tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49310221265654876812024-02-19T02:24:55.059-05:00BlackoutMovies, music, games, books, television, and more.
My opinions, jaded completely by my feelings, experiences, beliefs, and how I'm feeling at the time.
*SPOILERS* I will usually include a section at the end that may contain spoilers. If you don't want to know, don't read that part.
My opinion is not yours, nor should yours be mine. If you want to know for yourself, do for yourself. If you disagree, that's fine - you can make one of these for yourself for free.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-36416685797971915102018-02-08T17:48:00.002-05:002018-02-08T17:48:35.741-05:00"Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain." : Lovecraft Analysis Part One
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tVRNMiiWDHzlKKc7VBMW9Ex055gngD6VNqUn3nUWOk8e1yvj68hjmFvRuOh9FsiycepAPPTACSv97Myqgtq3jm0R50Ev2X5dgs2JfBOY9ZYSvm0Pfs0_4FiCzI1e0Fm8mCF1Cqio1VNQ/s1600/beast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0tVRNMiiWDHzlKKc7VBMW9Ex055gngD6VNqUn3nUWOk8e1yvj68hjmFvRuOh9FsiycepAPPTACSv97Myqgtq3jm0R50Ev2X5dgs2JfBOY9ZYSvm0Pfs0_4FiCzI1e0Fm8mCF1Cqio1VNQ/s320/beast.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rejoice, oh reader, for we have finally arrived at that most
critical of destinations: The first of my analytical posts, whose existence I
myself doubt even as I’m typing this. I’ve learned quite a bit about blogging
in the past few months, the main one being that consistent Internet
opinionating is not too far off from a second job. I won’t bore you with the
details, but suffice to say that this post should have been begun several times
before it actually commenced. </span><a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Commenced we have, though, and I’m excited to be getting
around to actually sharing some of my thoughts and observations about specific
Lovecraft stories, especially those which I had not previously read. In this
case, that amounts to all three stories I’m going to cover in this post. These
stories vary moderately in how much I enjoyed them, but they all read and feel
like Lovecraft.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Bryant refers to this as the “smell test,” otherwise known
as that six sense a dedicated reader of a specific author develops over the
years which allows them to gauge a work’s authenticity.* My own Lovecraft detector
was already fairly well-tuned, but these stories definitely helped hone it
further. This was probably most noticeable while reading the two pieces of
juvenilia present; there’s a palpable sense of a writer who is coming into his
own, but hasn’t quite refined his raw talent to its full potential.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*This sense is, of course, not confined just to the world of
literature, and any fan of an artist within any medium usually has such a
sense. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of The Hateful Eight, because to me it
doesn’t feel like real Quentin Tarantino. In my opinion, it’s more like someone
who has watched all his other movies is doing their absolute best to make a
Tarantino film.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Beast in the Cave (1905)</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">While not the earliest extant example of Lovecraft’s writing*,
this is his first piece of published fiction of which scholars are aware. It
involves an unnamed narrator attempting to escape from a cave in which he has
become lost after leaving the guided excursion they were on. Many of
Lovecraft’s tropes are already on display, although they are not yet as
effective as they will become. For instance, the narrator’s sense of dread
builds a palpable tension, but it’s undercut by the somewhat ham-handed ruminations
about death and facing one’s fate with determination.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The tension picks up when the narrator realizes that there’s
something else in the cave with him, and that it is getting closer. There’s
genuine imagination on display during this part, as Lovecraft – via the
protagonist – envisions all manner of terrestrial predators transformed and
misshapen by years in the dark. This bit is also interesting on a historical
level, and gives us some early insight into Lovecraft’s understanding of
science. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Origin of the Species had only been published forty-six
years previously in 1859, a scant three decades before Lovecraft was born. The concept
of evolution, represented here by an animal changing based on its environment,
was still widely scrutinized, even by members of the scientific community. That
a young man of 15 should have enough knowledge of the theory to include a
variation of it in a short story speaks volumes about Lovecraft’s education up
to that point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The tale’s final revelation takes this association a step
further, but unfortunately does so in a manner that I didn’t find all that
compelling. As the unknown thing nears our narrator, he hurls several rocks in
its direction, apparently injuring it gravely. The guide manages to track him
down around the same time, and together they investigate the corpse. The big
reveal is that the creature had once been a man (!) who like our protagonist
got lost in the caves and was forced to eke out a meager existence in the
darkness. The climax plays much like the shocking revelations Lovecraft would
eventually include in the last few lines of many stories, though as I said,
this one falls a bit flat for me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will say that the twist would probably have been a bit
more grotesque to contemplate at the time this was written and published,
especially given that Lovecraft’s description of the man-thing makes it sound
very much like an ape. Let’s face it, we still live in a time when evolution is
a hot button issue for many, and the suggestion that a human could devolve back
into an ape-like beast would be met with disapproving sneers. In that sense, at
least, I have to give “The Beast in the Cave” a fair amount of credit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">One last interesting thing of note, while I was reading
this, my girlfriend was playing the video game Skyrim, and at one point was
exploring some frozen caves filled with snow cats. As a result, my mental image
of the cave was one of snow and ice, rather than the rocks and earth Lovecraft
undoubtedly had in mind. Likewise, my imaginings of the titular beast were very
feline in nature until the reveal. I just thought it was curious how that
outside influence impacted “my” version of the story. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Final Verdict:</b> This
is an engaging enough bit of juvenilia and it’s interesting to see what would
become regular aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction popping up so early on. I
probably wouldn’t read this again for pure enjoyment, but won’t mind when it
pops up on further project-related re-reads.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*According to the list available at </span><a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/chrono.aspx"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Calibri;">http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/chrono.aspx</span></a><span style="font-family: Calibri;">,
there are eight stories Lovecraft wrote which pre-date “The Beast in the Cave,”
although only four of them have extant copies. Even the ones that haven’t been
lost are not much more than fragments, some written when Lovecraft was only
seven or eight years old, but they show quite a bit of both imagination and
macabre.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Alchemist (1908)</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For reasons which I can’t quite put my finger on – although
they might present themselves during this writing – I like this story better
than its predecessor. Our narrator actually has a name this time (Antoine, Comtes
de C——) which is a rarity within Lovecraft’s canon, and both is and isn’t
important to the story.* Antoine informs the reader that he is ninety years old,
and then proceeds to relay the tale of how all the male heirs in his line had
died within days of their 32<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">nd</span></sup> birthday. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Obviously Antoine himself has escaped this fate somehow, and
here we find another standard of Lovecraft’s writing coming into ply for the
first time. As with the opening of a story like “The Thing on the Doorstep,” we
are being given information about the narrator’s current situation as an
intentional tease against which the rest of the story plays out. From this
conspicuous introduction, Antoine lays out the origins of the “curse” which had
so afflicted his predecessors. Antoine explains that he did not know of the
curse until his aged caretaker, Pierre, started to become senile and began
talking about it. At the age of twenty-one, Pierre gave him a family document
which outlined the details.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">It was all tied to a man named Michel Mauvais who lived on
their lands and was rumored to be an alchemist, as well as his son, Charles Le
Sorcier, who himself was marked as a sorcerer. One day they were suspected of
having used one of Antoine’s young ancestors (Godfrey) in their nefarious
rituals, and the father was killed by Godfrey’s father (Henri) before the
matter could be sorted. Charles witnesses Henri kill his father, threw
something from a phial in Henri’s face which killed him instantly, and cursed
all male heirs of the line to die at around the same age as Henri. No one
really thought any more of it until Godfrey, once grown, and then later his son
Robert both died unexpectedly and tragically at the age of thirty-two. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">According to the letter, this cycle of male heirs dying at
32 had been ongoing for centuries. This information had a profound effect upon
Antoine, who decided never to marry – lest he inflict the curse on another
generation. He began to never wander too far from the family chateau, which was
surrounded by a once-impenetrable fort, and instead explored its mysteries. One
day a few years after Pierre’s death, when Antoine himself is but a week away
from thirty-two, he stumbles upon a trap door deep in an ancient section of the
castle. Following the tunnel it leads to, he discovers a strange laboratory,
and inside it an old and terrifying man. The old man attempts to hurl the
contents of a phial at Antoine, and our narrator if forced to burn his attacker
with his torch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Now, if you haven’t guessed it by this point and don’t want
a spoiler, skip this next bit and go on to my analysis of “The Tomb.” With his
dying breath, the old man who attacked Antoine reveals that he is Charles Le
Sorcier, the titular alchemist, and has kept himself alive for 600 years so
that he can continue to kill the male heirs of Antoine’s line at the age of
around thirty-two. This is where the tale ends, but also where it gives us one
final piece of information to chew on. While it’s true Antoine tells us he is
ninety years old, and that the estate is in disrepair, he never actually gives
any indication that he is “old,” or in failing health. One can only wonder:
What became of the contents of Charles Le Sorcier’s lab, and the elixir of life
which he had purportedly discovered?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Perhaps it’s this underlying mystery which makes me feel
more favorably toward this story than “The Best in the Cave.” I admittedly
rolled my eyes a bit at the final line here – “FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!” –
until I started thinking about Antoine’s advanced age and the possible
ramifications. This, for me, is where Lovecraft truly shines. The initial shock
of his reveals is not to be undersold, but it’s their implications which more
often than not keep me thinking about the stories days and even weeks later. This
kind of storytelling takes fine-tuning in order to pull off correctly, and I
feel like it’s kind of a dying art.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">M. Night Shyamalan used to be capable of achieving it, and
though I haven’t yet seen Split, I’ve heard it’s a return to form. Too many
creators think it’s just about having the audience go “What a twist!” The twist
needs to completely change how we perceive the events that came before, and make
us alter our expectations for what is going to come after. Even better is
Lovecraft’s ability to give us that teaser at the beginning of a story – “All
of the men in my family die at 32, except me.” – and thereby heighten the
tension during the story itself, as we wait for the revelation of what brought
our narrator to that initial point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Final Verdict: </b>As
I said above, I found the story to be a bit cliché on my first reading, but the
more I think about it, the more I like it. Definitely worth at least one
re-read after the revelation to spot clues hidden within.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*You could argue that Antoine’s name is important, because
it’s specifically his family line that has been “cursed.” At the same time, the
story could easily be rewritten to never make mention of the narrator’s name
and work just as well.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Tomb (1917)</span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We now take a nine-year jump in both Lovecraft’s life and
his writing. “The Tomb” is in many ways the obvious next step from the two
previous stories, and further refines several techniques which Lovecraft would
employ for his entire writing career. Unfortunately, for me at least, it is
also the first example of a certain conceit he would become fond of which I
personally don’t enjoy, because it’s rarely executed well. The conceit in
question is one in which the narrator claims certain things as real, but
everyone around them believes them to be mentally unhinged. The rub is that we,
as the reader, are never given a solid answer on who we should believe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Our narrator this time around is once again granted a name –
Jervas Dudley – and his name is most assuredly important to the story. Young
Jervas discovers a locked mausoleum in the wilds near his house; the titular
tomb belonged to the Hyde family, who fell into ruin after their mansion burned
and the last heir was killed in a fire caused by a lightning strike. Jervas is
fascinated by the tomb, and begins sleeping outside of it, much to the
consternation of his family. He eventually gains access to the tomb, or so he
says, via a key he purportedly locates in his family’s attic with unearthly
precision after waking suddenly one afternoon from his vigil. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is where the events as presented by Jervas begin to
diverge from what those around him are observing. He claims to be going inside
the tomb and sleeping in an empty sepulcher with his name inscribed on the
burial plate; according to servants and neighbors his family has tasked with
watching him, though, he only sits outside the tomb in a trance-like state.
While asleep inside the tomb, Jervas is apparently transported back in time to
the Hyde mansion before its downfall. All of this comes to a head one night
when Jervas visits the tomb during a thunderstorm, and envisions himself at a
party at the mansion on the night it burned down. He awakens in a panic,
believing himself to have been burned alive, to find he is being restrained by
his father and several other men.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the ensuing struggle, an antique box is discovered which
the storm has likely unearthed from the ruins of the mansion. Inside is a porcelain
miniature of a man, along with the inscription “J.H.” To his eyes, the
miniature is an exact match for Jervas’s own features, and he determines that
he must be the reincarnation of “Jervas Hyde.” He tries to explain this to his
father, along with his visions while inside the tomb, but this falls on deaf
ears. His father explains that no one has ever seen Jervas enter the tomb, and
an inspection of the padlock – which Jervas has supposedly been opening when
the key – shows it to be aged and rusted completely shut. Jervas is committed
to an asylum, as he is believed to be mad, but his servant Hiram remains
faithful to him. At Jervas’s request, Hiram breaks into the tomb and does
indeed find an empty chamber with the name “Jervas” on the inscription. The
story ends with Jervas informing us that when he dies, Hiram has promised to
have him entombed in that spot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There are, obviously, many different interpretations of the
story, leading to many different conclusions. On one end of the spectrum we
have the notion that Jervas is right, and supernatural forces were at work the
entire time; on the other end is the concept that Jervas is just a delusional
young man, who pieced together imaginary experiences based on folklore about
the Hyde mansion and tomb. Now, obviously this is Lovecraft, so most folks
would be inclined – and maybe rightly so – to go with the first option. I don’t
know if I’m just feeling contrary, but I personally think Jervas is just off
his rocker, and I think that explanation gives us a more interesting
jumping-off point for looking at this story – and the other two we’ve discussed
- as it relates to Lovecraft himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Final Verdict: </b>I
didn’t much care for this story upon reading it, and further examination has
not done much to endear me further. For me, the central concept of “Is any of
this real?” isn’t an appealing one, an opinion which extends to almost all
stories of this ilk.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">---</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">So there you have my impressions of our first three stories,
along with some background and tangential information. This post was originally
going to tackle ten tales, but upon realizing it was getting out of hand,
Bryant from The Truth Inside the Lie convinced me to alter my scope. That’s not
to say this post is done, however! Instead, I’d like now to do a bit of
ruminating on what these stories can reveal to us about H.P. Lovecraft’s life
at the time of their composition.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">H.P. Lovecraft’s father, Winfield, was committed to a mental
institution when Lovecraft himself was not even yet three years old, and died
there five years later. Details are slim – we are talking about 1893, after all
– but medical records indicate that Winfield had been "doing and saying
strange things at times" for a year before his commitment. The best
official diagnosis available points to late-stage syphilis as the most likely
culprit, although Lovecraft himself always maintained that his father’s
condition was caused by exhaustion and overwork from his job as a travelling
salesman. With his father absent, Lovecraft’s paternal figure became Whipple
Van Buren Phillips, his maternal grandfather. Whipple was instrumental in
formulating Lovecraft’s early impressions of the world; he showed his grandson
objects he had acquired while traveling, told the boy strange tales of his own
invention, and purportedly made young H.P. walk through darkened rooms at age 5
to “cure” a fear of the dark.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I don’t want to delve too much into Lovecraft’s entire life
history just yet, but suffice to say these things – along with a slew of other
family drama and trauma – had a profound impact on him. He was apparently prone
to “nervous attacks,” and at 18 had a breakdown so severe he never finished
high school or recovered enough to attend college. Here’s where I’m going with
this: All three of these stories deal with the idea of finding one’s place in
the world. “The Beast in the Cave” presents us both with a narrator who is lost
in the literal sense and with a glimpse at the fate that befell someone who
previously couldn’t find their way out of those catacombs. “The Alchemist” and
“The Tomb” take things one step further, dealing very directly with the
concepts of family and lineage, and what happens when someone believes they
belong to a bloodline that has been cursed. It’s not all that difficult to
picture Lovecraft himself wandering the rooms of the Phillips estate, studying
the various portraits, heirlooms, and family documents, and imagining various
portions of his predecessors’ lives. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">With all supernatural elements and ties to his different
mythos stripped away, the central theme that recurs again and again within
Lovecraft’s writing is one of exploration and discovery. Many of his
protagonists – almost all of whom beyond this point will be unnamed,
intellectual white men – are seeking a sense of belonging, even if the end
result is discovering that where they belong has horrific implications. When
you cut to the core of “cosmic horror,” past all of the tentacle-faced horrors
and half-breed monster offspring, the nugget at the center is simply the idea
that we don’t matter very much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">As I move forward in this project, these three pieces have
added a new layer to my understanding of Lovecraft, and I expect my further
readings will be influenced accordingly. From this point onward the Lovecraft
reading room in my head will undoubtedly be occupied at times by a figure who
is either a child or a young man still in his teens. I doubt the figure will
much, but when it does speak, it will almost assuredly be questions such as
“Who am I?” or “Where do I belong?” I imagine that, regardless of the answer
given, the figure will find it unsatisfactory and fade away again until it’s
ready to make another inquiry. Where it will wander during its absence I cannot
say, other than to assume it is looking for somewhere to call home, some proof
that its existence matters. If these stories are anything to go by, I fear its
search is doomed to be a fruitless one.</span></div>
</div>
Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-91008508755821663762018-01-19T18:14:00.000-05:002018-01-19T18:26:37.830-05:00Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivvpAi5lHuADo3cY5LmLLrVfQ9iiSnN8Jgz0Aubr2Vx85Cr4QKzQJ3xZK45BN8KQjNAwl-ORWECRlYBa3T4WmqKXRKTNV-wUVh_svaaCbLl2JIbKMohDpbHTe6N8IPa3c9847x55y-CKDg/s1600/Complete+Vol.+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="907" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivvpAi5lHuADo3cY5LmLLrVfQ9iiSnN8Jgz0Aubr2Vx85Cr4QKzQJ3xZK45BN8KQjNAwl-ORWECRlYBa3T4WmqKXRKTNV-wUVh_svaaCbLl2JIbKMohDpbHTe6N8IPa3c9847x55y-CKDg/s320/Complete+Vol.+4.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">I do not know how this post finds
you, fellow traveler, but as of this writing it finds my hometown in the grip
of a miserably cold season. The temperature is below freezing, as it has been
for some time, and as it will remain for some time. Truth be told, if not for
the fact that I would have forfeited my wages, I would not have willingly risen
from bed these past few days. As it stands, I am half-frozen but awake
nonetheless, and so it falls that you shall have another post to enjoy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"></span><a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">We have come, at last, to the
final volume in Joshi’s new collection, at least in terms of detailing the
contents of each one. As I have mentioned before, this volume deals entirely
with works that are not considered 100% original works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Rather, they are stories which he collaborated on, edited, revised, or
ghost-wrote for other – and usually more commercially successful – authors at
the time.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">This entire subject has
fascinated me ever since I first learned about this chapter of Lovecraft’s
life. I’ve spoken of it before, but in short Lovecraft reached a point where it
was more profitable for him to work on stories for others than it was to write
his own tales. The exact circumstances are worthy of at least one stand-alone
post; to put it briefly, he was such a misanthrope that he actively alienated
himself from the only publishers who had ever bought his stories. The end
result was that he could earn more revising a story for someone else, or even
writing the entire story himself and letting them publish it under their name.
