Wednseday October 12th, 2011 - Guest Blogger Alex Livingston Talks Antarctic Aliens

OK, Gentle Readers - a guest blogger today! Here is a excellent article by blogger and writer Alex Livingston about the relationship between Lovecraft's only novel, At The Mountains Of Madness, the work considered by many to be his greatest, and the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing. I have to say I think The Thing is probably the best example of Lovecraft in film, - despite it not being strictly related to an HPL story. Alex breaks it down for us. Enjoy...

Can we talk about The Thing and At The Mountains of Madness?

I re-watched John Carpenter’s masterful thriller last week, and as MacReady and Doc puttered around the Norwegian camp, finding abandoned research documents and an empty coffin of ice, I could not help but see Dyer and company investigating the wreckage of the Miskatonic research party’s tent city. Something was found deep in the ice. Something weird. It looks like it came to life. And it didn’t say “take me to your leader”.

A great setup for a story, to be sure, but one that serves as more than simply a catalyst for a thriller. In order for these tales to make sense, a few facts must be in place in the development of the story world:

o Aliens exist.

o They are much, much older and much more technologically advanced than we are.

o They have no respect for our lives, and can kill us very easily.

o We are only alive because they either have not noticed us or have yet to put their plan for our eradication into motion.

What better place than Antarctica for a story about mankind’s isolation? As our understanding of the universe grows, the perceived importance of our presence in it diminishes. We’re a blip. An oddity. Closer in intellectual advancement to a crow breaking a shell with a rock than to the horrible powers which exist beyond the borders of our knowledge. Indeed, the aliens themselves are so foreign-looking that we can barely understand what they are, be they Lovecraft’s anemone cucumbers or Carpenter’s tentacle-flailing blood beings. And they’re here, hidden in the dark places of the world we thought was ours.

The authors take their stories to very different places, and the success of each could be related to the times in which they were released. Mountains(1931) came about when the edges of our world were still only starting to be explored; Byrd’s expedition started in 1928. To find a massive city with the impossible geometry of German impressionist movies, one in which hieroglyphs reveal that humankind started not in Eden but at the hands of cold alien biologists, was terrifying. We have found the edge of the world, and it reveals to us that there is no God.

By 1982, we were fine with that. Alone in the vast, dark universe? Sure. So the focus moved from external to internal. We humans have nothing to trust but each other, and can turn on each other with very little prodding. This is a post-McCarthyism tale, in which the enemy is not some mad beastie but our own incapacity to work together. Fear rules, and it will undo us all. It forces us to ask ourselves what we would do if placed in such a situation. Would you kill everyone, just in case they were duplicates? Would you trust your friends, perhaps trusting them too much? Would you run out into the cold and die, to hell with the rest of humanity?

These stories may strike different chords, but share a completely modern worldview. Someday we will find the truth about our existence, and that truth will be one of terror.

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You can find more of my thoughts on The Thing here. http://galaxyalex.com/?cat=14

Friday, October 7th, 2011 - The Thing on the Doorstep

The Thing on the Doorstep by HP Lovecraft

Published January 1937

Illustrator Unknown

Category: Cthulhu Mythos

I.

Since HP wrote this story in seven chapters I thought I'd pay homage and do the same.

II.

I couldn't finish it in one sitting today so I'll have to break it up a bit. I sat and read the first three chapters while my 2 year old watched Dora the Explorer. The edition I'm reading (see below) has an amazing illustration on the cover, a detail of a larger work by Gustave Dore, a favorite of Lovecraft's, from Poe's The Raven. It's a picture of Death, a barely shrouded skeletal spectre with a scythe reclining on a sphere. My daughter looked at it and asked "Wass dat guy, Daddee?" I told her it's a skeleton, a ghost. She giggled and went back to Dora. Later she was a little obsessed with it, wanting to see it more.

III.

So, The Thing on the Doorstep. Like I said, it's broken into seven short chapters which is somewhat common for Lovecraft - he uses this technique in other stories, like At the Mountains of Madness and Call of Cthulhu. I quite like it, as I'm sort of a slow reader (so yeah, this blog is kinda killin' me!)

IV.

So, the Thing on the Doorstep. We are introduced to our narrator who admits in the first sentence to emptying his revolver into his best friend but says that he was actually doing him a favor, freeing him from a fate worse than death. We go back to the childhood of the two, our narrator a young man of 16 and his friend, Edward Derby, a precocious eight year old with a deep interest in the macabre. Here again we have our protagonist delving into the dark fringes of reality - a Lovecraft staple. Later Edward, a grown man still interested in the Occult, marries a young woman, Asenath, with a mysterious lineage. The description of her father is classic Lovecraft...

"...she was Ephraim Waite’s daughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—under rather queer circumstances..."

V.

Went on a nice walk around the neighborhood with my 2 year old after reading the first bits. We live in a clean, well-kept and quiet neighborhood in Astoria, Queens, a stone's throw from Manhattan. She's just now discovering shadows, fascinated by their properties. Every time we stepped into the shadow of a tree she shouted "Where my shadow go?" Then we'd change direction and our shadows followed us.

VI.

Just finished reading this story here, Friday night. OK - this story is now climbing the charts as one of my favorites in the canon. Love love love it. Our main character Edward is convinced that his wife, the daughter of a mad wizard, is trying to SPOILER ALERT possess his body, so she can live forever. Well, not quite right; his wife is actually her own father, who possessed her, and who has been traveling from body to body through time, undying. Edward is being driven mad by this knowledge and her psychic attacks. HPL does an amazing job taking us through this poor bastard's descent into madness. Really chilling. And the thing on the doorstep? Go read the story.

VII.

Who's up for ice cream?

~~ I read this tale in a lovely Penguin collection of HPL stories called The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories. Lovecraft was a fan of Dore's and it's not hard to see why. Check this site out for more of his work; amazing stuff! And the Penguin editions are a nice, subtle way of breaking into HP's work; they refrain from cover illos of tentacle wrapped skulls and dismembered torsos on meathooks on the binding.