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| - Howard Phillips or H.P. Lovecraft was a horror writer and the first known person to open the door to Purgatory.
- Howard Philips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American author, whose works in the horror genre have become widely celebrated and have led him to be considered the most influential horror author in American history - although all of his acclaim was posthumous. As Lovecraft had been dead decades before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles even existed, he very obviously had no direct hand in any TMNT projects. However, his reputation in modern times has made references to him ubiquitous and his works, including throughout many incarnations of the TMNT.
- H.P. Lovecraft is a famous writer best known for writhing The Call Of Cthulhu. In a 1918 letter, he wrote: Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear?... If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives...
- Carrion Hill : It is based on the story "The Dunwich Horror". The PCs encounters the spawn of Yog-Sothoth. The Pnakotic Manuscripts can be acquired. Crucible of Chaos : A group of cultists of Azathoth brings a shoggoth to the city.
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a prolific author whose works sit at the heart of the Cthulhu Mythos. His famous creation, the Necronomicon, has some similarity to The King In Yellow, and it has been suggested that he was influenced by the work of Robert W. Chambers, although it is generally agreed that he did not read The King In Yellow until quite late in his career, after which he added elements of the Yellow Mythos to his burgeoning mythos. Since his premature death, his work has been expanded upon by many subsequent authors.
- H.P. Lovecraft is an American horror writer whose stories deal with an Ancient shadowy conspiracy by Alien beings to conquer the Earth. His fictional stories influenced much of growth of late 20th century paranoia that gave rise to conspiracies and conspiracy theory.
- Lovecraft is regarded as one of the most important authors of the horror genre, usually by other authors of horror, such as Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, or by literary scholars interested in horror, such as S.T. Joshi. His legacy is rooted not only in his fictional works, but in his prolific correspondence with other authors who became important in their own rights in horror, science fiction, and fantasy, such as Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Still, all these criticisms add to Lovecraft's "cosmic horror."
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a pulp science fiction and horror writer whose most famous stories are of the Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu is an evil cephalopodic nightmare who haunts the dark and unexplored fastnesses of the Pacific; he lies dreaming in the sunken city R'lyeh and is only one tentacle of the pantheon of pre-human horrors described in the Mythos. Lovecraft also wrote a series of less horrible tales dealing with the unexplored dreamlands surrounding our world. "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (chronicling the exploits of archaic dream investigator Randolph Carter) are notable examples of this genre, and they shimmer like jewelled and cosmic hashish visions that bear the stamp of a peculiar and inexplicable authenticity. Surpr
- The best known author of the Cosmic Horror Story and the origin of Lovecraft Country, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is considered perhaps the greatest of all horror fiction writers, rivaled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe. An antiquarian eremite, he was more fond of books than of people, very much like most of his protagonists. There is, however, no official record of Lovecraft ever encountering anything corporeally eldritch, as much as some fans wish it were all true. To this day you can find at least a half dozen different fabrications of Lovecraft's wholly fictional Necronomicon. He credited his night terrors with providing most of his inspiration; both night terrors and the filmy, oily membrane between waking and sleep factor heavily in his various works.
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| abstract
| - Howard Phillips or H.P. Lovecraft was a horror writer and the first known person to open the door to Purgatory.
- The best known author of the Cosmic Horror Story and the origin of Lovecraft Country, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is considered perhaps the greatest of all horror fiction writers, rivaled only by his idol Edgar Allan Poe. An antiquarian eremite, he was more fond of books than of people, very much like most of his protagonists. There is, however, no official record of Lovecraft ever encountering anything corporeally eldritch, as much as some fans wish it were all true. To this day you can find at least a half dozen different fabrications of Lovecraft's wholly fictional Necronomicon. He credited his night terrors with providing most of his inspiration; both night terrors and the filmy, oily membrane between waking and sleep factor heavily in his various works. Although Lovecraft had a very happy childhood by his own account -- his rich grandfather, mom and aunts gave him just about everything he wanted including free run of the family library -- his early years were marked by loss. His father went insane (from syphilis) and died when Lovecraft was about eight. His grandfather died and his money was mismanaged by relatives, leaving the family penniless. Lovecraft's mother also went insane and died in a mental hospital. In his adult years he drifted in and out of poverty (mostly in), ate cold beans out of cans, lost his