He would then receive a percentage of whatever they got paid.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Probably the most interesting
thing about this whole subject is that, especially compared to Lovecraft, most
of those writers are at best obscure these days. I suppose that’s not surprising
if you really think about it; these other writers obviously recognized
Lovecraft as a superior talent, and so it stands to reason that he would have
weathered the intervening decades better than they. After you consider that
paradox for a bit, the next bit of puzzlement – or perhaps obsession, if you’re
not careful – becomes trying to figure out just how much Lovecraft there is in
each of these stories.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">That’s a subject Bryant has
dipped his feet into, and found the waters to be a bit deep for his tastes, at
least at the time. If I understand it correctly, S.T. Joshi himself has
endeavored in this new volume to shed some light on the subject, using new
resources available to him. If anyone could determine just by reading a piece
whether or not Lovecraft himself wrote it entirely or only edited it, I think
it would probably be S.T. Joshi, so I’m excited about the prospect. I haven’t
actually read any of the stories contained in this volume (!) and so this will
be an entirely new experience for me. Speaking of the stories, let’s take a
look at the table of contents, plus some additions of my own.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Green Meadow<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Poetry and the Gods<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Crawling Chaos<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Horror at Martin's Beach<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Two Black Bottles<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Last Test<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Curse of Yig<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Electric Executioner<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Mound<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Medusa's Coil<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Trap<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Man of Stone<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Winged Death<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Horror in the Museum<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Out of the Aeons<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Horror in the Burying-Ground<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Slaying of the Monster<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Tree on the Hill<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Battle that Ended the Century<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Disinterment<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Till A’the Seas<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Collapsing Cosmoses<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Challenge from Beyond<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Diary of Alonzo Typer<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">In the Walls of Eryx<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Night Ocean<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">---<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">I’m going to hit pause right
here, even though there are still two stories left in this volume, because they
are different enough from the rest that Joshi himself separates them. Already
we have a list of twenty-seven titles*, more than have been in any volume of
this new set since the first. This book runs over 700 pages, which puts it at
around 200 longer than the previous three in the collection. That alone should
serve to reinforce just how prolific this portion of Lovecraft’s career was,
even in comparison to the works released under his own name. Since I haven’t
read any of them yet, let’s take a look at the ones I’ve at least heard of.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">*For brevity’s sake, I have opted
not to include the information pertaining to the collaborators / credited
authors in this post. I will of course include that information when I reach
this volume in my reading and begin a more in-depth analysis.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Mound<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">This one stands out in my mind as
one Bryant has mentioned before, usually to the effect that he believes I’ll
enjoy it. While I might be misremembering, I also want to say that he and
others have pointed to it as one of the stories which was probably written
entirely by Lovecraft.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"><u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Crawling
Chaos / Medusa's Coil / The Horror in the Museum<o:p></o:p></span></u></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">These three stand out by virtue
of having been selected as the title of three other collections of Lovecraft’s
collaborations and revisions. The first two were used by Arcane Wisdom for
their two-volume set, and the third by Del Rey for their volume. I can only
assume this indicates that these stories are of particular interest.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"></span></o:p></span><br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The Horror
at Martin's Beach<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">I’m singling this one out because
the collaborator was Sonia Greene, who for two years was Sonia Lovecraft. Their
marriage is a fascinating subject, and I may have to avail myself of some of
the books available on the topic.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"><u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Poetry and
the Gods / In the Walls of Eryx<o:p></o:p></span></u></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">All I know about these two titles
is that they jump off the page in my mind more readily than others, which means
I’ve probably read / heard about them previously. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">---<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Now let’s have a look at the
final two stories collected in this volume, and talk about what makes them
different: Joshi, along with other Lovecraft scholars and amateur
investigators, doesn’t think Lovecraft was very much involved in their
composition. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">“Four
O’clock” by Sonia Greene <o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Based on the evidence available,
it looks like the concept for “Four O’clock” came from Lovecraft while he and
Greene were married, but he did not collaborate or revise it. It was included
in the collection Something About Cats and Other Pieces, which was the fourth
volume of “Lovecraft” stories released by Arkham House under August Derleth. As
I have already mentioned – and will undoubtedly mention again, in this very
post even – Derleth wasn’t always the most honest about where some of these
stories originated.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">“The Sorcery
of Aphlar” by Duane W. Rimel<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">From what I’ve seen in just briefly
perusing the web, the biggest contribution Lovecraft made here was suggesting
Rimel change the original name, “The Sorcery of Alfred.” Beyond that, all
anyone is willing to grant is that he might have made a few notes or
suggestions.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">--- <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Thus we reach the end of the
contents page of our fourth and final volume in the new set put together by
S.T. Joshi, and in a way reach the end of the first phase of this project. I
have now enumerated both my own collection of works either by or related to
Lovecraft, plus provided these codices of his extant works and my experiences
with them. Barring any unforeseen obstacles, my next post(s) will be of a more
analytical variety, beginning with “The Beast in the Cave” and proceeding from
there.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Before I leave you this time,
though, I’d like to share some curiosities I encountered while originally
putting together my own list of Lovecraft’s works. The first three are stories
that popped up in several places, but so far as I know, only one is included in
any of the collections I own. The last item is something I came across only in
this writing, and will need to try and track down by the time I reach my
reading of this volume.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">“Bothon” by
Henry S. Whitehead / August Derleth<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">This title pops up in various
places, but from what I can gather, Lovecraft might have suggested the idea to
Whitehead, and maybe a brief synopsis at best. Curiously, I even read comments
on forums from a few people who don’t even think Whitehead wrote it. Their
belief is that even Whitehead never did more than a synopsis, and this was another
Derleth “collaboration.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">“The Thing
in the Moonlight” by J. Chapman Miske<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">According to the Internet,
Lovecraft once wrote a letter to Donald Wandrei describing a particular dream,
and this story is the result of Miske taking that and expanding upon it. This
one is actually in one of the Del Rey collections I own (The Dream Cycle of H.
P. Lovecraft) and has a footnote that I will summarize: According to Joshi, the
“story” is just a bit from the letter, with a paragraph added by Miske before
and after. I’ve never read the letter or the story, but I will eventually get
around to both and report back.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">“Satan's
Servants” by Robert Bloch<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">This is another “collaboration”
Derleth included in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, which is probably
why I’ve seen it connected to Lovecraft’s name. All indications, however, are
that this is 100% Robert Bloch’s story.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">"Ashes"/"The
Ghost-Eater"/"The Loved Dead"/"Deaf, Dumb, and Blind"
by C.M. Eddy, Jr.<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<br />
These four stories are a fun mystery to have uncovered while writing this post, and I will definitely find them and read them in time. Apparently, all four were originally slated to be included in the two-volume set by Arcane Wisdom which I own, to the point they’re listed in official pre-release marketing materials from the publisher. Just before printing, though, Eddy’s family approached the publisher with a copyright claim and kept the stories from being included.<br />
<br />
Now, I personally believe that Arcane Wisdom had probably done their due diligence before deciding to include these works, so I imagine they were a bit blindsided. Of course, I could be completely wrong, and this is a case of a publisher trying to keep from paying an author’s estate due royalties. Whatever the case, what isn’t disputable is that Eddy’s grandson supposedly was / is working on releasing a stand-alone collection of his grandfather’s stories in order to bring them to modern audiences.*<br />
<br />
The last tidbit I encountered was that in addition to the copyright issue, at least some members of the Eddy family don’t believe those stories were collaborations. This caused at least a few raised eyebrows among the more learned members of the forums I was perusing, as apparently there is at least strong anecdotal evidence of Eddy’s wife talking about Lovecraft’s work with her husband. Either way, I was amused an excited to uncover a whole chapter of the Lovecraft collaboration saga I has previously not known about.<br />
<br />
*Personally, I think letting those four stories be included in a collection under the name of the world’s most recognizable author of weird fiction – a collection already being paid for by an established publisher – would be the way to go. Again, though, I don’t know the whole story.<o:p></o:p><br />
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<br />
So there we have it, (potentially) all of Lovecraft’s extant fiction, acknowledged revisions / collaborations, and possible revisions / collaborations accounted for. The truth is, we may never know the full extent of Lovecraft’s work, even if S.T. Joshi were to personally train a dozen new Lovecraft aficionados and task them with continuing his work. We’re approaching the century mark for when most of these stories were published, and the simple truth of the matter is that sometimes things slip through the cracks. Don’t believe me? Just dive into the literal mountains worth of research into what Shakespeare may or may not have actually written, or the differences between the various folios. If you want a more current example, and one that follows the horror thread, pick up one of the several volumes available which cover the lost / forgotten / maybe-never-existed Steven King works out there. <br />
<br />
For instance, King himself has said in multiple interviews that he submitted stories to several different men’s magazines (“skin rags” per Uncle Steve) over the course of the years. Well, we know about his early stories in Cavalier, and once he was a bit more famous Playboy picked up a tale or two. He’s talking about stories no one else seems to have on record, though, and he at least claims not to remember when he wrote them or what they were called. He wrote under at least one now-famous penname for years; what if those stories were submitted under others? For the completionists out there, how do you reconcile that information, knowing that you might never read those stories, or that even if you found one, it might be nigh-impossible to verify?<br />
<br />
Speaking of such things, I would not have been able to get into Lovecraft the way I have without the resources of <a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/">www.hplovecraft.com</a> such as this wonderful bibliography:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/chrono.aspx">http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/chrono.aspx</a><br />
<br />
Are there things on that list which I haven’t mentioned in a post yet? Boy howdy, you better believe it. Am I going to address them in this particular writing? Not a chance in R'lyeh. Right there at the top, though, are a half-dozen non-extant works just taunting me. Who knows, maybe this blog will turn into something more, and I’ll end up in some dusty Rhode Island attic, gingerly picking up century-old pieces of parchment. If so, know that I sincerely hope you’re all still along for the ride.<br />
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-91654703635226656172018-01-12T18:16:00.000-05:002018-01-12T18:16:18.318-05:00Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 3 (1931-1936)"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<o:p><div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Welcome back, all of you who dare continue this journey
with me. I hope your week has brought you as many joys as mine. In a very
Lovecraftian fashion, a certain tide rose, an old and powerful force which
swept away all those foolish enough to be caught in its path. People cavorted
in the streets like madmen, and gave way to their base desires and instincts. I
joined hundreds of my fellows in offering up our pay for robes and tunics
stitched with strange runes, chief among them the primary letter of the alphabet,
stylized in a most curious manner. Now the frenetic bliss is ebbing, as it
always does, and we shall have a period of calm until next year’s season of
festivals begins. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">If someone were to ask me for a book that captures the
best of Lovecraft, I could theoretically hand them this volume and be done with
it. There are a few missing key components, certainly, my own beloved
“Dream-Quest” chief among them. As an essential representation of Lovecraft’s
central “cosmic horror” thesis though, the six primary tales found within are
inarguably perfect. I’m honestly going to have to keep myself in check while
writing my briefs for the ones I have read, because otherwise this post would approach
research paper lengths. For the time being, I’ll curb my zeal, and get rolling
with our list of the included works.</span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At the Mountains of Madness</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Shadow Over Innsmouth</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Dreams in the Witch House</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Through the Gates of the Silver Key</span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Thing on the Doorstep</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Book*</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Shadow Out of Time</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Haunter of the Dark</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Very Old Folk*</span></div>
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</div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Evil Clergyman*</span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">…by Gan, that’s a Hell of a collection. Looks like I lied,
there’s a bit more indulgent gushing before I talk about specific stories. At
least three of these tales are given treatment in what I’ve read of Alan
Moore’s Providence, and that was just the first six issues. One of these is my
favorite “cosmic horror” story, and another is my second favorite of the same
ilk. Every single one of these tales that I have read made an impression on me,
and I am stoked to eventually make my way back to them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*“The Book,” “The Very Old Folk,” and “The Evil Clergyman”
are the only three I haven’t read, and all are a bit of an oddity. The latter
two are taken from letters Lovecraft wrote – the man DID love him some
letter-writing – and it’s likely neither were ever meant for wide publication.
