guardians_song (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guardians_song) wrote2013-03-27 01:02 am
guardians_song) wrote2013-03-27 01:02 am
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Recommending: H.P. Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness".
(Yeah, yeah, old news to harp , I know)
It's available here (public domain and all).
Now, I actually like this more than most of Lovecraft's work for the following reasons:
1) It incorporates 1930s technology and biology into its plot in a way that makes sense and enriches the story. Usually, I'd say that Lovecraft's stories take place, for all intents and purposes, in a glorified Renaissance-era world with automobiles, flashlights, reliable postal services, and guns conveniently present. *cough* This one, however, actually discusses evolution, Antarctic expeditions, anthropology, and fantasy-world history (of a sort). ...I had no idea Lovecraft had that much range.
2) It builds up to the usual eldritch-horror routine. In fact, the only true extradimensional beings are only mentioned in this story (and seen by one poor fool at the end). This story may be the most tolerant Lovecraft ever gets towards nonhuman beings. ...Did you know shoggoths aren't actually beings from beyond this dimension? They're just an alien race's biotech servitor-lifeforms that slowly evolved sentience through mutation! :D
3) As a consequence of the building up, part of the horror is that the main characters venture deeper and deeper into the alien realm around them, giving extremely detailed descriptions all the way, and slowly begin to crack under the strain. To be harsh, for all that I like Lovecraft, this usually gets left out of his other stories, wherein there is much coy hinting, ominous connections, and then characters swooning delicately right around the point of the monsters or monstrous sorcerers doing the deed on-page.
...To be fair, that also happens in this story, but it's at the very end, and it concerns a subplot, not the main progression of the story, and comes after a quite monstrous encounter has already run its course. I find it much more effective for that reason - it comes off as 'There are even worse things out there', rather than 'The bank repossessed the rubber suit and miniature Tokyo-set before they could appear in the story, so you'll have to make do with Mr. Lovecraft stomping on sandcastles behind a dark screen and making vague gargling noises'.
(Let me just state outright that I enjoy Lovecraft period, but my attitude towards the Nothing Is Scarier trope is 'Only if you can't think of anything even worse than the readers' imagination will provide'. :P The asexuals may not quite catch the meaning of this simile, but it's like if PWP writers started claiming that writing fade-to-blacks could be more effective than bothering with all that tiresome 'description' stuff, because then the readers can insert their own fantasies. Ch'yeah, but then what do we need you for, writers?)
4) There's so much detail.
I'd like to confess, in embarrassment, that the 'omit excess words' stuff is just Strunk & White's writing style, and is not the Holy Grail it's held up to be. And I don't like to say that, because I've preached it so much, but... it's true. Victorian-era writing and Lovecraft's style do not conform to that, and they are not worse off for that. It has to be done well and consistently - I still stand by my comments that Cassandra Claire pads her work out to a ridiculous extent, and Cori Falls goes off on poetic tangents at the most annoying moments - but it is a legitimate style.
So what's my real complaint about padded badfic? It's that it's not consistent. Cori Falls breezes over major points with a few lines, then decides to lavish prose upon every detail of James's French toast. It terminally effs up the pacing. If she elaborated upon everything to the same degree, her writing would look drastically different. It wouldn't magically be better, but it wouldn't betray that the author has really weird priorities.
As for Cassandra Claire... Draco Dormiens is silly and overwrought in places, but Draco Sinister doesn't really diverge from the usual overpowered!Harry (+ overpowered!Draco) fic until she starts describing Slytherin, and we all know that's because she was paging heavily through epic fantasy for... "inspiration". And from that point, well, let's just say I get the feeling that she decided she was going to write like a Great Author, and [insert rant on people who think they shall now act like Great Authors here]. I really don't think that she'd be writing the same way if she wasn't putting on a grand show. It doesn't read as overly-detailed stuff that's just poorly paced. It reads like a much less complicated fic - like one of those wonky guilty-pleasures from fanfiction.net - was subjected to literary edema, so it's not a stout story that carries its weight well, but rather a badly-swollen, fogged-over fic that probably has some severe underlying endocrine-system issue. :\
The... adjective-laden, description-coated, detailed-half-to-death style is perfectly legitimate, however. It just takes great care to pull off.
