Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the kind of writer who provokes mixed emotions. On the one hand, he has become the face of the cosmic horror subgenre and his influence on modern horror in general is undeniable. When you sit down to actually read his stories, however, you’ll find that they tend to be permeated by his rampant bigotry—extreme even for his own time—and many of his plots fall into repetitive, predictable patterns. Even his best stories (I particularly enjoyed The Shadow over Innsmouth and “The Thing on the Doorstep”) have at their core an intense xenophobia and complete disregard for women. But whether you’re a hardcore Lovecraft fan or uninterested in ever reading anything from the man himself, you can enjoy the many new stories coming out from authors who play in Lovecraft’s sandbox while critiquing some of his views and adding new perspectives into his worlds. Here are just a few examples of books that put a fun, new twist on Lovecraft’s immortal mythos: Continue reading Fresh Takes on Lovecraft
Tag: Cthulhu
Weird Fiction and the Gothic
One reason why the Gothic can be difficult to pin down as a genre is that over the years, it has spawned and overlapped with many different genres. I have touched briefly on the role that the Gothic played in the development of modern horror and explored in some depth how we can credit it as the foundation of the detective novel. Today, I want to explore one of the Gothic’s more nebulous offspring: weird fiction.
The Sea Monster Literary Canon
This week I continue my quest to establish a literary canon for each and every monster in the gothic tradition. So far, I’ve done three of the most prominent types of monsters in horror fiction: vampires, zombies, and demons. But now it’s time to venture into uncharted waters and see what I can do for monsters with a less clearly defined canon. And where better to start than with one of the oldest and most pervasive of monsters: the sea monster? Continue reading The Sea Monster Literary Canon