wife, and ended his life with cancer of the small intestine. On the other hand, he was a member of the United Amateur Press Association and made many friends by correspondence, and when possible he would travel to meet them, journeying all up and down the east coast and even venturing into Canada. He was an amateur astronomer and antiquarian, a tireless walker and lover of all things ancient and strange. He was a professed atheist, but loved the Gods of the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and as a child had prayed to them. He earned most of his living as an editor and ghostwriter. He was reluctant to sell his own stories, fearing they would not be well-received, but he was a prolific correspondent with other writers of the time, including Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (not to mention the teenage Robert Bloch), and heavily rewrote many of their stories for them, inserting his own themes. Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W Chambers' The King in Yellow, and Arthur Machen are frequently cited as major influences on Lovecraft's work. No summary of Lovecraft's life is complete without a mention of his passionate devotion to cats and to his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. He only owned one cat in his lifetime, but fed and named every alley cat he found. His words I Am Providence are engraved on his tombstone. As the quote at the top shows, Lovecraft might be considered a real life Nietzsche Wannabe. He also expressed racist and xenophobic views, though he was opposed to the racial violence of Nazi Germany. Even after he married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene, he often made anti-semitic remarks -- in response to which she gently reminded him with whom he was sleeping. Many of his early stories and poems contained overt racial slurs, mostly aimed at immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. One of the "horrors" he intended to creep out his audience was miscegenation -- racial impurity, which he considered "degenerate" -- again, a commonplace societal fear at the time, especially in the New England states where opposition to interracial marriages was higher than in the South. Lovecraft's stories featured not so much fear of people of different (non-White) skin colour, but distaste aimed at "mental, moral and physical degeneration" (a concept prevalent at the time) due to in-breeding, interbreeding with non-human creatures, or even immoral acts such as cannibalism. In his stories such degeneration could afflict the lower classes (The Horror at Red Hook) and inbred rural communities (The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth) as well as upper class families (Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, The Rats in the Walls, The Lurking Fear). On the other hand, Lovecraft's stories, especially the Dreamland stories, featured protagonists with dark skin of which he speaks quite highly, and Lovecraft was a great admirer of the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Roman Empire. He differentiated between people of "noble" appearance and heritage and civilized behaviour contra "degenerate" individuals or tribes, independently of ethnicity or skin-colour. He thought that immigrants to the U.S. should keep their original language, dress and customs, not discard them and try to become "Americanized", because this made them look vulgar. It has often been suggested that he only incorporated so much racism in his stories because they stemmed from the element that proliferates all of his works: fear of the unknown. He almost singlehandedly invented a new cosmology, but instead of being one based on science and progress, it was instead full of otherworldly horror and blind, raving deities. While most people of his time were entranced by the technological innovation produced by the Industrial Revolution, Lovecraft was deeply suspicious of modern technology and the poorly-understood powers it vested in mankind. All of his work resonates with the terror of the newly-discovered magnitude of the universe, which in the early period of his life was believed to consist entirely of the Milky Way. Einstein's theory of relativity opened a door into teleportation, time travel, alien geometry, and radically altered peoples' notion of space-time itself, while the discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils and Wegener's then-new-and-controversial hypothesis of continental drift brought the notion that the Earth was far older than previously believed, and that even the shape of the continents was not set in stone. All of this was subtly addressed in Lovecraft's stories of alien horror, and of the remains of ancient civilizations lost to the abyss of geological deep time. The dizzying speed of progress of his time was compounded by an expansion of the unknown. Each new development, instead of reducing the number of questions as had been expected by pre-modern philosophers, instead compounded them exponentially. Leibniz had hoped that the entire world could be described by reason, and that this is the best of all possible worlds -- a possibility utterly abolished during Lovecraft's writing period. Each new discovery only increased humanity's knowledge of its own ignorance and insignificance, encouraging a nihilistic atmosphere, and this is perhaps the central theme of Lovecraft's incisive fiction. For fiction done by others in his literary mythos (and the Lovecraftian setting as a whole) see the Cthulhu Mythos. Despite some controversy over whether most of his works are genuinely public domain, they're all invariably available online somewhere. The letters are harder to get ahold of (and expensive as hell, check out Abebooks), but they're well worth the search.