Likewise, “The Book” is a story fragment that was found among his papers and
published posthumously.</span></div>
<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">At the Mountains of Madness</span></u><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I seriously doubt that anything I write here about this story
will do it justice. That’s not to slight my own analytical skills, or to say
that I’ll never have anything to write about it which would fit the bill. (If
anything, a big goal of this blogging project is to get me to that point!) What
I’m writing here and now, though, is based off of me reading it over the course
of several nights before bed back in early 2014. There were difficulties in my
personal life at the time – which I will save for a different post – and as a
result I was perhaps distracted from the investment the tale deserved and
demanded.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Because make no mistake, this is a story that demands
much of the reader. This was the first Lovecraft story I decided to read, and I
both would and wouldn’t suggest that method to others looking to discover his
works. All of his writing quirks and nuances are on display here, and for the
uninitiated, if can be a little overwhelming. At the same time, you’ll get back
whatever you put in, plus more on top of that. I keep typing and deleting more
to say, but I think I’ll save it for when my journey brings me back around to
read the story again.</span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Shadow Over Innsmouth</span></u><br />
<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></u><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ah, fish people. This is admittedly my least favorite of
the seven stories from this book which I’ve read, but make no mistake, it’s
still a classic. The narrator ends up in the titular Innsmouth – a place where
one doesn’t want to linger – for far too long, and begins to discover things no
sane person would want to know. There’s definitely plenty of tension, but I
didn’t feel the same dread other Lovecraft stories inspire. I also figured out
the big revelation well in advance of the ending, and found it lacked the same
impact as something like “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Perhaps a re-reading will
improve my opinion!</span><br />
<br />
<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Dreams in the Witch House</span></u><br />
<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></u><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">For some reason, this story escaped my attention until
late 2015, when Bryant’s posts on The Truth Inside the Lie and my own reading
of Providence drew me back. There is a particularly menacing issue of the comic
which deals with “The Dreams in the Witch House,” which is probably why I
finally got around to it. The narrator is a boarder at a most unusual house,
and he finds that his room does not seem to obey the laws of geometry or
physics.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is, in my opinion, Lovecraft at his very finest. There
are connections to the greater mythos, but at its core this is a very
finely-tuned tale of one man’s personal experiences with horror of the most
malicious sort. It was responsible for a few restless nights while I was
reading it, and will undoubtedly have the same effect the second time around.</span><br />
<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Through the Gates of the Silver Key</span></u></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></u> </div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I initially confused the plot of this story with that of
another, “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” which is more a condemnation of my
own memory than of either tale. In working on these posts I realized my error,
and have amended Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925)”
accordingly. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Yet another Kadath-related yarn, this one takes place later
in Carter’s life… maybe? I don’t want to give too much away, but things play
out in a New Orleans manor, where some folks have gathered to try and determine
the fate of Randolph Carter. The more I recall about the story, the more I
remember liking it; this is once again Lovecraft working more in the realm of
the fantastical than the horrific, and it still suits him. </span><br />
<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Thing on the Doorstep<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is one of the rare cases where Lovecraft’s execution
– exceptional though it is – does not quite match the full scope of the story’s
subject matter. Over the course of the tale, our narrator begins to fear that
his best friend is the victim of some awful plot involving body swapping and
something which is both ancient and not at all human. The central plot is good,
but the more time I have to consider the concept, the more terrifying the idea
of being forced out of your own body becomes. Alan Moore takes the concept into
darker territory in Providence; does he take it too far? We’ll talk about that
when we reach that issue!</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Shadow Out of Time<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’ve mentioned it in other posts, but in case you’ve
missed those: “The Shadow Out of Time” is undeniably my favorite Lovecraft
story. It combines my favorite elements from other tales listed so far, with a
core concept that both fascinates and terrifies me. The protagonist is a professor
who starts losing chunks of time from his life; when he comes to, he encounters
people confronting him about things he’s never said or done. Worse than that,
these lapses are accompanied by visions of a place complete alien to him,
inhabited by beings he can barely find the words to describe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’ll stop myself there, before I give too much away, but
I will add that the ending to this story rattled me more than most of the
others combined. Once I had read it, I was not surprised to learn in the least that
this was the second-to-last story Lovecraft ever wrote, and the final one to
spring from a completely original idea. By the time of its composition, it must
have been obvious he was sick, to himself if not to anyone else. As such, this
story reads like something written by a man who knows his time on this Earth is
nearing its end.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Haunter of the Dark<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The final story ever written that can be attributed 100%
to Howard Phillips Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark” has a rather unique
origin. In 1935, Robert Bloch – who was only 18 at the time! – wrote a story
called “The Shambler from the Stars.” As you can probably guess from the
title*, it was a pastiche of works by Lovecraft, who had already become a
mentor to him. Lovecraft was impressed enough with the tale that he actually
wrote a sequel, that being the tale we’re currently discussing, and dedicated
it to Bloch. Bloch would eventually finish the “trilogy” in 1950 with his story
“The Shadow from the Steeple.”</span></div>
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</div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Lovecraft’s story involves a young writer, Robert Blake –
almost definitely a stand-in for Bloch – who becomes obsessed with an old,
strange church he can see from his window. A little discussion with the locals
reveals that the church has a dark history, and has been the object of
investigation before. Blake ignores their warnings and his better judgment, and
decides to try and gain access to the church. From there, as you can imagine,
things don’t go so well. The entire tale is genuinely engrossing, and it
features some of the best moments of suspense in any fiction I’ve ever read.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">*I much prefer this title to ANY of the ones used by
August Derleth in his co-opting of Lovecraft’s name for the former’s “new”
stories supposedly written from the latter’s notes and unfinished writing.
Also, while I haven’t read those stories yet, something tells me both
“Shambler” and “Shadow” – which I have read, and enjoyed – are far superior.</span><br />
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
</div>
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</div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">This is the penultimate volume of the set, and the last
which deals directly with fiction only attributed to Lovecraft; the final
volume is focused on his collaborations, revisions, and ghost writings for
other authors. I feel now as I did after completing my first reading of
“Haunter,” which is that literature was robbed of something irreplaceable in
that Lovecraft never got to do such work with other protégés. Robert Bloch
himself would go on to write Psycho, along with innumerable other works, and
passed away in 1994 at the age of 77. </span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">What Lovecraft would have produced if he had another
thirty years granted him is a subject for another post, and is ground which has
been trod by countless others. I can’t help thinking about when Stephen King
was nearly killed in 1999, nearly twenty years ago now; would Lovecraft have
been as prolific as Uncle Steve has been during his potential extra years? I
get the feeling we would have more collaborative works to enjoy. I want you to
imagine a world where young Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury,
Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov could potentially have had
direct interaction with Lovecraft, either as their friend and mentor, or even
as a rival author. </span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In our world, and without a coveted Ur-Kindle to give us
glimpses of stories from other timelines, this sadly remains the end of the
fiction Lovecraft produced during his lifetime. As mentioned above, there is
one more volume to consider, and one which I am particularly excited about. I
am also happy to report I have begun the necessary readings for my analytical
posts once this “Table of Contents” series wraps up next week. Perhaps, as
Simon Pegg pointed out when David Bowie died, I should just be glad that in the
4-5 billion years the Earth has existed, I’m lucky enough to be alive in a time
when Lovecraft’s works exits at all.</span><br />
</div>
</o:p>Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-91272372531181850762018-01-05T15:23:00.001-05:002018-01-05T15:25:45.590-05:00"If I Am Mad, It Is Mercy!" : My Lovecraft Collection (Part Two)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRXbBj2OP2vzzEZqvmrUwXWhsWel8SKbtR3Se3gAKZEiCYNQRbJOzK3NRUE24OoBf9RJwjKA_dJtSqKJxrKZihOgUsvuktev0qTw95c4FmFbVoxIT53k2jjXeSK46h6Xt8yw9l1yx4J8_P/s1600/20171226_191959.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRXbBj2OP2vzzEZqvmrUwXWhsWel8SKbtR3Se3gAKZEiCYNQRbJOzK3NRUE24OoBf9RJwjKA_dJtSqKJxrKZihOgUsvuktev0qTw95c4FmFbVoxIT53k2jjXeSK46h6Xt8yw9l1yx4J8_P/s320/20171226_191959.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As I write these, I sometimes like to imagine what my
readers will think as they read them. For instance, I imagine right now most of
you are going “Wait a second, didn’t I already see a picture of that shelf, and
read a post about his Lovecraft collection?” The answer to that question is
yes, I did already show you a similar picture, and write a post that was very
similar in theme and format to this one. The answer is also no, because this
post in front of you is about books I have which are related to Lovecraft, but
weren’t written by the man himself.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Great,” I imagine I can hear you muttering, “More of him
preening over how cool he thinks all of his stuff is.” For once, I’m not going
to go with the easy, self-deprecating shot about a massive Lovecraft collection
being uncool; I think these books are cool as Hell, which is why I’m excited to
be sharing them! Now, just for clarification, the following titles are either
directly related to Lovecraft, or were purchased as part of my efforts to
expand my understanding of his influences and legacy. I will openly admit that
I have read very little of what’s on this list, but hey, that’s one of the
things I hope to rectify with this ongoing project. Now, in the words of the
Pagemaster, let’s look to the books!</span><br />
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<strong><u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">The
Collection </span></u></strong><b><u><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;">Part Two: Works Related to H.P. Lovecraft</span></u></b><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">S.T. Joshi – I Am Providence (Two Volume Set)<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Of all the books on this list, these two volumes are perhaps
the ones which I am most excited to finally read. In these two volumes, Joshi
presents a work that is partly a biography of Lovecraft, and partly the story
of Joshi’s own fascination with the writer. The reviews I’ve read are either
glowingly positive, or found the books to be self-indulgent tripe, but the
former thankfully outweighs the latter. Given how much I enjoy Joshi’s
introductions and annotations in the other works I have, I imagine I’ll like
this quite a bit.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and
Robert E. Howard (Two Volume Set)<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">You may or may not know this, but Lovecraft’s best friend
for many years was the famous (and somewhat infamous) pulp writer Robert E.
Howard. Basically, everything I could find online said that if you wanted to
understand Lovecraft as a person, reading his letters to Howard was the way to
go. This set was unfortunately out-of-print when I first began really digging
into Lovecraft, and sellers online were charging several hundred dollars for
it. Thankfully, there was a reprinting in January 2017 – just after I received
my copies of I Am Providence for Christmas, as it happens – and I got this set
as a birthday present. One of these days, I hope to add Mark Finn’s “Blood and
Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard” to my collection as well.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Robert E. Howard – The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’ve read all of these stories, and love them, and wish more
existed. While Solomon Kane is definitely not as well-known as Conan, I feel
that has less to do with the character, and more to do with readers. Solomon
certainly cuts a striking figure in my mind, with his high-collared Puritan
garb and black hat. Perhaps a bit more imagination is required to appreciate
his adventures, although I mean that as no slight against the raw pulp
awesomeness that is Howard’s Conan tales. Whatever the case, Howard wrote far
more Conan adventures than he did Solomon Kane stories, and the two Arnold
Schwarzenegger films helped cement the Cimmerian in pop culture. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There actually IS a Solomon Kane film starring James Purefoy<span class="author"> </span>which has never gotten a full release in the States, but
is available for viewing on Amazon Prime. The audience reviews are mostly
positive, and I think Purefoy is a great actor, so I really should get around
to watching it. Based on the posters, it appears that they took a bit of
creative license with “Puritan swordsman,” but I guess that’s to be expected.
Admittedly, a direct translation of his appearance from the stories would
probably have looked silly in a movie.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Robert E. Howard – Conan the Barbarian (3 Volume Set)<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As a kid, I loved the show He-Man and the Masters of the
Universe; I had action figures, and a light-up sword, the whole nine yards. So
when I was slightly older, the natural progression was to Conan the Barbarian. Look,
I’m not going to get into lengthy diatribes about gender roles or masculinity
on this blog, and I certainly don’t look like Schwarzenegger does in these
films or anywhere close. There’s absolutely no denying, though, that when you
see Arnold in that costume you think: “Now that’s a fucking man, let me tell
you.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">That was precisely what Howard was always shooting for with
his Conan stories, and given the legacy of his works, I’d say he succeeded in
spades. I haven’t read but a few of these stories over the years – and some of
those were the comic book adaptations by Dark Horse – but these tales are about
as straightforward as you get. That’s not to say they’re lazily written, or
simple in execution. You can just be pretty certain going in that there will be
villainous cultists, a scantily-clad woman in distress, and most of the problems
will be solved by Conan turning people into jigsaw puzzles. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There are people out there – on both sides of the aisle, and
for “different” reasons that all come down to them wanting to control how
others thinks – who will tell you this kind of story doesn’t have a place in
the world anymore. To which I say: “Bullshit.” There are still people writing
new Conan stories, both in prose and for the aforementioned ongoing Dark Horse
comics. Now, do I think pulp adventures about glistening, muscled warriors are
the only stories to be told? Not in the slightest, but those stories are still
out there, and readers still need a way to access them. </span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Michel Houellebecq – H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World,
Against Life<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have yet to read this, but I’ve heard only good things
from other Lovecraft fans who have recommended it. You might notice that the
cover proudly states “Introduction by Stephen King,” which means old Uncle
Steve thought it was worth his time. That alone is probably enough to sell me
on it.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">August Derleth – The Watchers Out of Time<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There’s a history lesson to be told about this book, but I’m
going to save the bulk of it for my actual post regarding it and its contents.
