a sushi restaurant orders sashimi of tako (octopus.) But to his disgust, the tiny creature is delivered to him still alive. “Waiter!” he calls. “This octopus is still alive.”
“Not alive, Sir, only dreaming.”
H.P. Lovecraft needs some alone time for serious writing, so he takes a boat to Antarctica. There, on a snowy beach and wrapped in furs, he takes out pen and paper and starts to compose. But he’s soon interrupted by some starfish-headed, barrel-shaped beings who start to play volleyball.
So he packs up and sets up his table and chair further inland. But again the starfish-headed beings come by, this time whistling loudly among themselves, to lay down a picnic cloth and bottles of wine.
This time Lovecraft moves even further away. But again the silence is broken by the squawks of a giant blind albino penguin, who is running away with a whole pack of the alien beings chasing it with spears.
“Blazes,” Lovecraft mutters. “I’ll never get any writing done today. It’s just one damn Elder Thing after another.”
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/16/22: Great Old Ones (Lovecraft II)
This image is of Hastur, equated with the mythical King in Yellow. Hastur isn’t depicted nearly as frequently as his compatriot Cthulhu so I wanted to give him, or her, some press.
Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones were powerful, immortal godlike beings who were worshipped, and in some cases are still being worshipped, on planet Earth. They are present, for the most part, in spirit not body. Certain rites, times of year, or sacrifices are required to manifest them. Their physical forms may live deep in the mantle of the Earth, on other planets of the solar system, or even other worlds, where they snooze in a semiconscious state. Cthulhu, Hastur, Ghatanothoa, and Tsathoggua are the best known of Lovecraft’s own creations. In addition, there are Outer Gods who are even more powerful and less understandable, such as Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and Shub-Niggurath. The division between the two is not clear, so for this randomgen, I’ll just lump them in all together.
Lovecraft’s Mythos, while he was writing, was always growing and changing. He cribbed creatures and concepts from earlier writers like Robert Chambers, and, with permission, from writing friends who also borrowed Mythos elements from him. The first Mythos stories I read, in fact, were from borrowers and not Lovecraft’s original ones. Some of their creations, like the Hounds of Tindalos, Lloigor, and Glaaki, proved just as popular as Lovecraft’s own.
As the decades went on, however, the Mythos accrued more and more ancient gods of every stripe until it seemed you couldn’t spit at a sacrifical stone without hitting one, and every author was convinced their Mythos god was the best. Unfortunately, not all of them knew how to name properly. That’s how we wound up with such ridiculous, unpronounceable entities like Zstylzhemghi and Hziulquoigmnzhah. This is just unacceptable.
Lovecraft’s names looked complex, but were easy to say. YOG-sawth-UTH. If they resembled any language, it might by Yiddish, Latin, and certain Polynesian tongues. The many ths and shs makes the words sound soft and slimy. But they’re their own thing, really.
By those standards, a new bath of Great Old Ones to terrorize your dreams.
(Incidentally, Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu as K’tool-who, NOT K’thool-oo.)
Great Old Ones
| Yarog’n
Yebuth Shablatha Yaggloth Ghataar Ngorgna Quagnu Yarith Zorog’n Cthono Cynothog Umcha M’bakhee Yogshee Zuyiddoth Zashotharagua Xothmoog Azmar Chagla Azhkhee Hsayeb Ghatshee Yorshub Mordyag |
Yurt-yag
M’bachka Nug-yae Tsabthaat Hsaakoth Mythaggua Mnimog Sothya Glysgna Mnathoom Zutrik’i Mnatur Yebglaa Sothn’gor Nyctobra Ngyagog’n Tzu-tho-tho Ubbelath Vullithor Zaalthant Vhusch |
Lovecraft Lamp
Courtesy of a local chiropractor.
Baby Cthulhu
Now you can crochet your own Baby Cthulhu! The pattern maker is from Ukraine, and by purchasing the pattern, you will be giving a besieged citizen some much-needed support.
City of the Elder Things
The beautiful artwork of the city of the Elder Things by illustrator François Baranger
The City of the Elder Things (it didn’t have a proper name) is the most well described of Lovecraft’s alien cities, which also includes Pnakotus, the city of the Great Race of Yith that lay in the Australan outback, and R’lyeh, Cthulhu’s tomb. Immense, alien, frozen in time both literally and figuratively, half of the novella At the Mountains of Madness is taken up with it.
But, it could never exist in real life. For one thing, glaciers would crush it in their slow advance, not flow around it. And though it might have been buried in snow which later compacted into ice, the mass of frozen water would still move, and periodically crack into crevasses, grinding down and breaking the stone of which it was made. There’s also a description of wooden shutters which have fossilized into place at the windows while their metal parts dissolved, which isn’t very plausible either. I still love the story, but it’s now in realm of alt.history and fantasy.
Lovecraft himself seems to have been aware of this. The history of the city, given by the story’s narrator, gives a dizzying array of geographic dates for the various eras of construction: this part was built on an older part, with this part being older still, but, hey, most of it really dated from blahblahblahozoic, which implies he knew it wasn’t plausible for it to survive so long and was making excuses, trying to have his cake and eat it too. Which is actually endearing, as was the narrator’s deriving the history of the city solely from its bas-reliefs.
In my research on Lovecraft, he said he had been inspired by the description of a mirage known as a Fata Morgana, in which the bending of light due to certain atmospheric conditions causes distant objects to appear over the horizon in a distorted, often upside down way, like fantastic cities looming through the mist. In fact, the whole city seems inspired by a mirage.
Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/9/22: Blasphemous Books (Lovecraft I)
A sample page from the Necronomicon by artist Daniel Govar. Too pretty to be blasphemous?