- Lovecraft is regarded as one of the most important authors of the horror genre, usually by other authors of horror, such as Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, or by literary scholars interested in horror, such as S.T. Joshi. His legacy is rooted not only in his fictional works, but in his prolific correspondence with other authors who became important in their own rights in horror, science fiction, and fantasy, such as Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Ideas and concepts developed by Lovecraft have influenced an enormous amount of literature, music, film, and art, from writers as diverse as Clive Barker and Jorge Luis Borges, to heavy metal bands like Cradle of Filth and Morbid Angel, to artists such as H.R. Geiger. So many stories and novels have been inspired by him that there is a subgenre of "mythos fiction" drawing upon characters, creatures, and ideas from Lovecraft's fiction, with many anthologies devoted to this theme. His style and subject matter, despite the fact that many have tried to reproduce them, take a relatively unique approach. He deplored the formulaic qualities of the science fiction of his day, such as Buck Rogers stories. In his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." he expressed the importance of striving for new and unusual tactics. What Lovecraft achieved is described as "cosmic horror," in which terror is created through the confrontation of limited human qualities with knowledge and beings beyond understanding. Insanity and death arise from such encounters rather than through violence or outright malevolence. An example of how Lovecraft implemented this was by using invented literary works supposedly describing encounters with strange beings, such as The Necronomicon, which also contains spells and ways of contacting outside realities. Reliance on such forbidden tomes often turns disastrous for Lovecraft's characters. Also, the beings featured in Lovecraft's stories do not bear much resemblance to traditional horror villains, such as vampires, werewolves, etc. Instead, Lovecraft created monstrous entities, sometimes operating by completely different rules of biology and physics than any terrestrial creature. The beings sometimes bear similarity to known life forms, though these are mostly for a frame of reference, and draw upon creatures not typically seen as "horrific" per se, such as fish, frogs, fungi, and sponges. Stylistically, the language is often academic in nature and draws upon various literary, artistic, historical, and scientific allusions, in contrast to a more action and character oriented style. At times, the writing can seem very heavy-handed due to Lovecraft's attempt to convey the overwhelming stress brought on by encountering phenomena so far removed from ordinary human understanding. In his dialogue, Lovecraft sometimes employed dialect, trying to show the oddness of characters isolated from society or entrenched in specific regional influences. His characterization remains one of his poorest devices, admitted even by his most fervent admirers, since the unfolding of mysteries overshadows the significance of personal issues. Still, all these criticisms add to Lovecraft's "cosmic horror." He was heavily influenced by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, and Robert W. Chambers. Lovecraft even used a character developed by Bierce and Chambers: Hastur, The Unnamable. After he died on March 13, 1937 from complications due to intestinal cancer, a friend of his, August Derleth, founded the publishing company Arkham House with Donald Wandrei. Their purpose was to publish Lovecraft's stories (other publishers not expressing much interest). Although some have criticized Derleth for putting together anthologies of his own work dubbing it as a "posthumous collaboration" with Lovecraft, which utilized small fragments or notes of the latter author, there is no doubt that Derleth did much to spread Lovecraft's work to a wider audience, and probably was a significant factor in Lovecraft's current status as a major American author. Lovecraft led a relatively solitary life, though he corresponded much with friends through letters. His personal life had a number of paradoxical elements: he often exhibited elitist and racist attitudes, though he was amicable to anyone he met, and married a Jew; he maintained an interest in science and the importance of rationality and reason, though he wrote about things that often defied those very things, and displayed a hostility towards modernity, romanticizing the 18th and 19th centuries; though a gentleman and intellectual, he remained wistful about childhood and wished to harken back to the simpler days before adulthood (reflected in stories such as "The Silver Key").
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a pulp science fiction and horror writer whose most famous stories are of the Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu is an evil cephalopodic nightmare who haunts the dark and unexplored fastnesses of the Pacific; he lies dreaming in the sunken city R'lyeh and is only one tentacle of the pantheon of pre-human horrors described in the Mythos. Lovecraft also wrote a series of less horrible tales dealing with the unexplored dreamlands surrounding our world. "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" (chronicling the exploits of archaic dream investigator Randolph Carter) are notable examples of this genre, and they shimmer like jewelled and cosmic hashish visions that bear the stamp of a peculiar and inexplicable authenticity. Surprisingly, these formidable tales were equalled and surpassed during the 1930's by Clark Ashton Smith, a Lovecraft contemporary who lived and wrote in the Sierra foothills, in Auburn, CA. (Lovecraft referred to him as "the Atlantean high priest Klarkash-Ton). Both Lovecraft and Smith clearly had some kind of direct visionary link to elder worlds, which is why their stories have survived and gained stature over the years.
- Howard Philips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American author, whose works in the horror genre have become widely celebrated and have led him to be considered the most influential horror author in American history - although all of his acclaim was posthumous. As Lovecraft had been dead decades before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles even existed, he very obviously had no direct hand in any TMNT projects. However, his reputation in modern times has made references to him ubiquitous and his works, including throughout many incarnations of the TMNT.
- H.P. Lovecraft is a famous writer best known for writhing The Call Of Cthulhu. In a 1918 letter, he wrote: Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear?... If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives...
- Carrion Hill : It is based on the story "The Dunwich Horror". The PCs encounters the spawn of Yog-Sothoth. The Pnakotic Manuscripts can be acquired. Crucible of Chaos : A group of cultists of Azathoth brings a shoggoth to the city.
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a prolific author whose works sit at the heart of the Cthulhu Mythos. His famous creation, the Necronomicon, has some similarity to The King In Yellow, and it has been suggested that he was influenced by the work of Robert W. Chambers, although it is generally agreed that he did not read The King In Yellow until quite late in his career, after which he added elements of the Yellow Mythos to his burgeoning mythos. Since his premature death, his work has been expanded upon by many subsequent authors.
- H.P. Lovecraft is an American horror writer whose stories deal with an Ancient shadowy conspiracy by Alien beings to conquer the Earth. His fictional stories influenced much of growth of late 20th century paranoia that gave rise to conspiracies and conspiracy theory.
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