The short version is: Without August Derleth, you wouldn’t be reading this
blog, because none of Lovecraft’s stories would have survived to the modern
era. For that, if nothing else, every fan of weird fiction owes Derleth an
indescribable debt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">…unfortunately, simply collecting and publishing Lovecraft’s
extant works wasn’t enough for ole August, and so we have the stories in this
volume. Ostensibly written straight from notes and unfinished drafts left
behind by the man himself, these are stories Derleth “finished” and then
published. I have only skimmed them – and read Bryant’s thoughts over at The
Truth Inside the Lie – but my impressions are not positive. In truth, the
titles of the stories alone make me roll my eyes something fierce, as they are
just poorly jumbled versions of Lovecraft’s own titles. For instance: “The
Shadow Out of Space.” Are you kidding me?</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Del Rey Books - Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos & Tales
of the Lovecraft Mythos<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I briefly mentioned the “Cthulhu Mythos” volume in my first
collection post, but wanted to give it and its companion volume “Tales of the
Lovecraft Mythos” a little more examination here. Both collections contain
stories either directly related to or inspired by Lovecraft’s works; the former
has stories from both his contemporaries and modern writers, while the latter
focuses just on authors from the height of the pulp era. The titles are a bit
of a misnomer, as the works in “Cthulhu Mythos” don’t deal exclusively with the
Great Old Ones, but that’s a minor complaint at best. This is another chunk of
the project I’m genuinely looking forward to reaching.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Flame Tree Publishing – Gothic Fantasy: Lovecraft Short
Stories<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My girlfriend (Hi, Em!) got me this as a surprise
after-Christmas gift, mostly because she found it for a phenomenal price and
had been looking for something to add to my Lovecraft collection.* I was
uncertain of whether to include it here or go back and add it to my Collection
Part One post, and still don’t know if I made the right choice. You see, most
of the stories within were written by Lovecraft, but there are a handful of
stories by others interspersed. In the end, I decided to put it here, since it
matches up thematically with the books proceeding and succeeding it on the
list.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">*In case it hasn’t already become clear, that’s a difficult
task to accomplish, given to my proclivity for just buying books related to my
interests, even when it’s not in the interest of my wallet.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Dark Renaissance Books – The Ghost of Fear and Others
& The Dead Valley and Others<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’ve been structuring these lists by theme rather than
chronologically, so I would like to note that these two volumes were some of
the first I picked up during my Lovecraft resurgence in 2015. Compiled and
edited by the incomparable S.T. Joshi, these collections contain stories which
Lovecraft himself regarded as being triumphs of the horror genre. Now, I can’t
say with certainty that they’re all winners; sometimes a creator whose work you
love turns out to have terrible taste themselves. Just based on the pedigree of
the authors within, though, I’m going to guess these are probably two of the
best collections of this type in print, even without the Lovecraft connection.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">To my knowledge, I’ve only read one of the stories collected
here, that being Lord Dunsany’s “Idle Days on the Yann.” It’s so obviously the
inspiration for “Dream-Quest” and the connected stories that I wouldn’t have
been surprised if someone had called the narrator Mr. Carter. I enjoyed it so
much I bought an entire volume of Dunsany’s work, which will appear later on
this list. I greatly look forward to reading the rest of the stories in these
two collections, and sharing my thoughts about them here.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Barnes & Noble – H.P. Lovecraft Selects: Classic
Horror Stories <o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Someone I know got this for Christmas, which
alerted me to its previously unknown existence, and so of course I snagged
myself a copy during post-holiday sales. The title makes me arch an eyebrow
slightly, seeing as Lovecraft died in 1937… huh. I was going to make some
snarky comment about him “selecting” things for a book put out by Barnes &
Noble, but it turns out the original bookstore was founded in 1886, and had
grown large enough have a publishing division under the B&N name by 1931. So
it’s entirely possible he did select horror stories for them to put in a
collection. I’ll save actually digging into whether or not that is the case for
when I get to this book in my reading!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Either way, skimming the table of contents, I saw familiar
names from the set just prior to this on the list, but there were enough
differences to make this a worthwhile purchase. Really and truly, if you
started with the two Del Rey collections mentioned above and worked your way
down to here, you’d have a pretty phenomenal set of horror / weird tales collections
spanning most of the 20<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> century. There’s something to be said for
the fact that all of them have been put together with Lovecraft as the common
association. Though my full thoughts on it are a topic for a later post,
suffice to say that I get understandably frustrated when people try to
marginalize his contributions to both the horror genre, and American literature
as a whole.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Clark Ahston Smith – The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I haven’t read any of these stories, but that hasn’t stopped
me from adding a six-volume set of Clark Ashton Smith’s complete works to my
Amazon wish list. Smith is commonly mentioned in the same breath as Lovecraft –
as is our next author – and so I’m sure whatever this volume contains will
entertain me, and probably deepen my understanding of this era of writing as
well.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Algernon Blackwood – Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird
Stories<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have read two of these stories – “The Willows” and “The
Wendigo” – and found them both to be simultaneously delightful to read and
utterly suspenseful. Though I don’t know if it’s true of all these stories, the
two I’ve read show an interest and familiarity with the outdoors that is absent
from Lovecraft’s own work. Even when Lovecraft’s protagonists do venture
outside, there’s always an ethereal quality to the places they visit, such as
the Antarctic. Blackwood’s stories take place in locations that feel real, and
the fantastical elements feel all the more threatening because of it. </span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lord Dunsany – In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy
Tales<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As mentioned above, I so adored “Idle Days on the Yann” that
I made this purchase as a result. I suspect I won’t connect with all of these
stories on that level, but if even a third of them elicit such a response, this
will have been a worthy purchase. In addition to heavily influencing Lovecraft,
Dunsany was also a key figure in developing Tolkien’s literary voice, so this
volume can serve double duty when I eventually get around to blogging about
those books as well. (I sincerely hope all of you reading this are still around
when I get to THAT project in 2071!)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Side Note: Looking back at the last three entries – and at
part one of this bibliography, and at my Amazon wish list – it’s pretty obvious
that at some point, someone at Penguin said “You know there’s a bunch of
awesome stories out there no one is printing anymore. We should fix that!” For
instance, with Lord Dunsany, searching on Amazon brings up this volume, and a
couple of cheap-looking paperbacks, and some Kindle collections. I mentioned in
my last post that Clark Ashton Smith’s works were unavailable as recently as
2001. Yet two spots above this is a whole book full of ‘em, just waiting to be
enjoyed! So I would like to extend my gratitude to this unknown publishing
employee; I am grateful for your bold thinking, although my bank account is
not.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Robert W. Chambers – The King in Yellow and Other Horror
Stories<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I purchased this and the next two titles partly because of
the Lovecraft connection, but mostly as a result of watching the first season
of HBO’s True Detective. There are numerous references to the King in Yellow –
often referred to as Hastur in associated works, though I don’t know if that
name appears here – and to the land of “Carcosa.” Chambers’ story is also a key
part of Alan Moore’s Providence in which rumor has it those who read the tale
are driven mad. As for the story itself, I’ve heard mixed reviews, both from
friends and online, so we’ll see what my thoughts are when we get here.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Ambrose Bierce – Can Such Things Be? & The Complete
Short Stories<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I have even less to say about these than The King in Yellow,
other than I bought them for similar reasons. Uh… that sure is a pretty cover
on the Complete Short Stories. Moving on!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><u>Seabury Quinn – The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin
(Volumes 1-3, Ongoing)</u> *Not Yet Pictured*</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Here we have what is possibly the most indulgent,
potentially risky set of purchases on the list so far: I have never read a
single story by Seabury Quinn, but have purchased three out of five planned
volumes involving his protagonist Jules de Grandin. (Yes, there are items on
here still more gratuitously acquired.) Now, odds are good that I’m going to
greatly enjoy these stories. They’re about a French detective who investigates
supernatural cases in a small New Jersey town; he’s got a Poirot-style
moustache, for heaven’s sake! Still, I might despise them, in which case I’ve
spent not a small amount of money on (eventually) five books I dislike.
Regardless, their release over the past two years is another indicator of the
weird fiction resurgence we’ll eventually discuss.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Bram Stoker – Dracula / Mary Shelley – Frankenstein <o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Let’s be honest, nothing I say here can capture either of
these works. There are collegiate courses dedicated to the study of just one of
these two titles. Graduate students compose theses and dissertations about
their themes, style, and composition. Even the most far-reaching of Lovecraft’s
works doesn’t even come close to the impact Dracula and Frankenstein have had
on the cultural and literary landscape.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So what are they doing on my little list, you ask? Well, I
intend to read them and write about it, both because they are awesome, and
because their influence on horror literature – and all writers of the genre,
including Lovecraft – probably can’t be overstated. Just as sci-fi as we know
it today would not exist without Wells and Verne, neither would horror exist
without Stoker and Shelley. I’ve heard people say that horror writing has
changed, and so you don’t need to read these works anymore. To quote myself
from earlier: “Bullshit.”</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvehr72S9xlsJSuHtY_6MqQ_VSiP8LB0HJrXYb0ysO3Q7dobT-5Rw5leq3R8imG-fqnpPNeKx9f-gc5_2KuDaXiZKzkwrd_Irc5qZ-wZyxFmiFn_-cvpWw4JjxDZo40fBLVhyo1LdjUVw0/s1600/20171226_193307.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvehr72S9xlsJSuHtY_6MqQ_VSiP8LB0HJrXYb0ysO3Q7dobT-5Rw5leq3R8imG-fqnpPNeKx9f-gc5_2KuDaXiZKzkwrd_Irc5qZ-wZyxFmiFn_-cvpWw4JjxDZo40fBLVhyo1LdjUVw0/s320/20171226_193307.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">H.P. Lovecraft, et al – Shadows of Carcosa<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I won’t even lie, that cover had a huge role in me buying
this volume; the stories inside were just kind of a bonus. Unless I’m mistaken,
every author represented within has already popped up previously on the list,
so I can be fairly assured of the quality of the contents. There’s a piece of
Bram Stoker short fiction in here, which I guess I should have known was a
thing, but hadn’t ever really thought about before.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">William Sloane – The Rim of Morning<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I know three things about this book: The cover is once again
top-notch, the tales involve “cosmic horror,” and Stephen King provided an
introduction. (That’s essentially a trifecta of ways to get me to purchase a
book.) I can’t put my finger on why, but I always get this thrill of anticipation
anytime I think about diving into these two stories.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Titan Books – Black Wings of Cthulhu (Volumes 1-4,
Ongoing)*<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Starting in 2012, S.T. Joshi started this anthology series
of tales from modern writers that are either directly related to Lovecraft’s
works, or are heavily influenced by them. There have been three further
releases to date, with the fifth volume in the series coming out in a few
weeks. I have yet to crack open any of them, but fingers crossed that changes
as we continue along this journey together. (In case you were wondering, yes,
they are really, REALLY sharp-looking in person.)</span><br />
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*Volume 5 will be out less than two weeks from this writing. If I can remember, I'll try and update this entry accordingly.<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows – Neonomicon<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’m going to let Bryant kick this one off: “If you’re going
to read one comic with ejaculating fish men in it this year, make it
Neonomicon.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Look, this comic is all kinds of weird, and genuinely
disturbing / upsetting in pats, and in a way I’m not really looking forward to
reading it again. When you get right down to it, though, isn’t that what horror
is all about? I’ve come to the conclusion that this work represents Lovecraft
with all of the ethereal fog stripped away. You want stories in which there’s
an entire town populated by people who appear to have been cross-bred with fish
men? Well guess what, there’s a certain biological process that has to occur
for such things to exist, and baby, it ain’t pretty. </span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows – Providence <o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Confession Time: As of this writing, I have only read the
first six issues of Providence, and unfortunately do not remember those as well
as I’d like. Essentially, the series was supposed to kick off in May of 2015
and then run for twelve consecutive months, wrapping up in May of 2016.
Unfortunately, like many projects of this nature – especially those involving
Alan Moore – things took longer than planned. As it was, Providence #12 didn’t
hit shelves until April of 2017, nearly a year overdue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The intervening time saw me move from Maryland back to
Alabama, and as I’ve mentioned previously, the first year back wasn’t conducive
to giving something like Providence the attention it deserved. Make no mistake,
this is a comic that demands your full attention, and doubly so for the prose
sections in the back. So as each new issue came in, I set it aside, and then
did likewise with the three collected editions that were released this year.
This will probably be one of the first things I tackle after finishing
Lovecraft’s main body of work, as I’ll enjoy reading it with the source
material fresh in my mind.</span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Donald Tyson – Alhazred & Necronomicon<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Donald Tyson’s interpretation of the Necronomicon is another
work that my buddy Adam sent my way; I read his copy over a weekend when I was
dog-sitting for him and his wife. It’s an interesting read, written from the
perspective of Abdul Alhazred, and drawing inspiration from all sorts of works
tied to the mythos. I enjoyed it enough that I picked up my own copy, plus
Tyson’s “autobiography” of Alhazred. The Necronomicon runs just under 300
pages, and is written / formatted so it seems shorter than that, so imagine my
surprise when the companion volume arrived at just under 700 pages. I haven’t
found the time to read it since, and even now it seems a daunting task.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Laird Barron – Three Volumes of Short Fiction<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I bought these story collections after a friend / the founder
of the sci-fi book club I joined in Maryland (Hi, DeLuca!) suggested them to
me. I took a trip back up to visit in early 2016, and read The Imago Sequence
on my flights and during layovers. It’s… man, I don’t even know. A couple of
the stories I really enjoyed, and Barron is obviously a talented writer, but
some of them just did not impress me. The main offender is the longest of the
stories, "Procession of the Black Sloth,” which had never been published
before this collection. It just doesn’t work, for my money.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As I said, though, some of the other stories are quite good,
and overall I’m pleased with the purchase, and am interested to read the other
two collections. I do want to make something clear, though: I honestly don’t
feel the supposed resonance between Barron’s stories and Lovecraft. If
anything, I think going in with that expectation – which you will find
discussed in nearly every online review – hurt the stories because I was
looking for something that I never found.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This presents an interesting dilemma, one which lies at the
core of why the only modern Lovecraft-homage collections I own are the ones
edited by Joshi. There are a bunch more on my wish list, collections with cool
cover designs, or excellent titles like “A Mountain Walked.” I hesitate,
though, because I have yet to encounter a writer who can successfully,
intentionally evoke Lovecraft. Robert Bloch did a decent enough job in his two
stories which frame “The Haunter of the Dark,” but even then the difference between
the original and the pastiches stood out to me. </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><span style="font-family: "calibri";">All of
this is probably better left for a different discussion, but suffice to say
that if you use the name “Lovecraft” when suggesting an author’s work, that
work better bring it.</span><br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Fantasy Flight Games – Eldritch Horror / Elder Sign /
Call of Cthulhu Card Game<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As I mentioned in several previous posts, Lovecraft’s legacy
extends far beyond other writers continuing his mythos or paying homage to his
style. So vast is this influence that I had to make a conscious decision to cut
this post off at some point, and start a list for an eventual third codex.
Works such as John Carpenter’s film The Thing, or the video game series Dead
Space will have to wait until then to get their turn in the spotlight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My first encounters with the Cthulhu mythos proper would
have undoubtedly been via Chaosium’s “Call of Cthulhu” tabletop roleplaying
game. It mostly plays like D&D set in the 1920s, except that one of your
primary concerns is keeping your character from losing their mind.
(Alternatively, your objective can be to intentionally have them lose their
sanity in order to being about the glorious rebirth of the Ancient Ones!) From
my brief interactions with the game, I learned that Lovecraft’s world was one
in which madness was perhaps even more certain than death, and also that
artists love to draw some messed-up stuff based on the mythos.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I unfortunately don’t own any of the Chaosium books, but I
do have these top-notch board / card games from Fantasy Flight. Since they are
directly tied into the mythos, rather than only borrowing from it, I decided
I’d go ahead and include them here. What cinched it is that I bought them all –
although not all at once – as a direct result of my interest in Lovecraft,
rather than having acquired them beforehand and later recognizing the
connection. I’ve played both Elder Sign and the CoC card game, and of the two I
prefer Elder Sign. It’s a cooperative game where each player is an
investigator, and you’re all working together to keep an “Ancient One” from
awakening. I haven’t yet played Eldritch Horror, and although my buddy Adam
owns its big brother, At the Mansions of Madness, we’ve never gotten past the
setup phase. </span></div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">The H.P. Lovecraft Coloring, Dot-to-Dot, and Activity
Book<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Yes, I own a coloring and activity book based on the work of
H.P. Lovecraft, and boy do I love it. We found it in 2<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">nd</span></sup> &
Charles, and Emily got it for me when she saw how delighted I was. I’ll try to
get some scans of the pages, because they really are pretty radical. The
dot-to-dot drawings are especially amusing to flip through, as most of them are
simply the odd tentacle, eyeball, or mouthful of teeth surrounded by little
numbered dots. It makes me grin, because the dots form the vague outline of
whatever horror can be revealed, and I feel a bit like one of Lovecraft’s
protagonists; I don’t know precisely what I’m looking at, only that you’d have
to be a madman to investigate further.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">With that, we can close the doors on my Lovecraft
collection… for now! I already picked up two new paperbacks which will need to
be added to Part One, and that’s likely to continue. As I mentioned above, I’ll
also eventually do a Part Three which will focus on all different types of
media, and explore a broader range of works influenced by Lovecraft. I hope
you’ve enjoyed reading these two codices as much as I’ve enjoyed compiling
them. If you’ll be sticking around for a while, I’ll probably end up using both
of these posts as a guide for when I dive into all of these works and begin
doing my analysis. When that day comes, I’ll do my best to come back and add
links to each description here. Until then, enjoy the time we have left before
beings we cannot comprehend emerge from the darkness between the stars!</span><br />
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-1029429533497706382017-12-29T11:35:00.000-05:002017-12-29T11:35:19.616-05:00Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 2 (1926-1930)"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As promised, this post will continue our journey through
the contents of each of the four volumes in Joshi’s new editions, with a brief
synopsis from me regarding the tales which I’ve read so far. You’ll notice that
the list is significantly shorter <a href="http://xannblack.blogspot.com/2017/12/table-of-contents-collected-fiction.html" target="_blank">this time around</a> – this volume only contains
thirteen stories – but they are also quite a bit longer. I’ve also read a
larger percentage of them, thanks mostly to the shortened list of contents, but
also because we’re getting the real meat of Lovecraft at this point. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Cool Air<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Call of Cthulhu<o:p></o:p></div>
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Pickman's Model<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Silver Key<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Strange High House in the Mist<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Colour Out of Space<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Descendant<o:p></o:p></div>
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History of the “Necronomicon”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ibid<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Dunwich Horror<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Whisperer in Darkness<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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While I only have a passing familiarity with three of the
tales I haven’t read, both “The Strange High House in the Mist” and “The Case
of Charles Dexter Ward” are two of Lovecraft’s most widely-celebrated works. My
failure to read them up to this point is not to be held against them, but is
due to my own haphazard reading patterns. “Cool Air” is also well-recognized,
to the point where it was used as the primary focus of an issue of Alan Moore’s
comic Providence.* Now, rather than talk about what I haven’t read, let’s take
a look at the stories I have!<o:p></o:p></div>
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*I had toyed with the idea of denoting which stories were
directly referenced in Providence during these posts, but decided to hold off
until I do my analysis of the comic itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Call of Cthulhu”</u><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn</i>:
In his house at <i>R'lyeh</i>, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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While the “demonic couplet” might be as recognizable –
although many who hear it may not be aware of its origin – this phrase and its
associated mythos are undeniable the most enduring parts of Lovecraft’s legacy.
