HPL

Hereby some notes about an author of fantastic tales.

He was totally out there. His imagination was 3-D, 4-D, you name it, gleaming in every possible and impossible color of this world and the next.

I am talking about H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), an American author of deathless renown. One fine example of his prose is "The Festival," a short story. Here we have a narrator visiting a village where a certain Festival is about to take place. They dress in gothic robes, they gather at the church, they chant Hum-A-Drum-Drum and then descend a stair into a neglected cave.

Yea, verily. And finally there, in the murky depths of that cave, what do they see? They see this:

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membraneous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.

A man writing stuff like this this can't be sane, he must have some extraordinary quality of seeing things, a glorified third eye hooked to the grotesque and the arabesque.

More about H. P. Lovecraft and other conservative sf and fantasy authors can be read in "Science Fiction Seen From the Right". This 378 page essay is published by Manticore Books this year, 2016, and is to be bought on Amazon, Adlibris etc. Check it out in this Svensson Galaxy blogpost.




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