Why have I gone on about this at such length? Because I have to justify this:
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment [behold the portion after this] when the sounds finally reached our consciousness - the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones ‘could possibly have been - since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake’s dissection report had led us to expect in those others - and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror - it would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments - all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief - it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
In Strunk-and-White-ese: [...] when, incongruously, we heard penguins squawking.
If I accept the Strunk and White style as that of writing divinities, this passage is such an atrocity that it loops around to self-parody of the deplorably padded style, then circles around once again to unutterably awful, then destroys the laws of reality and becomes a deranged reflection on the ultimate meaninglessness of all prose and imaginative works. To be brief, it makes The Eye of Argon seem a masterpiece of spare and austere prose.
Yet I like it. It makes the reader grasp the meaning in a way that couldn't have been conveyed by fewer words - and please insert the sneering about how that makes me an indolent, brain-dead lump of flesh here, because clearly an intellectual reader would insert all the extra analysis themselves, and how those miserable fools who want anything whatsoever spoon-fed to them are the downfall of all intellectual standards and human civilization, et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Sorry. I can't tell whether snark forums are more infested with snobs now or I just didn't notice it when I was younger, but they're scraping on my nerves more and more as I get older.)
But I don't want to be compelled to say an Act of Literary Contrition for liking it! D: (O my Manual of Style, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my purple prose, because I dread the loss of gratuitous compliments and the pains of bad reviews...)
5) I liked the aliens. Admittedly, I did end up seeing them as tentacled stylized Christmas trees, but it's a tribute to the story that I managed to take it seriously despite that. I cannot say that about The Shadow Over Innsmouth, even though I DO enjoy that story, because the procession of Deep One hybrids came off as more hilarious than hideous. And I was adhering strictly to Lovecraft's description there.
...Though, come to think of it, the scene's even less dignified if I visualize Kermit the Frog as a Deep One...
6) Finally, I learned what a shoggoth is! Here I thought they were basically humanoid blobs of acidic tar. No, they're gigantic blobs of undifferentiated protoplasmic cells that can produce organs on the spot, barrel after someone at human running speed, crush anything in their paths, and have rudimentary intelligence boosted by imitation of their much smarter former masters. :D Also, they farm six-foot-tall blind albino penguins.
7) Have I mentioned the worldbuilding? It's late, so I honestly can't remember. But I did like the world-building.
So try it out! It's free, after all.
And the shoggoths would like you to read it. You don't want to anger the shoggoths, do you?
harp , I know)It's available here (public domain and all).
Now, I actually like this more than most of Lovecraft's work for the following reasons:
1) It incorporates 1930s technology and biology into its plot in a way that makes sense and enriches the story. Usually, I'd say that Lovecraft's stories take place, for all intents and purposes, in a glorified Renaissance-era world with automobiles, flashlights, reliable postal services, and guns conveniently present. *cough* This one, however, actually discusses evolution, Antarctic expeditions, anthropology, and fantasy-world history (of a sort). ...I had no idea Lovecraft had that much range.
2) It builds up to the usual eldritch-horror routine. In fact, the only true extradimensional beings are only mentioned in this story (and seen by one poor fool at the end). This story may be the most tolerant Lovecraft ever gets towards nonhuman beings. ...Did you know shoggoths aren't actually beings from beyond this dimension? They're just an alien race's biotech servitor-lifeforms that slowly evolved sentience through mutation! :D
3) As a consequence of the building up, part of the horror is that the main characters venture deeper and deeper into the alien realm around them, giving extremely detailed descriptions all the way, and slowly begin to crack under the strain. To be harsh, for all that I like Lovecraft, this usually gets left out of his other stories, wherein there is much coy hinting, ominous connections, and then characters swooning delicately right around the point of the monsters or monstrous sorcerers doing the deed on-page.
...To be fair, that also happens in this story, but it's at the very end, and it concerns a subplot, not the main progression of the story, and comes after a quite monstrous encounter has already run its course. I find it much more effective for that reason - it comes off as 'There are even worse things out there', rather than 'The bank repossessed the rubber suit and miniature Tokyo-set before they could appear in the story, so you'll have to make do with Mr. Lovecraft stomping on sandcastles behind a dark screen and making vague gargling noises'.
(Let me just state outright that I enjoy Lovecraft period, but my attitude towards the Nothing Is Scarier trope is 'Only if you can't think of anything even worse than the readers' imagination will provide'. :P The asexuals may not quite catch the meaning of this simile, but it's like if PWP writers started claiming that writing fade-to-blacks could be more effective than bothering with all that tiresome 'description' stuff, because then the readers can insert their own fantasies. Ch'yeah, but then what do we need you for, writers?)