The winged, squid-faced monstrosity Cthulhu has graced the cover of everything
from books to board games. If one is so inclined – I am not, and neither is
<a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Bryant</a> – one can even purchase beanie caps or plush dolls in the likeness of
this Great Old One.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The story itself employs a style Lovecraft used a handful
of times, in which the unnamed narrator relates their findings as they
themselves uncover evidence in the course of an investigation. It’s hardly a
style unique to Lovecraft – in truth, while reading this you get the impression
he was trying to emulate others – and I vastly prefer his tales in which the
events are happening directly to the protagonist. It’s also a fairly brief
tale, and I remember being surprised when I read it that THE Cthulhu story
turned out to be so short. I also find it interesting how unpredictable
storytelling can be; we’re coming up on the 90<sup>th</sup> anniversary of “The
Call of Cthulhu,” and I can’t imagine anyone at the time could have imagined
its eventual reach and permanency.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“Pickman's Model”<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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A personal favorite of mine, this can be seen as both a
weird tale and a critique of how traditional art has evolved over time,
depending on how you look at it. The short version is that a young new artist
is making waves with his paintings of creatures almost too hideous to behold.
Everyone wants to know where he gets such horrific ideas, and our protagonist,
perhaps foolishly, decides to find out. Typing that sentence, it occurs to me
that this might also be Lovecraft’s rebuff / answer to that age-old question
constantly posed to horror writers: “Where do you come up with this stuff?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Silver Key”<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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I remember one thing about this story: It relates to
Randolph Carter and the Dream-Quest, which is why I read it to begin with.
Beyond that, this is the first case in which I absolutely have zero
recollection of the tale. It’s going to stay that way too, at least until my
reading brings me back to this point!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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Meh, I don’t really have much to say about this story…<o:p></o:p></div>
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Except that, you know, it’s almost inarguably the most
imaginative work Lovecraft ever wrote, and I wish like Hell it got the kind of
attention the Cthulhu mythos gets. Bryant made a comparison that I had never
been able to put into words, so he gets the credit: This is Lovecraft’s
Silmarillion. I’ve mentioned how I feel about Tolkien in other posts, but just
in case you’ve never read those, it’s a BIG DEAL for me to allow that
comparison. I’ll allow it because it fits, though, and because Dream-Quest
really is that good. It’s the tale of a man journeying through the dreaming world,
desperately trying to find a place he can only describe from visions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A huge component of the story’s success is the
protagonist Randolph Carter, who for once is a Lovecraft character capable of
facing the challenges and horrors placed in his path.* That’s not to say I
don’t like his other protagonists, or that none of them display any courage or
grit. Carter is on an entirely different level, though, and I can’t help but
wonder what had changed in Lovecraft that he suddenly felt compelled to write
such an extensive piece like this. I do know that he was best friends with
Robert E. Howard – I have their collected letters to read eventually – and so
perhaps the pulp heroics of Solomon Kane had a hand in it?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Whatever the reasons, this story is like a breath of
fresh air, a shaft of brilliant sunset light cutting through the mist and gloom
of his other tales. There is vibrancy to his prose that simply doesn’t exist in
the rest of his canon; that’s not to say the other stories are less
well-written, just vastly different in execution. Dream-Quest was (sadly,
inexcusably, unbelievably!) never published while Lovecraft was alive, and one
has to wonder what his remaining lifetime and career might have been like
otherwise. <o:p></o:p></div>
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*In case you’ve read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories about
John Carter’s adventures on Mars and were wondering, the answer is “Yes.”
Lovecraft does indeed include references which make John – and, by extension, Edgar
Rice Burroughs – relatives of Randolph Carter. If you haven’t read the John
Carter stories, I cannot recommend them highly enough if you enjoy pulp,
sci-fi, and good old-fashioned adventuring.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Colour Out of Space”</u><o:p></o:p></div>
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There are a couple of other stories on the list – the
next two, in point of fact – that would have been a more drastic change of pace
from the last tale, but this one comes pretty close. Cosmic horror
through-and-through, this tale involves a family farm where a meteorite lands
in the well one ill-fated night. As the days pass, they begin to notice that
things are a bit off, the most noticeable change being that their plants are
beginning to display colors which don’t exist in the known spectrum. I won’t spoil
anything, but let’s just say that some oddly-colored tomatoes are the least of
their troubles. This is another personal favorite, and I’m excited to read it
again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I forgot to mention it with “The Call of Cthulhu” – so
I’m fixing that oversight now – but there are actual a handful of Lovecraft
tales for which I’ve seen direct film adaptations. This is one of them, and the
end result was actually fairly entertaining. The filmmakers wisely avoided the
issue of trying to show “colors which don’t exist in the known spectrum” in a
movie by shooting it in black-and-white. Instead, they show the plants begin to
grow overly large and misshapen, and have the characters reference the odd
colors in conversation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Dunwich Horror”</u><o:p></o:p></div>
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For my money, you don’t get more sheer weirdness and
horror in a Lovecraft tale than “The Dunwich Horror.” Without giving too much
away, it involves incest, an invisible monster, offspring of unholy unions,
occult rituals, and thunderstorms. I personally quite like thunderstorms, except
in the context of all those other things, which is what you get here. Don’t get
me wrong, I love this story, but it makes my skin crawl terribly just thinking
about it. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, you know that this is
neither my favorite Lovecraft story, nor the one I find to be the most
horrifying. Just let that simmer for a minute.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>“The Whisperer in Darkness”</u><o:p></o:p></div>
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My buddy Adam hasn’t gotten enough credit up to this
point, so let me rectify that now: Hi, Adam! He had a huge hand in getting me
into Lovecraft, and when he found out I had finally started reading the
stories, implored me to read “The Whisperer in Darkness” at my first
opportunity.* I took him up on that, and then as soon as I finished the story
either called or texted him to chastise him for trying to keep me from sleeping
ever again. Make no mistake: This story is terrifying. It’s not gory, or
creepy, and it’s not going to make you jump, but you will never see a chair
sitting in the corner of a room the same again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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*I haven’t mentioned it yet, but after “At the Mountains
of Madness,” the next three Lovecraft works I read were “Whisperer,” “Dunwich,”
and “Colour,” in that order. </div>
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This brings us to the end of the second volume, and also
to (nearly) the end of this post. While it’s true that I’ve already read most
of the significant stories in this particular collection, my excitement over
getting to this point in the journey is no less diminished. For the most part,
Lovecraft’s works are the kind which offer up new treasures each time you dig
into them. It bothers me that I can’t recall them all as well as I’d like, and
deeply worries me that I can recall nothing of “The Silver Key.” Even worse, in
going through some notes from the past few years, it seems that I have actually
read “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” a story included in the first volume.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Much like “The Silver Key,” though, I can recall nothing
about it*; mental gaps like this are a large part of what is spurring me to
read these stories and get these posts written. Well, that and a desire to go back
to school and earn my PhD, either on this subject or one very close to it. I
want to read these stories, and either remember them, or at least record my
thoughts about them. In a way it goes back to the <a href="http://xannblack.blogspot.com/2017/12/i-couldnt-live-week-without-private.html" target="_blank">entire discussion about collectioning</a>, and why I buy books in the first place. I love being surrounded
by them, but there’s a yearning that goes with that, an understanding that I
haven’t used them to their full potential.<o:p></o:p></div>
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*I started to go back and amend the post about Volume 1,
then decided it’s not worth the effort. I’ve mentioned it here, so my failure
is recorded for posterity.<o:p></o:p></div>
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---Warning: Big off-topic tangent incoming. If you’d
rather just read about Lovecraft, feel free to step off here. No one at
Blackout will be offended---<o:p></o:p></div>
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For anyone who’s read the Dark Tower, I can best compare
it to the singing Jake hears from the Rose, and I think books having a similar
effect on certain people fits well within that mythos. Of course, that comment
might’ve made a few people’s eyebrows go up. Don’t worry, the nice young man
whose books sing to him won’t get anywhere near your children. Now, if they go
sneaking off to the house on Dutch Hill, well, that’s not fault of mine.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Anyways, my original point was that I want to stick with
this project and really get the most out of it, while constantly fighting what
corporate project managers call “scope creep.” That is to say, I have to keep
curtailing or redirecting my desire to follow other threads, or else I’ll never
actually get anywhere. Hell, this is the fourth post in the series, and all I’ve
done so far is talk about Lovecraft in a general sense, show you some pictures
of my books, and yammer about two tables of contents. I still need to actually
read each story in turn, give my analysis, write a couple of posts that track
different threads within the stories, do a post about all of the books I have
connected to Lovecraft in some way, and repeat the process for those.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Forgoing any discussion about when I will eat, sleep,
work, and have a life, I feel the urge to do this same thing every time I look
at my Dark Tower books, or my Flash comics, or my Miyazaki films. I have three
entire shelves overflowing with even books by and about Tolkien to rival even
my Lovecraft archive. I actually started a series of posts like this about
Daredevil once upon a time; I posted the first one <a href="http://xannblack.blogspot.com/2011/08/devils-due-into-kitchen.html" target="_blank">ON THIS BLOG</a> on August 30,
2011. The DD quest my dad and I have undertaken in the years since is probably
worth a series of posts in its own right, without even involving actually
reading the comics.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If it sounds like I’m bemoaning my situation, know only
that I’m bemoaning the lack of hours in any given day which can be readily
given over to reading and writing. That’s not to say I begrudge other leisure activities
the time given over to them, especially when that time is spent with loved
ones. Far from feeling burdened by the thought of all these potential projects,
what I really feel is a kind of nervous energy. My literary switch has been
flipped fully back into the “On” position, and there’s a part of me that wants
to stay up into the wee hours each morning either reading or typing. For now, I’m
going to see if I can direct that energy toward reading, and bring this
rambling postscript to a close. If you stuck it out, I say thank you, and I’ll
see you next time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-38685367350868916322017-12-26T14:40:00.000-05:002018-01-11T12:33:40.444-05:00Table of Contents: “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925)” <br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The stars have aligned, but rather than creating the
correct conditions for Cthulhu to rise from his slumber, the end result is that
I’m actually following through on writing yet another Lovecraft post. Your
excitement over this development may vary; it’s possible that you were looking
forward to being driven mad by the sight of a being the size of a mountain
striding out of the sea. If so, apologies, and I hope my little blog post can
provide you at least a taste of cosmic horror until the day when the one who is
dead but dreaming awakens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In <a href="http://xannblack.blogspot.com/2017/12/with-strange-aeons-my-introduction-to.html" target="_blank">my initial write-up</a> I mentioned wanting to start a series of posts,
but didn’t actually outline my plan in the body of what I wrote, mainly because
I was still figuring it out. By the time people started commenting, though, I
had a direction in mind, which I will now share here. My plan was to go a
similar route to how Bryant approached his Lovecraft journey over on <a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Truth Inside the Lie</a>; I'd start with a post that just ran down Lovecraft’s works,
whether I had read them, and what I thought / could remember about them. Then, using
my fancy new Joshi volumes, I would really dig in to each story starting with
"The Tomb." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">That plan has been altered slightly, as in this post I’ll
only be addressing the works which comprise the first of Joshi’s new volumes, “Collected
Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925).” After that I’ll follow up with three additional
posts which follow the same format for each of the remaining volumes, at which
point the posts actually digging into the stories should (hopefully) begin.
Another development from the comments was my desire to write about how weird
fiction in general, and Lovecraft in particular, has gone through a resurgence
in the past decade or so, and the last few years have been particularly interesting.
It is not lost on me that this resurgence coincides with my own burgeoning
interest in the subject; the Dark Tower fan in me wants to call it ka, but
which kind of ka I don’t rightly know yet.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">As I mentioned in the first post, I kind of jumped all
over the place when I first started reading Lovecraft. That works fine for
getting into an author's body of work, but is less conducive to the sort of
semi-academic pursuits I have in mind. In an effort to catalogue all of his
fiction – and to quiet my every-present collectioning OCD – I did at least have
the presence of mind to compile a list of all of his stories a few years ago.
Like most amateur scholars, I visited the hallowed halls of Wikipedia, and to
the site’s credit obtained a nearly complete chronological list of not just
Lovecraft’s own writing, but also the stories he had edited / ghost written,
and the ones August Derleth had supposedly “finished” from notes Lovecraft left
behind.</span><br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">One outcome of this method of research is that, based on
the information available to me, I believed that “The Tomb” was where we’d be
starting our journey. I had somehow forgotten – despite their inclusion on the
Truth Inside the Lie posts – that there are two pieces of published “juvenilia”
Lovecraft wrote when he was 14 and 17, respectively. Thankfully these two
stories are included in the first Joshi volume, and so I will be able to
examine them in the proper order. In that same vein, Joshi’s newest chronology
alters the dates for some of the stories based on new information he’s discovered;
I have amended my own list accordingly, and below have reproduced the table of
contents for the 1905-1925 volume:</span><br />
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</div>
<br />
The Beast in the Cave<br />
<br />
The Alchemist<br />
<br />
The Tomb<br />
<br />
Dagon<br />
<br />
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson<br />
<br />
Polaris<br />
<br />
Beyond the Wall of Sleep<br />
<br />
Memory<br />
<br />
Old Bugs<br />
<br />
The Transition of Juan Romero<br />
<br />
The White Ship<br />
<br />
The Street<br />
<br />
The Doom that Came to Sarnath<br />
<br />
The Statement of Randolph Carter<br />
<br />
The Terrible Old Man<br />
<br />
The Tree<br />
<br />
The Cats of Ulthar<br />
<br />
The Temple<br />
<br />
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family<br />
<br />
Celephaïs<br />
<br />
From Beyond<br />
<br />
Nyarlathotep<br />
<br />
The Picture in the House<br />
<br />
Ex Oblivione<br />
<br />
Sweet Ermengarde<br />
<br />
The Nameless City<br />
<br />
The Quest of Iranon<br />
<br />
The Moon-Bog<br />
<br />
The Other Gods<br />
<br />
The Outsider<br />
<br />
The Music of Erich Zann<br />
<br />
Herbert West–Reanimator<br />
<br />
Hypnos<br />
<br />
What the Moon Brings<br />
<br />
Azathoth<br />
<br />
The Hound<br />
<br />
The Lurking Fear<br />
<br />
The Rats in the Walls<br />
<br />
The Unnamable<br />
<br />
The Festival<br />
<br />
Under the Pyramids (Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)*<br />
<br />
The Shunned House<br />
<br />
The Horror at Red Hook<br />
<br />
He<br />
<br />
In the Vault<br />
<div>
<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">---</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">That’s 44 stories total, which is not an insignificant
number, even for a volume that runs 530 pages, although many of them are quite
short. Now, for the kicker: As of this writing, I have only read seven (!) of
the tales listed above, and a couple of those are the shorter ones. So without
counting those – even though I intended to re-read all of them for this
undertaking – that leaves me with 37 stories to read twice, take notes on, and
evaluate in the course of finishing “Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925).”