It was Lovecraft who wrote the book on the magic book… the insanity-causing occult book trope that is.
The Necronomicon, entirely an invention of his despite the listings on Amazon, first appeared in 1922 in his short story “The Hound.” It was a treatise on dark magic and the Old Ones, written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred in the 8th century and called then Kitab al-Azif.
Probably what that original copy looked like, minus the purple stickies. If the book was real, of course. Which it isn’t.
The author was torn to pieces and eaten by an invisible demon after writing this and the Arabic copies later disappeared. But one apparently made it out of Syria and was translated into Greek, then Latin, and hence into English, a rare copy residing, in Lovecraft’s alt.history, in the library of Miskatonic University. Where it no doubt is continuing to cause trouble for future generations who poke their noses into things that they shouldn’t.
Lovecraft created the word Necronomicon out of several Greek ones: nekros, nomos, and eikon, or dead-law-image, but the missing e in icon translates the title to English simply as “Book of Considering the Dead.” Despite its longevity and notoriety, it was not the first fictional book Lovecraft created. That honor goes to the Pnakotic Manuscripts, which appeared in 1918.
As to the inspiration behind the book? Lovecraft never said, and cited only the Gothic trope of moldering books in cobwebbed libraries. But I think the likely candidate is the Lesser Key of Solomon, that notorious treatise on demon-summoning I took a look at here. Like the Necronomicon, the Lesser Key has a checkered past of multiple translations and compilations, being lost and then found, and having strange and perverse artwork.
Need a Mythos magic book to spice things up in your world?
Lovecraftian Books
| Eldritch Surveys
The Ngorish Guide to Mharinoom Book of Yoggha The Shabric Album The Yellow Journals The Papyrus of Dzyscha Book of the High Priest Llyhu Tales of Lucid Uhm The N’kai Manuscript Unspeakable Scrolls of Pnarion The Byaatic Treatise Wanderings of a King’s Astrologer among’st the Upper Planes |
The Azhraic Translations
In Pursuit of the Brown Witch Scroll of the Mad Arab Golden Papyri of the Hyades The Betelgeuse Manuscript The Cosmic Guides of Count Tsuyov Notebooks of Canopus Shoggastic Encyclopedia The Shebbish Scrolls Eternal Transformations Ebon Encyclopedia Kreinhausen’s Tome of Blasphemous Beings |
Locke & Key, Vol. 1
[Reading Challenge 2022]
Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft
by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
IDW Publishing, 2008
[ Challenge # 21: A graphic novel or comic book. ]
Finished my Three-color mythology pick, Locke & Key. This was Vol. 1 of the series, but I don’t think I’ll be going on. I was eager to read it because of the Lovecraft associations, but aside from the name of the town it’s set in, there wasn’t much of the Mythos in there. It’s more of a supernatural thriller.
A high school guidance counselor is murdered by two of his former students and his wife and children traumatized, having had to hide from the killers and then attack them on their own. One teen attacker dies while the other has his face disfigured by the murdered man’s teen son, who bloodily bashes him with a brick. Afterwards they move cross country to a old Edwardian house in Massachusetts on its own private island which was in the late father’s family. The house is called Key House and the town, Lovecraft.
The house has special keys that unlock special doors, which, when you go through them, turn you into someone or something else, or transport you somewhere else. A demonic woman living in the wellhouse wants one or more of the keys so she can get out of her supernatural prison and cajoles the youngest child into befriending her. Meanwhile, the crazy youth who planned the father’s murder escapes from jail and travels cross-country to seek the same keys from the family. And — surprise! — he had been cajoled by the demon lady in the wellhouse as well (sorry for the pun) because she had communicated with him out of a picture of it in the murdered teacher’s house!
The artwork was OK, if not as expressionistic as I wanted, and bloodier than I wanted. Too angular and stylized for my taste. The palette of subdued browns, golds, and blues was restful, but monotonous. I would have liked it used to convey emotion. The character design of the teen killers made them look supremely goofy, and in the case of the stalking teen, unsettling. He began to remind me of Mad Magazine’s gap-toothed mascot Alfred E. Neumann. Shortly after this came into my mind, there came a page showing him sitting on the steps of the high school, which is named William Gaines Academy! Gaines being the original publisher of Mad Magazine. I appreciated the in-joke, but know also a teen reader of this (it’s made to appeal to teens and YA) wouldn’t get it.
“What? Me worry?”
I thought the story lacking. It sounds like a good story in synopsis, but just wasn’t written well. Much of the dialogue sounded two guys were joking around as they wrote it, trying to sound edgy and flip, even as the things they were writing about — grief, PTSD, guilt, the fear of forever being a victim — were serious ones. It devalued the more heartfelt parts. For example, one of the teens who killed the father mentions twice that the mother used to bend over while she was packing groceries to show him her panties. I guess the purpose of this was to show he’s a gross teen psycho who makes things up, but as far as grossness goes, it’s a cheap shot. It served no purpose except to make the writers sound flip and edgy. The story wasn’t about this yucky dude who dies early. It’s about the family and the mysterious house.
There’s another cheap shot later when the demon lady, who has escaped the well, uses one of the magic keys to change her gender to male and quips, “Time to have clothing to fit balls again.” Like…what?
I don’t recommend this despite the hype.
(More of a Lovecraft connection comes into play later on in the series, when it turns it there is a “Plain of Leng” — an extradimensional space — beneath Key House that is full of demons, who are wont to possess teens and turn them into murderers. Which brought up, for me, the way Lovecraft’s Mythos has sunk its tentacles into modern horror and fantasy… not least because it’s copyright-free.)
Buy me a coffee
Put a dollar in my coffee jar for all
the hard work I do at Ko-fi. com!