4) There's so much detail.
I'd like to confess, in embarrassment, that the 'omit excess words' stuff is just Strunk & White's writing style, and is not the Holy Grail it's held up to be. And I don't like to say that, because I've preached it so much, but... it's true. Victorian-era writing and Lovecraft's style do not conform to that, and they are not worse off for that. It has to be done well and consistently - I still stand by my comments that Cassandra Claire pads her work out to a ridiculous extent, and Cori Falls goes off on poetic tangents at the most annoying moments - but it is a legitimate style.
So what's my real complaint about padded badfic? It's that it's not consistent. Cori Falls breezes over major points with a few lines, then decides to lavish prose upon every detail of James's French toast. It terminally effs up the pacing. If she elaborated upon everything to the same degree, her writing would look drastically different. It wouldn't magically be better, but it wouldn't betray that the author has really weird priorities.
As for Cassandra Claire... Draco Dormiens is silly and overwrought in places, but Draco Sinister doesn't really diverge from the usual overpowered!Harry (+ overpowered!Draco) fic until she starts describing Slytherin, and we all know that's because she was paging heavily through epic fantasy for... "inspiration". And from that point, well, let's just say I get the feeling that she decided she was going to write like a Great Author, and [insert rant on people who think they shall now act like Great Authors here]. I really don't think that she'd be writing the same way if she wasn't putting on a grand show. It doesn't read as overly-detailed stuff that's just poorly paced. It reads like a much less complicated fic - like one of those wonky guilty-pleasures from fanfiction.net - was subjected to literary edema, so it's not a stout story that carries its weight well, but rather a badly-swollen, fogged-over fic that probably has some severe underlying endocrine-system issue. :\
The... adjective-laden, description-coated, detailed-half-to-death style is perfectly legitimate, however. It just takes great care to pull off.
Why have I gone on about this at such length? Because I have to justify this:
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment [behold the portion after this] when the sounds finally reached our consciousness - the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones ‘could possibly have been - since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake’s dissection report had led us to expect in those others - and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror - it would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments - all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief - it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
In Strunk-and-White-ese: [...] when, incongruously, we heard penguins squawking.
If I accept the Strunk and White style as that of writing divinities, this passage is such an atrocity that it loops around to self-parody of the deplorably padded style, then circles around once again to unutterably awful, then destroys the laws of reality and becomes a deranged reflection on the ultimate meaninglessness of all prose and imaginative works. To be brief, it makes The Eye of Argon seem a masterpiece of spare and austere prose.
Yet I like it. It makes the reader grasp the meaning in a way that couldn't have been conveyed by fewer words - and please insert the sneering about how that makes me an indolent, brain-dead lump of flesh here, because clearly an intellectual reader would insert all the extra analysis themselves, and how those miserable fools who want anything whatsoever spoon-fed to them are the downfall of all intellectual standards and human civilization, et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Sorry. I can't tell whether snark forums are more infested with snobs now or I just didn't notice it when I was younger, but they're scraping on my nerves more and more as I get older.)
But I don't want to be compelled to say an Act of Literary Contrition for liking it! D: (O my Manual of Style, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my purple prose, because I dread the loss of gratuitous compliments and the pains of bad reviews...)
5) I liked the aliens. Admittedly, I did end up seeing them as tentacled stylized Christmas trees, but it's a tribute to the story that I managed to take it seriously despite that. I cannot say that about The Shadow Over Innsmouth, even though I DO enjoy that story, because the procession of Deep One hybrids came off as more hilarious than hideous. And I was adhering strictly to Lovecraft's description there.
...Though, come to think of it, the scene's even less dignified if I visualize Kermit the Frog as a Deep One...
6) Finally, I learned what a shoggoth is! Here I thought they were basically humanoid blobs of acidic tar. No, they're gigantic blobs of undifferentiated protoplasmic cells that can produce organs on the spot, barrel after someone at human running speed, crush anything in their paths, and have rudimentary intelligence boosted by imitation of their much smarter former masters. :D Also, they farm six-foot-tall blind albino penguins.
7) Have I mentioned the worldbuilding? It's late, so I honestly can't remember. But I did like the world-building.
So try it out! It's free, after all.
And the shoggoths would like you to read it. You don't want to anger the shoggoths, do you?