(If you think you hear something coming through the computer that sounds like a
man screaming and running away, just ignore it. I’m sure everything is fine.)
For now, I’m going to list the stories I’ve read, plus give a very brief outline
of what I can remember about them.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">*When I originally posted this, I somehow missed that "Under the Pyramids" was included in this volume. I have added a synopsis for it below.</span></span></div>
<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“The Doom that Came to Sarnath”</span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I read this story after “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,”
in which the protagonist Randolph Carter comes across the ruined city of
Sarnath on his journey. Of course, Lovecraft clearly wrote this tale before his
longer imaginative epic and saw fit to incorporate it into the later story.
He’s hardly the first author to do this, but I think he might arguably be the
best at it. Unfortunately, I don’t remember many specifics from this story,
other than that it don’t end well for the titular locale, do ye kennit?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><u>“The Statement of Randolph Carter</u>”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><strike>Yet another Kadath-related yarn, this one actually takes
place later in Carter’s life… I think? I don’t want to give too much away, but
it takes place in a New Orleans manor, where some folks have gathered to try
and determine the fate of Randolph Carter. I will say that I personally am glad
I read this after Dream-Quest, and would suggest other readers do so as well.</strike></span></div>
In the writing of a post which followed this one, I realized I had confused this tale with "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Such is memory! This is actually the first Randolph Carter tale, and involves him trying to explain the disappearance of a companion while they were meddling with things best left un-meddled.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“The Cats of Ulthar”</span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now we’re three-for-three on stories that would eventually
come to be incorporated into Dream-Quest, and it occurs to me that I should
eventually do a post – or a series of posts, or a dissertation – about how,
like the Dark Tower for Stephen King, the tale Randolph Carter’s travels in the
dreaming realm has tendrils which thread themselves through most of Lovecraft’s
work. This particular yarn (cat pun intended!) is about a city where no man may
kill a cat, and precisely how that law came to be.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“The Nameless City”</span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Aha! Here we have a story which doesn’t seem to have any
direct connections to Dream-Quest… but is also basically the acknowledged
starting point for the Cthulhu mythos! It’s most well-known for being the first
appearance of the demonic couplet:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">“That is not dead which can eternal lie; And with strange
aeons even death may die.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">This couplet is attributed to the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred,
writer of the fabled grimoire known as the Necronomicon, and both appear
frequently in following Lovecraft works. The core of this story involves an
unnamed traveler making his way deep into the desert, where he finds an
entrance to an ancient – and possibly inhuman – city. From a writing
perspective, this is where we first see many of the concepts and stylistic
choices which permeate Lovecraft’s most famous stories.</span></div>
<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Herbert West–Reanimator”</span></u><br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></u><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Whether or not this story links to other is debatable,
but it is the foundation for what is unquestionably the most well-known direct film
adaptation of a Lovecraft story. I’d wager that anyone with at least a passing
interest in horror is aware of Re-Animator (that’s how the movie stylizes the
title). If that interest is any deeper than passing - and especially if it
leans toward cult classics, cool gore effects, or schlocky B movies – then
chances are good they’ve seen it.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The story focuses on the experiments of the titular
Herbert West, as told by his one-time friend and assistant. There’s quite a bit
of Frankenstein in there, along with some Island of Doctor Moreau. I quite
enjoyed the story, though it causes divisiveness among some readers. (Hey
there, Bryant and <a href="http://mcmolo.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">McMolo</a>!) I will say that while it does put to use some of the
tropes Lovecraft often relied upon, it reads differently than most of his other
works in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“The Lurking Fear”</span></u></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Y’all, this story terrifies me for multiple reasons, none
of which I’ll spoil here. Though I admittedly haven’t read every story that
preceded this one, to my knowledge this is the first tale to fully employ the
tropes which would become Lovecraft’s bread and butter. The narrator becomes
embroiled in attempting to unravel a mystery that’s best left unsolved, and begins
digging up parts of the past best left undisturbed; it also involves strange
mounds of dirt and lightning strikes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“The Rats in the Walls”<o:p></o:p></span></u><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Along with the previous story, this one marks one of the
earliest examples of Lovecraft’s “unnamed protagonist messes with things they
ought not to” structure put to its full effect. I have a friend (Hi, Erich!)
who puts this at the top of his list as far as scare factor; I personally still
find “The Lurking Fear” to be more horrifying, but this one certainly delivers
on the fear scale. Spoiler Alert: The titular rats are far from the most
unsettling part of the tale.</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Under the Pyramids (Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)”<o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I originally missed the fact that this story is contained
in this volume, and if you’ll allow me to share a bit of history, I think you’ll
understand why. This story was originally commissioned in 1924 by J. C.
Henneberger, the founder of Weird tales magazine. The magazine had recently
begun an association with Harry Houdini in an effort to combat its shrinking
readership; Henneberger wanted Lovecraft to write a story based on an
experience Houdini claimed to have had while in Egypt.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Lovecraft listened to the story and, unsurprisingly,
determined it was utter nonsense, but found a nugget of potential within. After
getting clearance from Henneberger to add his own twist to the tale, Lovecraft wrote
“Under the Pyramids.” He then lost that manuscript, and had to completely
rewrite it during his honeymoon, which is when it became “Imprisoned with the
Pharaohs.” The story was split into three parts and published in Weird Tales
under the new title, although Lovecraft was given no credit, since Henneberger
wanted readers to think it was Houdini telling the story.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">I was therefore expecting to find the story in the
contents of the fourth of Joshi’s new volumes – which deals with revisions and
collaborations – rather than in this first volume. It wasn’t until I was
reviewing the fourth volume’s table of contents last night that I realized my
error. I would have been exceedingly surprised if this story hadn’t been
included at all if for no other reason than Joshi himself has praised it on
numerous occasions.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I was personally flustered to find I had mistakenly overlooked
it because I also greatly enjoy this particular yarn. I’ve had a bit of the
Egyptian mysteries flu my entire life, and Lovecraft uses the setting to great
effect. Equally effective is the claustrophobia that begins to sink in the
longer “Houdini” spends in those ancient, torch-lit tunnels. The finale is
terrific, and I remember upon reading it that I felt the creators of Stargate
owed Lovecraft a fair more amount of credit than they’ve given him, which as
far as I know is none whatsoever.</span></div>
</div>
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</div>
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</div>
</div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">So there we have it! Writing those snippets was fun, but
also made me realize that at least a couple of those stories have become so dim
in my recollection that it’ll probably feel like I’m reading them for the first
time. I did my best not to look the stories up – not saying I succeeded in
every case, just that I tried! – so that my original impressions remained
preserved. All of the work and writing I’ve done so far has gotten me excited
to get reading and taking notes, so fingers crossed my first story analysis
post is up by early in 2018. My current plan is to have it cover “The Beast in
the Cave,” “The Alchemist,” “The Tomb,” and “Dagon.”</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Between now and then, depending on time, I may go ahead
and do a post like this one for the remaining three volumes in the new Joshi
set. My reading time is currently more limited than my writing time, and since
these posts really just consist of me listing stories off a table of contents
page and reminiscing about them, I can get them done more expediently than the
analytical pieces. </span></div>
</div>
Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-24519210816564823562017-12-22T18:19:00.002-05:002017-12-26T23:57:26.465-05:00“I Couldn't Live a Week Without a Private Library" : My Lovecraft Collection (Part One)<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In my first Lovecraft post, I wrote about the several
occasions on which I have sought to expand my collection of his works, despite
it flying in the face of all practical considerations. I gave my reasons and
rationalizations for the purchases, but as any collector can attest, there is
one answer as to why I bought those books: Because I did not yet own them. I’ve
found that people, even those of the “nerdy” persuasion we so often associate
with collecting things, fall into two categories on the subject. There are
those who immediately understand my sentiment above, and those to whom it is a
foreign concept. Folks in the latter group might be able to understand that
drive in theory, but you can usually tell after just a few moments’ discussion
on the matter that they don’t feel that same pull as a collector.</span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Case in point, last year I had a rather nasty disagreement with
a friend and roommate at the time, who deigned to call my desire for books “hoarding.”
Now, there was a time when such a statement might have evoked images of a
dragon perched atop a mound of gold; these days, thanks largely to reality
television, it elicits thoughts of people in bathrobes with flyaway hair and
wild eyes surrounded by eight-foot-high stacks of Reader’s Digest. Needless to
say, I did not respond positively to this assessment of my habits, and rebuked
him bitterly for it. The main thrust of my rebuttal was simply that my books
are not simply intended to be things I own without purpose, but are purchased
in order that they might eventually be read.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, if I’m being completely honest, there’s a
better-than-good chance I won’t get to read every book I own in my lifetime,
and I buy new books pretty much anytime finances allow for it. That doesn’t
erase my intent to read each of them when purchased, though, nor does it take into consideration the other positive qualities of my collection. Anyone who has
a genuine collection of items which are important to them – be it baseball
cards or fine china adorned with aardvarks – knows exactly what I mean by that.
There’s a certain feeling you get when you’re surrounded by your things, a
sense of both peace and power which very little else in the world can
replicate. Given the quotation I used for the title of this post, I’d say odds
are good H.P. Lovecraft himself understood this phenomenon quite well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In my original post I used stock images of the different
works I was discussing, with one exception, that being the header image at the
top of the page. That photo is the bookshelf in my apartment which contains
most of my Lovecraft collection. The arrangement and contents of that shelf have
changed slightly since that particular photo was taken, and so below I've included an updated version. (The biggest change is that the two Gene Wolfe
paperbacks stacked on top of the Lovecraft books have been replaced with more
Lovecraft books. This is in no way intended as a slight against Gene Wolfe, who
is a phenomenal author.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPNAdNsmkFDSaQ7JBBjS_PCW1Ok_9W24WnuQ2F9mIjHjLy5Pshtx2E05Ap2SGfaqfnrJOQU1fjFajtAyOJIVqaqSEwpzI6oWKgfwYLjeVjbDUMhXRiPv8BDKTdobiWC3oehzNpRFmV6xJ/s1600/20171226_191926.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEPNAdNsmkFDSaQ7JBBjS_PCW1Ok_9W24WnuQ2F9mIjHjLy5Pshtx2E05Ap2SGfaqfnrJOQU1fjFajtAyOJIVqaqSEwpzI6oWKgfwYLjeVjbDUMhXRiPv8BDKTdobiWC3oehzNpRFmV6xJ/s320/20171226_191926.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: calibri;">You might have noticed above that I said “most” of my
collection, because like most collectors, I am in a constant state of flux as I
try to strike a balance between the things I want to display and the space
available to me to display them. Unsurprisingly, I also have stories or remembrances
connected to each of my acquisitions, and those are difficult to share without
parsing the full shelf down into its individual components. Such are things
that I find myself with the desire to share a more robust guide to my
collection in the pictures and descriptions below; the fact that this also
provided me with an excuse to pull each volume off the shelf and admire it
briefly is not something lost on me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><strong><u>The Collection Part One: Works by H.P. Lovecraft</u></strong></span><br />
<strong><u><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></u></strong><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><u>Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading - Three Volume Set</u></span><br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></u><br />
The set that started it all, I love these volumes, and am especially fond of that gnarly cover art for "At the Mountains of Madness." That first picture of the spines is the first picture I ever took of Lovecraft books for my photo album chronicling my ever-expanding library. For this post, I decided to supplement it with a picture of the full covers, so that y'all can appreciate how rad the art is. Content-wise, these contain a nearly all of Lovecraft's stories which were released under his name, though some more obscure pieces are absent.<br />
<strong><u><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></u></strong><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUmKPvqqCxjIsGlJK0tx7aykSSrvreYvGwqtqQz2HekGvhMk9xTT4ff4B_6kCdGYAlBOfzRQRDR1kSUYBd90ZOa-51Kve6_i3DYe2Lj__PYyNyzJzq7VvDf2izjOTgez6y4cvwQThFXR7O/s1600/20171220_193000.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUmKPvqqCxjIsGlJK0tx7aykSSrvreYvGwqtqQz2HekGvhMk9xTT4ff4B_6kCdGYAlBOfzRQRDR1kSUYBd90ZOa-51Kve6_i3DYe2Lj__PYyNyzJzq7VvDf2izjOTgez6y4cvwQThFXR7O/s320/20171220_193000.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><u>Penguin Classics - Three Volume Set</u></span><br />
<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></u><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The second set of story collections I purchased, these contain mostly the same content as the B&N set, so one might wonder why I would have picked them up? (Well, one might wonder if they're not a chronic collector, that is.) There are actually two practical answers to that, the first simply being that I wanted some "reading copies" that weren't my nice B&N set. The second is that I had begun to do a bit of research on the topic, and discovered that the Penguin versions had been edited by someone named "S.T. Joshi." I had no idea who Joshi was at the time, but comments and reviews on Amazon mentioned him frequently in a positive light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><u>Del Rey Books - Six Volume Set</u></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Alright, at this point my justifications for having multiple copies might seem to be wearing thin, BUT three volumes in this set are completely different material from the previous two. "The Horror in the Museum" collects most of Lovecraft's revisions / ghostwritings for other authors, which are of great interest for anyone who is more than a passing fan of his work. "The Watchers Out of Time" contains all of August Derleth's stories which are purportedly "based on" either notes or story fragments Lovecraft left behind when he died. (I'll save my opinions on THAT whole piece of history - and the stories themselves - for a later post.) Finally, "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos" is a rather impressive collection of works from both classic and modern horror writers, although some of the ties to the mythos are tenuous at best.<br /><br />The other three volumes - those containing the bulk of Lovecraft's own fiction - are sort of divided up by theme, and for a time were the only readily available collections of these stories. Unfortunately, they could have used better editing, and are riddled with typos and even a few glaring mistakes in transcribing the texts. Nevertheless, those covers are still wicked; I should have taken a picture of the backs as well, since most of them wrap around.<br /><br />Fun Fact: Unless I am mistaken, I believe "Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre" is the first Lovecraft book Bryant ever picked up. You can (and should!) read more about that over on <a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">The Truth Inside the Lie.</a></span><br />
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<u>Del Rey Books - Waking Up Screaming & Shadows of Death</u><br />
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Yeah, ok, I will readily admit that I bought these two books simply because I wanted them. They contain stories I already had in numerous other volumes, and are unfortunately even more poorly edited than Del Rey's other offerings. The one edge I will give them is that they represent possibly the only instance of Lovecraft's stories being collected in mass market paperback format. Now, I much prefer the trade paperbacks that have been listed up to this point for reading these tales. Like a vast majority of heavy readers / collectors, though, I grew up frequenting used bookstores, so I have an undeniable affinity for mass market editions.<br />
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<u><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Dell Publishing - The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft & More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft</span></u><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Though the actual stories contained in these volumes are present in three and sometimes four of the items already on this list, the real focus here is on S.T. Joshi's extensive annotations. There are only ten stories total collected within - four in the first volume, six in the second - but they are accompanied by a staggering wealth of information surrounding their history and composition. I haven't yet investigated the contents beyond some light skimming, but when I reach each of these tales within my larger project, I plan to use the versions here for my second reading.</span><br />
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<u>Arcane Wisdom - The Crawling Chaos and Others & Medusa's Coil and Others</u><br />
