Over the last week I have had no power in my house and so have gotten a chance to catch up on some reading and I decided there is very little that is better to read by candlelight on a stormy night after a tornado than H. P. Lovecraft. This makes even the stories that are not really all that scary far more creepy and the truly disturbing made me want to grab the flashlight more than once.
One of the things that is most interesting to me is the world that H. P. Lovecraft wrote these stories in. I don't know a lot about his life, but I like to imagine that he may have written them under similar circumstances to how I am reading them, because even if he had lights at the time, which wouldn't be surprising I am almost certain that he would not have had TV and he likely spent a lot of hours sitting in dim rooms reading stories from people like Poe and I enjoy that connection.
Sadly, the stories that I read have been a very mixed bag of stories. The first two were The Mound and Medusa's Coil, which both have interesting beginnings, but go wrong in very different ways. The Mound simply explains things to much and takes away most of the interesting elements in doing so while Medusa's Coil is one of the few stories I have ever read which is completely undermined by the last sentence even though that sentence really has almost nothing to do with the story.
The other two were considerably better being Whispers in the Dark and Mountains of Madness. These both have moments in them when I wished it would speed up, but I still wanted to know what was going to happen in both of them and even though I knew almost everything that was going on in whispers in the Dark long before the end I still found myself interested in how it played out.
So, if you're going camping or simply want an experience buy a candle, turn out all the lights and try reading some H. P. Lovecraft by candlelight.
Saturday, May 28, 2011 at 4:54PM