Lovecraft

[spoke]

So. 'The Rats in The Walls.' omg so freaked out. And I'm not sure exactly where in there lies the urge to burn those pages/wish I had never read the story, but it was that bad after first reading it.

And I will probably never read it again, because it's one thing to sit down and force my self to re-read certain passages and try to figure out what was doing this to me - and another, having done so, to turn around and keep sticking my hand into a fire. It's somewhere in the cannibalism, because the next story in the book I'm reading now is 'The Picture in the House' and that... was bad, but not as much so.

Somewhere in this mix of insanities is the idea that there are certain Outside Forces humanity is all but incapable of fighting, and they all thus far have been Terribly Evils. There is this... surrender to and sinking into fear, here, that makes me wonder about his mental state? Then there's Randolph Carter. Whom I only reached a couple of days after Rats, and I could cry that there isn't more of him in this book. I know there isn't, because I cheated and checked - The Silver Key made such a wonderful balm, after the first two. Even though the rest of them aren't as bad, I needed that.

But the thing is, even with the freaked-out induced by Rats, I couldn't just.. stop. For one thing, if I hadn't done something I'd have had nightmares. I still did, but I got myself calmed down enough that it was... strange, and titled off-center. Less a nightmare than a dream that thought it should be one. Those damned caverns where there, and there were people in them, but they were more ghosts than anything, and somehow - the crew of DS9 was in there, getting out those people who were sill able to escape? Which included a younger set of themselves. It amused me that young Cisco kept wanting to talk to his older self and find out what was going on. Dax was pulling him back, though...

So. For one thing, there's something I remember reading once that I took to heart, though I cannot remember where I read it. I can't even remember the exact wording, just that you should read things you don't like as well as those you do, and explore in a literary sense to expand yourself as a writer? So after the initial 'oh my God why did I read that? ;_;' I stopped and thought, 'Okay clearly there is something I need to deal with here.'

I don't like the idea of surrendering to this sort of nightmarish evil. Which is essentially what seemed to me happened to the guy in Rats. I don't like cannibalism. I don't like the way everything Outside at first seems to be a horror, to Lovecraft - as if his mind did not admit of the possibility of a non-human sentience that is not Evil, or barring that, repellant to humanity due to not being human.

But part of what drew me into this, aside from liking the Call of Cthulhu and the beauty of the way he puts words together, is that certain muses reacted to that and I felt like... here was something I should pursue, if I wanted to do better writing them. In this, I was not disappointed.

Gerald Tarrant - It's just about impossible to speak of Gerald without Damien being involved. Part of that is that it's... the only parallel I can think of is DiR. The way you see Bran mostly through Will, you see Gerald mostly through Damien. Only, there are Issues that Damien brings into it from the beginning of the story, and things that go almost unspoken because they are so obvious to the characters involved. Like Gerald's species-ism, which has a lot in common with Lovecraft's fears. And it had not really meant anything to me, until this - nor had it occurred to me that he was scared of those things he defined as other. Which folds into why I have always thought the man is insane, albeit a very controlled and disguised insanity - by any definition of Other that can be applied to that planet? He is Other, or a precursor of what humanity could become under the conditions of their colony world.

Then there's Bakura Ryou. And I wondered, what could such a gentle, dreamer-type person want with this? 'Bakura', this being the only name I can apply to the Spirit of the Ring (and a lot easier than typing that out all the time) him I could see. He has a thing about blood, and can be supinely casually violent... it's not so much that he's focused on violence, as that he seems to see it as a tool... but Ryou?

Then I read the Silver Key. There is an easy and immediate parallel there, Randolph and the Key/Ryou and the Ring. Only. It makes me wonder exactly what the boy thinks the Ring is, you know. Further speculation there will have to wait until I can find more of Randolph Carter.

In the meantime, I shall take refuge in the prosaic reality of a history-book about tea that I picked up on my latest library run.