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I briefly mentioned above that Lovecraft did enough work editing / ghostwriting during his life that one of the Del Rey volumes is composed of nothing but those stories. As it turns out, that one volume alone wasn't enough to contain all such works, and so I picked up this marvelous pair. Edited by Joshi - whose name by this point I actively sought out when buying new Lovecraft collections - these two volumes contain nearly all of the collaborative efforts, plus extensive annotations. The fourth volume in Joshi's most recent set is also focused on these tales, and seeing how I've only read two of them, I'm excited to reach this part of my project.<br />
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<u>Hippocampus Press - The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H.P. Lovecraft</u><br />
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I've honestly never read any of Lovecraft's poetry, so whenever I get around to tackling this beast - it comes in right around 600 pages - I'll be interested to see what my reaction is. <br />
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<u>Library of America - Lovecraft: Tales</u><br />
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I purchased this for two reasons: Because it's a lovely, travel-sized hardback of Lovecraft stories, and because I wanted to support the Library of America's acknowledgement of Lovecraft's importance as a voice in American writing. Given the sheer quantity of times his work has been collected and reprinted, you'd think that latter one is a given, but we live in interesting times. (That's a topic for an entirely different series of posts, most likely once I start reading "I Am Providence.") If you've never seen a Library of America edition, I highly recommend visiting your local bookseller and seeing if they have one available for an American writer you find enjoyable. They're slightly expensive ($25-$40, depending) but are a real treat if you're into this sort of thing.<br />
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<u>Chartwell Books / Barnes & Noble - Complete Fiction Collections</u><br />
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There is at least one more well-reviewed "complete" Lovecraft collection out there, that being the Knickerbocker printing which Bryant used during his own foray into madness at The Truth Inside the Lie. The Chartwell I picked up online for a whopping $11, while the B&N edition was a gift from friends in my Maryland sci-fi book club when I moved (Hi, Brian and Cindy!). Interestingly enough, and unbeknownst to them when they bought it, post-2011 copies of the B&N printing are the most complete extant single-volume collection of Lovecraft's works. They include stories which, for one reason or another, are not present in the Knickerbocker or Chartwell editions. The B&N collection was also overseen by Joshi, so I would say it is THE definitive version to pick up if you want a big-ass chunk of cosmic horror.<br />
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<u>Penguin Classics - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Orange, Deluxe, & Standard)</u><br />
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One of these volumes - the standard edition on the right of the picture - has already appeared on this list, and yes, the other two contain the exact same stories. In the middle of the picture is the "deluxe" edition, which I found used but in flawless condition at 2nd & Charles, and was so delighted by the cover I couldn't possibly have left it behind. The leftmost edition is part of the "Penguin Orange Collection,"* and I couldn't tell you what sets that collection apart from their standard "Classics" printings. I do know that I vehemently hate orange, so it's telling of my Lovecraft fandom that I decided to pick up this particular edition. (Let it also be known that I hate Tennessee.)<br />
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*McMolo over at <a href="http://mcmolo.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Dog Star Omnibus</a> has joined out little Lovecraft venture, and the Penguin Orange is the edition he selected to begin his descent into madness!<br />
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<u>Publishers TBD - At the Mountains of Madness... & The Case of Charles Dexter Ward</u><br />
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Not much to say here; these were recent finds at the aforementioned 2nd & Charles. They don't usually have used Lovecraft books, so whenever I find some, I'm apt to buy them if I don't already have that specific edition.<br />
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<u>SFBC Science Fiction - Black Seas of Infinity</u><br />
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The penultimate item before we move on to the parts of my collection that connect to Lovecraft, but weren't necessarily written by him, is yet another curiosity I picked up at 2nd & Charles. What caught my eye was the fact that someone other than Joshi had selected the stories within. Coming in at just over 500 pages, it's a compact but hefty hardback volume which purports to be "the largest one-volume collection of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction ever assembled." What's surprising is that this was only published in 2001, meaning it's only been in the last 10-15 years that we've gotten the kind of "Complete Collected Fiction" editions seen earlier in the post.<br />
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Andrew Wheeler's introduction is great, and gives further insight into the fact that this resurgence of weird fiction I keep mentioning is a very real thing which can be tracked across the past decade. For instance, Wheeler talks about how the writings of Lovecraft's contemporary Clark Ashton Smith were out of print, and virtually inaccessible unless you could get ahold of the originals or scans. Thing is, I own a Penguin Classics collection of Smith's works that will be featured in my next post about books I own that are connected to Lovecraft. Furthermore, there's a six-volume set on my wish list that collect's all of Clark Ashton's Smith's fantasy stories, plus his miscellaneous writings.<br />
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This introduction, along with flipping through the book and reading snippets of my favorite stories, is a large part of what spurred me on to finally begin writing about Lovecraft in earnest. So if nothing else, I'm glad I came across Black Seas of Infinity for the interesting waypoint it provides in tracking the popularity and availability of both Lovecraft's fiction, and works from his contemporaries. Plus the cover art - which is another wraparound I should have photographed in full - is pretty spectacular, and the book overall is just a really pleasing addition to my collection.<br />
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<u>Hippocampus Press - Collected Fiction Volumes 1-4 (Variorum Editions)*</u><br />
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After picking up Black Season of Infinity, I did something which will be very familiar to anyone with a passion for reading or collectioning: I hopped online to look for other Lovecraft editions I might have overlooked in the past few years. This search lead me almost immediately to Joshi's newest releases, which in turn lead me to an assessment of my budget; where things went from there you can probably guess. I knew that I could not in good conscience obtain these volumes simply to place them on a shelf, though, and so resolved that it was time to finally get cracking on getting my "academic pursuits" up and running again.<br />
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The volumes themselves are a sight to behold, with the first three coming in at around 500 pages each, while the fourth surpasses a whopping 700 pages. Joshi uses copious footnotes in order to denote the textual differences between various versions of each story. The references both are and aren't distracting if you're just trying to read the story, and so I am split on whether I would suggest these editions to someone new to Lovecraft. On one hand, you can easily obtain the Penguin paperbacks for about $15 apiece; add in Del Rey's Horror in the Museum for the collaborations at about $20, and you've got most everything for around $65. On the other hand, the presentation in the new variorum editions is superb, all of the stories are presented in the most accurate known chronological order, and overall these volumes are simply better-made than their trade paperback brethren.<br />
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*Just so no one thinks I'm putting on airs, I very much so had to look up what "variorum" meant when I ordered these editions. The answer is "an edition or text with notes by different persons; an edition containing variant readings of the text." <br />
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<u>*Special Addition* Barnes & Noble – H.P. Lovecraft: Great Tales of Horror</u><br />
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In addition to the set from which my B&N “Complete Fiction” volume hails, the company also has various other compendium / collection sets they publish and sell. While doing a little holiday shopping, my mom and I came across the volume you see below. Mom is one of my most avid readers and supporters of my different pursuits, and has contributed a fair number of books to my Lovecraft collection in recent years. So when she asked if this particular book would be a good one for her to start reading some of his works, I leapt at the opportunity. The contents really are quite impressive, covering pretty much of all of the major stories save “Dream-Quest.” Given that it is specifically a collection of “Horror” stories, though, that omission makes a decent amount of sense. I’ll let you know what she thinks once she gets underway! (Also, the book you can just barely see the corner of is a copy of Stephen King’s Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which she received from Bryant, and is also super excited about!)<br />
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So there you have it! Everything in my collection - except that one thing which I'm inevitably overlooking - written by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. (Yes, I know that two of the Del Rey books push this criteria a bit, but so be it.) I'll be honest, that took significantly longer than I expected to format and write all of those blurbs! I had originally planned to include the things I own which are inspired by / related to Lovecraft as well, but I feel we've reached a good stopping point. Those works will have to wait until my next post, after which I'll start my cataloguing of the works themselves!</div>
Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-71411224080405516512017-12-15T15:33:00.000-05:002017-12-28T10:21:00.003-05:00"With Strange Aeons" : My Introduction to Lovecraft<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">From the fall of 2010 to the very tail end of 2015, I lived
in various parts of eastern Maryland between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
During this period, I only visited Alabama and saw my family twice a year, for
my birthday in July, and for Christmas / New Year. During these trips –
especially centered as they were around two times of year when I’m usually in a
buying mood – I tended to let myself splurge, especially on books and movies.
(Also LEGO sets, but that’s not currently relevant.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">My trip home at the end of 2013 / start of 2014 was a rough
one though; my roommate had announced unexpectedly in November that he would be
moving out, leaving me to either find a replacement or a new place to live. By
the time of my visit home, I still hadn’t had success at either venture, and knew
that by the end of January, I would be in dire straits indeed unless something
changed. I tell you all of that so you have an idea of my mindset as I stood in
the Tuscaloosa Barnes & Noble, holding copies of “At the Mountains of
Madness and Other Weird Tales” and “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales”
from the B&N Library of Essential Reading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">All things practically considered, I should not have
purchased those books, nor should I have gotten online and ordered the third
volume of the set, “The Other Gods and More Unearthly Tales.” Money was tight,
I had limited free time, and anything new I took back to my apartment was just
going to have to be packed away almost as soon as it came in the door. I did
buy them, though, and by the time February arrived, I was in a great new place
and ready to dive into some cosmic horror. After pondering where to begin for a
day or so, I finally decided to see what all the hype was about and flipped to
the opening of the novella “At the Mountains of Madness.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I’m not generally one to sing my own praises, but one thing
I do rather well is reading, and so I fully expected to finish the story –
which comes in at a little over 100 pages – within no more than two hours,
including breaks. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when it took me
several consecutive evening sessions to reach those final shrieks of <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"> I was even less
prepared for the growing sense of unease the novella created within me; I
wouldn’t say it scared me, necessarily, at least not in the sense with which
most people use that word. Rather, certain sections – particularly the finding
of the elder things, and the descent into the great underground city –
unsettled me both as I read them, and when I contemplated them later. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Before I embarked upon that first reading, I believed myself
familiar with Lovecraft’s mythos and legacy, at least in theory. I had heard
the “demonic couplet;” flipped through the rulebooks for the “Call of Cthulhu”
tabletop RPG; seen “Event Horizon” and “Alien” and “John Carpenter’s The
Thing.” As time and further study would show, though, I actually had nowhere
near enough appreciation for how much his works had influenced so many things I
loved. For instance, halfway through “At the Mountains of Madness,” I realized
that the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen tie-in “Nemo: Heart of Ice” was a
direct homage set in those same accursed Antarctic locales.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Beyond that better understanding of his influence, though,
came the deepening realization that exploring his works themselves represented
a vast and potentially dangerous venture. In my lifetime, I can only think of
one other author’s works which have presented the same sort of challenge, that
being John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. The difference is that even in the darkest
parts of the stories, the Shire and Imladris remained inviting places, where
fair maidens dwelt, and celebrations eventually awaited weary heroes returning
home. Those brightly-lit halls are literal worlds removed from the dim shelves
of Arkham library, the shadowed alleys of Innsmouth, or the murky depths of the
Atlantic. It’s ironic that Lovecraft’s tales so often feature protagonists who
knowingly seek out information best left hidden away, because I can’t think of
a better comparison to becoming a fan of his writing. That sense of unease
never really goes away – if anything, it gets stronger – and yet you find
yourself turning pages late into the night, seeking unwanted answers to
questions no sane person should be asking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Fast-forward to Labor Day Weekend 2015, and you’ll find me
in Atlanta for that year’s DragonCon, better in some ways and worse in others
than when I first ventured upon those stygian, icy shores. I’m standing at a
jewelry booth in the dealer’s room, eyeing a silver ring styled as a class ring
from Miskatonic University, Class of 1928. It’s not the first time I’ve stopped
to look at it, but the young lady currently working this end of the table is the
exact right kind of nerdy cute to make me linger. (I am male, and susceptible
to such things; dealers at cons know this, and use it to their advantage.)
She’s also a better saleswoman than her peers, and smartly offers to let me try
several different sizes on, to see which one fits best. I’m sold as soon as I
see it on my finger, but some fiscally conservative part of me is still trying
to talk me out of it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Sensing my hesitation – and a potential lost sale – the
young woman compliments how it looks, and asks why I still seem uncertain. “I’m
worried it would make me look like a poser,” I admit, revealing more of my
inner thought processes than intended. Most people don’t concern themselves
with whether or not people might see their Lovecraft homage ring and question
the wearer’s authenticity as a fan. That’s exactly what I was contemplating,
though. “Well,” she replied, “most posers don’t know enough to even stop and
look here. How many Lovecraft stories have you read?” It is this moment to
which I have been guiding us in this little aside – I bought the ring, and wear
it to this day – because her question made me realize just how far from a poser
I really was. While I still haven’t read every Lovecraft story, by that point
already there weren’t any of the “big ones” left that I hadn’t read at least
once. I had become a genuine Lovecraft aficionado in my spare time without
actively realizing it, and the revelation stirred something in the uneasy
depths of my mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">That something continued to stretch and groan in an uneasy
slumber for a little over a month, at which point my friend Bryant began
writing a series of posts about Lovecraft on his blog “The Truth Inside the
Lie.” I cannot recommend those posts – or that blog in general, which is about
Stephen King, mostly – to you enough. For 2015 me, Bryant’s own Lovecraftian
expedition caused the thing in my mind to stretch obsidian wings too vast for
human comprehension, which carried it to the forefront of my thinking. Over the
next few months, while corresponding with Bryant about his readings, I acquired
no less than seventeen volumes that were related to H. P. Lovecraft. These
included more story collections written by Lovecraft, two collections of
stories which influenced Lovecraft, two collections of stories which Lovecraft
either ghost-wrote or edited, and several collections of stories inspired by
Lovecraft. I also bought several board games that use the Cthulhu mythos as
their setting, but those are harder to justify as being intended for “academic
pursuits.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Because, you see, “academic pursuits” is exactly how I
rationalized spending that money, and adding more books to my collection less
than two months before a major move. Oh, that’s right; I forgot to mention the
new move! Yes, shortly after DragonCon I began planning and packing for another
move, this time all the way from Maryland back to Alabama. And yes, I was once
again devoting funds, box space, and time to Lovecraft rather than more
practical applications of those resources. I truly did have the intention of
making the most of those purchases once I settled into my new place. In my
mind, I would be huddled over my desk late into the nights, not unlike Gandalf
as he delved into the archives of Minas Tirith. It has long been a desire of
mine to get back into academia and regain ground on my path to a PhD, and
Lovecraft’s works seemed – and still seem – a worthwhile foundation on which to
forge that path.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Unfortunately, that plan ran afoul of both life and my own
difficulties in following through on projects, the latter of which may yet
consume even this very piece you’re currently reading. While my new
accommodations upon returning to Bama were warm, safe, and clean, I was
unfortunately not afforded either the contemplative atmosphere or necessary
physical space in which to comfortably study. On top of that, finding new
employment proved much more difficult than expected, and I didn’t secure a new
job until the middle of June. While I’ll be the first to admit that some of
that time spent unemployed could have been put to better use, the fact is that
being unemployed when you desire otherwise is a stressful and unpleasant state
of existence. Finally, during that time I actually was engaged in a literary pursuit, and somewhat
extensively at that; it’s just that the pursuit was writing stories of my own
rather than analyzing ones written by someone else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The beginning of 2017 presented me with both a new abode
that is much more conducive to analytical pursuits, along with a new job that
affords me slightly more leeway in terms of free time and finances.
