Podcast notes:
Sherry Priest (sp?) – writes in the genre of “Lovecraftian” horror.
Lovecraft walked away from the trope that characters needed to make stupid decisions in order for the horror plot to unfold…Lovecraft’s horror was about the horror that even a well-informed individual could not escape from (there’s NOTHING that can be done). The horror is bigger than humanity.
Supernatural elements. People going insane rather than being killed. Many stories actually take place AFTER the action and we see them in their post-encounter insanity.
Some stories are very small, very personally. Others are very grand and global.
Lovecraft…was a gd racist. Super super antisemetic, super super mysoginistic, homophobic, etc.
Genre fiction has always been the literature of the “other” and the people who feel left out for whatever reason.
“The Color out of space” – a small farm family is menaced and eventually destroyed by a color <— how friggin cool is that? A *color*
Lovecraft uses the word “too” a lot…”it was TOO dark” “it was TOO quiet”
Try to surprise people with your comparisons…for example: don’t open a can of whoopass the size of a tank…open a can of whoopass the size of a German Shepard. The second is funnier or more surprising because it’s the small version of a big thing, not the actual big thing.
Lovecraft sanctioned other writers to write in his universe: August Durluth is one. There are several. Robert E. Howard (the Conan stories?)
Lovecraft really liked a nesting doll of isolation (except perhaps in reverse – starting small, like isolated at work, then isolated in this small town, then all the way up to isolated cosmically)
There is a futility to a Lovecraftian horror. There is nothing that can be done.
There is a story about an expedition down deep into a tomb where they assemble a whole team, outfitted with a telephone so that they can report in back up to the top – an instrument of SAFETY – and it becomes the instrument of HORROR when the last call that comes back up to the top is not from a human. That’s so friggin genius.
Lovecraftian Horror in so many ways is the opposite of Epic Fantasy…in EF, the protagonist starts very small, learns of the big wide world, and then CONQUERS it.
Writing Prompt:
Take a character, and from that character’s point of view, describe their reaction to something horrific and awful, but do so without describing the thing itself.
I was in a trailer, near the beach. Were we camping? I’m not sure. I don’t remember. What a silly thing to forget – why I was even out there?
I remember that it wasn’t my trailer. It was one of those old trailers, the kind that people used to camp in a long time ago, with the shiny metal siding covering every square inch of the outside, and where inside the ceilings are low and everything is molded together like it was one imacculate piece that came into existence fully formed. The cabinets run seamlessly into the counter into the sink into the range top into the wall separating the front from the back, all melting into the low, curved ceiling.
I heard the sound, and I looked out through the horizontal slats of glass and I saw it. I thought for a split second that maybe it wasn’t what I feared it was, but I’ve seen too many videos of them, too many pictures drilled into me in textbooks. There were two of my friends outside. I don’t even remember their names, or their faces, I just remember my concern for them when the sound came. All I could think about was them; I didn’t know if they knew not to look. I knew the flash would come next…or was it supposed to have come first? I couldn’t remember, I just remember my friends out there, outside, looking straight at it and I knew if they continued to just stay there like that they would be blinded, and die.
I yelled for them not to look, that there was going to be a flash and they needed not to look at it. The ground was already trembling as I shouted, and so I then shouted that they needed to come inside, into the trailer. As I yelled, it was already creeping in my mind that they wouldn’t have time, and even if they somehow did, this trailer was such a flimsy thing. Those videos I’d seen had houses in them too, with the orange air rushing out past them, gathering orange dust in billows and tendrils, and then sucked back again. Those houses were destroyed. Houses. This trailer, made for moving, temporary, wouldn’t stand a chance.
But I dropped to the linoleum floor, and I covered my head after yelling out to my friends. I knew this, too, was utterly futile; it was something they told kids back in the days where they actually made the kind of trailer that I was in…something they told them just so they had something to tell them. The adults knew; it would save no one. The adults had seen the videos. If you were close enough, there was no escape.
The trailer shook, but the roar never came. Instead, outside, I heard people running out to the beach, asking what had happened, what was that climbing in the sky.
I went outside, and I followed them to the beach. There was a ring of haze around it; sea water falling in droplets in slow motion. It was there. It was real.
Further away than I had thought when I first saw it. Far off shore.
I suppose were lucky. Lots of people were crying. Some looked relieved, some looked like me. Me and the ones whose faces looked like mine knew that it was over. If that was out there off our shores, if that had really happened, someone had sent that to us…it was all over. Everything was over. The world was over.