Unfortunately, May of this year also presented me with a diagnosis of Stage 3-C
melanoma, after several months of poor health which were quite outside the norm
for me. Many things which I had thought to accomplish this year were set aside,
while a few things I hadn’t thought to look for came into my life and
brightened it in astonishing ways. Lovecraft has risen once more to the
surface; last Christmas I received a genuine surprise in the form of the two
part biography “I Am Providence,” and for my birthday I got the set which
collects all of his letters with Robert E. Howard, plus his complete poetical works. The inimitable Alan Moore completed
his twelve-issue “Providence” series, and it’s all been collected in hardback
for easy access. Perhaps most exciting from an academic standpoint, seminal
Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi released a four-volume set which recollects all of
Lovecraft’s fiction with new annotations and textual references. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">On a deeper level, though, I can’t deny that my battle with
cancer has altered certain aspects about how I view the world, and what does
and doesn’t seem important. Lovecraft himself died at an early age from an
undiagnosed cancer, and who can say what else his life might have been if he
had access to modern medicine. While some might disagree, it’s my opinion that
there’s symmetry between hearing you have cancer and the revelations of cosmic
horror reached by most of Lovecraft’s protagonists. For a moment everything
just seems to stop, and then it all starts moving again, but nothing means the
same thing anymore. You’ve been presented with evidence of something against
which you can fight, but may never fully prevail. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Even worse, somehow, is the fact that this thing isn’t
actively antagonizing you. You’re not its enemy, you just happen to exist in
the same space, and most of the time that ends poorly for creatures on the
“human” end of the spectrum. People personify and demonize cancer all the time
– I’ve done it myself in recent months – but the fact is it doesn’t have an
agenda; it’s just cells that are replicating out-of-control. When you’re up
against that kind of reasonless destructive force – one which consumes the
lives of children and the elderly alike – there’s a primal part of you that
begins to wonder if we actually matter at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Now, just in case anyone is worried, I firmly believe that
the answer is “Yes, we all matter, including me!” That query lies at the heart
of many human endeavors, though; I feel completely confident in saying it
definitely lays at the heart of our fascination with horror. Perhaps that’s
what really drives Lovecraft’s protagonists, and drives us to read about them,
and drove him to write about them. We want to tear back that curtain, to peer
into the void beyond the stars, because something in us demands that we do so
if for no other reason than so we can say “I gazed into the abyss, and the
abyss gazed back, and the abyss ain’t shit.” Lovecraft himself wrote at least
one character – his only real recurring character at that – who seems to arrive
at that conclusion, in the form of Randolph Carter. The Cthulhu mythos is
unquestionably the biggest part of his legacy, but for my money “The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” and its companion pieces are far more
interesting. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The particulars of my opinion on that subject, along with
other insights – such as why my favorite Lovecraft story is “The Shadow Out of
Time,” which I’ve only just mentioned! – are beyond the scope of this
particular post. The intention of this post, which has admittedly taken me far
too long to bring to fruition, is simply to offer you all an insight into how
and why my interest in Lovecraft first arose. The secondary intention, and the
one which is perhaps too lofty in its ambitions, is for this post to serve as a
kicking-off point for a series of posts (gasp!) about the stories of H.P.
Lovecraft and their impact both on yours truly and pop culture in the broader
sense. </span></div>
Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-57970410283841746012017-05-16T01:47:00.001-04:002017-05-16T01:52:05.472-04:00Xann Black Plays... Prey Night 3<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tTSx9jTP4-U" width="480"></iframe><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "youtube noto" , "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">After fiddling with the glitch for a bit longer - and possibly getting closer to a solution! - I wrap up my time in the Hardware Labs and head back to the Talos-1 Lobby... </span>Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-58962643441164659172017-05-16T00:55:00.001-04:002017-05-16T01:51:57.886-04:00Xann Black Plays... Prey Night 2<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/H2pZSF856Zc" width="480"></iframe><br />
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I continue my trek through the Hardware Labs of Talos-1, and discover some excellent gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, I also discover a glitch which could have frustrating consequences for a later quest.<br />
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TL;DR - You can skip the last thirty minutes unless you really enjoy watching glitches drive a streamer mad.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-31926573855974429882017-05-08T23:33:00.002-04:002017-05-08T23:33:09.530-04:00To Play or Not To Play - A Discussion on How to Approach Game Criticism & AnalysisAs some of you may have noticed, I've been posting several game streams over the past few weeks; I'm not 100% certain where that will go yet, but the short version is I am trying to find a way to finally get rolling with turning my love of games into something more substantial. I was having a conversation with my friend Bryant (who has <a href="http://wherenobloghasgonebefore.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">many</a> <a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> <a href="http://you-only-blog-twice.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">exploits</a>) about streaming, and he asked me what my potentially increased time gaming meant for my writing efforts. Below is the conversation which followed, in which he tried to help me get a handle on how one might approach examining games as a unique storytelling medium.<br /><br />*Spoiler Alert: Mild spoilers for the opening of the new Prey reboot.*<br />
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<a name='more'></a><span style="color: blue;"><b>Bryant: I have to ask, by the way: what does this mean for your writing?</b></span><br />
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<b>Xann: Well, the hope is to marry the two here shortly. I can't get away from games; I'm fascinated by the potential they offer for storytelling.</b></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Bryant: Storytelling or experience? They are not necessarily the same thing. Not necessarily NOT the same thing, either, of course.</b></span></div>
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<b>Xann: For instance: Prey starts with you waking up, going through a morning routine, then going and doing some tests for your brother's company.</b></div>
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<b>Things go wrong, you get hit with knockout gas, and then wake up to the same alarm, in your bedroom again, only things are... off. In a scene like that in a book or a movie, while that might still surprise the reader / viewer, their reaction is going to be at least partially informed by how the character is reacting.</b></div>
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<b>In a game with a silent protagonist, that level of separation is removed; your feelings as the player are the only ones in play. Shortly thereafter in Prey, you smash what you think is the glass door to your balcony, only to find a science lab behind the glass. That moment literally gave me vertigo as I tried, in my agency as the player, to come to grips with what I was seeing.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: Fair enough. But is this due to the story working or the experience working? It doesn't matter, and neither is superior to the other. But for me, those are not the same thing. And this MIGHT be something that needs new terminology.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Very possible! In my opinion, agency completely changes the game. Some - like Dr. Burke when I wrote a paper about this - will argue that games are by nature less enduring because of this fact. In his words: "Achilles defeats Hector the same way anytime anyone reads the Iliad, and has for thousands of years. Even if everyone defeats Bowser in the end, they all do it their own way."</b></div>
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<b>Which actually comes back around to something we've discussed, which is that games have an accessibility barrier not found in any other form of media: Can you actually play them?<br /></b></div>
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<b>By all reports, the Dark Souls games have intricate stories told in a very unique, atypical style. I won't ever know first-hand, because despite owning all of them, I suck at them.</b></div>
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<b>Even in watching someone else play a game, though, for me there's this itch, this feeling of "I want to do that." Hell, there are things in other forms of media which I have, since a young age, wished someone would put into a game so I could play it out.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: I do not believe a story can include the audience as a co-author without turning into something else, some other medium. The critical mistake is to assume this makes the medium lesser than existing ones.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Very true! This also ties into what you've talked about concerning memory / your surroundings in <a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/2011/08/media-violence-stephen-king-and-you-or_5198.html" target="_blank">reading certain works</a>.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: It does, doesn't it?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: The biggest hang-up right now is that gaming hasn't been around long enough to have an established canon of "great" works. I don't mean "Top 100 Games" lists or whatever, obviously, but rather that unassailable library of works which have stood the test of time.</b></div>
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<b><br />The literature professor in me goes "There is no gaming equivalent of Hamlet, or Huck Finn, or even At The Mountains of Madness." And in that regard, I don't know that I have an answer.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: The answer is plain as day: someone has to construct that canon, and the ground rules for it.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Games add these wonderful new wrinkles though, such as playability, or graphics.</b></div>
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<b>I'm not disagreeing, by-the-by, simply stating one of the biggest obstacles in attempting such an undertaking.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: Regarding playability, what is the difference between a great '80s arcade game and some VR-enhanced game of today? I am willing to be there is zero fundamental difference. The difference lies in the physical approach to playing and the degree of difficulty. But fundamentally, would you not use the same metric to assess their playability?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Potentially not! Part of the problem is that older games are becoming more and more difficult to approach and appraise, precisely because gameplay has changed so much in the past thirty years. Controller design and control schemes adapt and are refined, becoming more intuitive and inviting. </b></div>
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<b>I've tried to go back and play a variety of games on different systems, only to find I simply can't get the hang of them anymore. So while you could build a canon on the basis of the impact those games had when they were released, that differs fundamentally from other mediums.</b></div>
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<b>Assuming you have the skills to read and comprehend such a work. anyone can go and appreciate Macbeth, but the same can't necessarily be said of the first WarCraft game. You can potentially mitigate the graphics debate by comparisons to writing style in literature, or special effects in film, but there is no corollary for the issue of "How do I play this?"</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: If that's true, then it indicates games exist on the same level as sport: as something that, if one is going to write about it, one must choose to write from the vantage point of an observer or of a participant. I have to ask: what, then, is the role of the critic? I can see the role of the journalist, and even the author, but maybe not the critic. Not as it is currently considered.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: The role of the critic would be to judge at least these two things: The story being told, and the efficacy with which the developers have made that story accessible.</b></div>
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<b>On top of that, you would also have to judge their presumed benchmark for accessibility, and the extent to which they hit their mark. Some developers seek to have their games be more difficult to complete than others.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: Wouldn't the playability be so affected by the story (and vice versa) that deficiency in one could seriously compromise the other?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Oh, to a greater degree than in almost any other medium!</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: So essentially the criticism is of the success at melding somewhat disparate disciplines?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: </b><b>That's a good way to look at it. A writer has to both have a good story and be able to tell it via language; same goes for a filmmaker. Game designers and developers need a story worth a damn, have to be able to tell it through an audio-visual medium similar to film (in most cases), and have the added task of generating gameplay which is both engaging and fits (or intentionally doesn't fit) the thematic elements of the story.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: So take that, apply it to the question of what role gaming plays to the artistic furthering/reflection of culture, and there's your approach, right?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: ...that's not a bad start, no.</b></div>
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<b>Also, before I forget, your mention of sports in interesting, since their is an entire branch of gaming (eSports) which has developed over time where the sole purpose is to compete and prove yourself the better of other contenders.</b></div>
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<b>Some friends actually got me into watching the League of Legends championships a few years back, and it felt 100% like watching a sporting event.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: Makes sense. See, a framework -- or set of frameworks -- for this stuff is already in place. Just needs linking and a perspective/focus. At one point, I wanted to do that with theme parks.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Really?! That sounds fascinating.</b></div>
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<b>The last thing I'll say about games in regard to their potential impermanence as an art form is that the industry may already be shooting itself in the foot.</b></div>
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<b>I've talked about this before, but there was a time when a few titles were enough to last gamers the entire year. The end result was that new games were almost always played to completion, while old favorites got played repeatedly.</b></div>
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<b>Some of this was accomplished by simply playing the old games and consoles, but a fair amount of it was done via unlicensed emulators. Then the industry started officially feeding this habit by giving us older titles on the newer systems, either remade / remastered or just updated to use new control schemes.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: So kind of like officially-sanctioned fan edits of movies? If such sanctioning existed?</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: In one sense, yes. There are the now-infamous fan-made Metroid and Pokemon titles which Nintendo shut down. </b></div>
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<b>Largely, though, emulators are simply a means for players to access those titles without owning the game and console, usually via a computer program. See, that's one of the approachability issues: Once a studio puts an old movie on a DVD or blu-ray, it's fairly easy to watch it. With old games, though, there was a time when you actually had to track down a copy - usually at exorbitant prices - and find a working console to play it on.</b></div>
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<b>The publishers and developers wanted in on this - they did create these titles, after all, and not as volunteers - so now we have a surplus of older titles being re-released into the market.</b></div>
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<b>On top of that - and this is where I was going in chastising the industry - there are now dozens of new, "must-play" titles released each year, in both existing franchises and new IPs.</b></div>
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<b>For a while my gaming friends and I wondered if perhaps we were just getting older - and therefore had both more disposable income and less free time, creating a catch-22 of owning more games than we could play - but it's become a pretty much accepted fact that the market is oversaturated.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: The intersection of Art and Commerce is always littered with wrecks. Always folks who don't heed the stoplight.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Precisely. Two of my favorite games from the last generation are the Metro games, based on the Russian post-apoc novels by Dmitry Glukhovsky.</b></div>
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<b>They're the kind of games which, in an earlier era, might have risen above their current cult-hit status and really made an impact on the industry.</b></div>
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<b>Of course, movies and literature are also oversaturated, so maybe that particular train of thought needs to be reconsidered.</b></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: If not reconsidered then taken into consideration. But then you are critiquing an industry, which is a different story.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Very true.</b></div>
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All of this has been excellent food for thought, and I thank you for getting those wheels turning.</div>
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I'm about to fall over, though, and fear my contributions will slowly slip into the realms of first-year undergraduates waxing on into the wee hours.</div>
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<b><span style="color: blue;">Bryant: I was playing Pac-Man on my phone for some of this, FYI.</span></b></div>
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<b>Xann: Dude, the ubiquity of gaming throughout our current culture - both in literal and referential forms - is an entirely different subject.</b></div>
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That was the end of the current conversation, although such discussions are actually fairly common between the two of us, as well as several other friends. My hope as time goes by is to avoid having such investigations remain exclusively in the above-mentioned realm of youthful navel-gazing. It's all fine and dandy to talk about games being an artform, or a potentially unrivaled method of conveying a story to an audience; it's another thing entirely to undertake the task of breaking those ideas down into their core components and examining them in a useful fashion. Bryant is thankfully quite skilled at pushing fellow media enthusiasts into the realm of sincere analysis, while advocating for not losing your own style and voice along the way. Fingers crossed this is the first step down the road to accomplishing that, and becoming a founding faculty professor of a newly-designed field of study down the line.</div>
Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-72416328340491749592017-05-06T00:31:00.001-04:002017-05-16T01:52:15.608-04:00Xann Black Plays... DOOM, Level 3: Foundry (Meltdown)<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1JG0PoWNdMc" width="459"></iframe><br />
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After foolishly playing the first two levels without streaming - which is basically like not even playing them at all! - I bring you my in-progress playthrough of the 2016 DOOM reboot.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-56004139274417931102017-05-06T00:14:00.003-04:002017-05-06T00:46:07.663-04:00Xann Black Plays... Resident Evil 5, Part 2<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CYU1ZwIV4Ms" width="459"></iframe><br />
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After narrowly escaping from angry villagers - and one giant man trying to axe us all the questions - JS Wolfwood and I try and remember just what the Hell this game is about.<br />
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-73412889762573767692017-05-06T00:14:00.001-04:002017-05-06T00:37:31.820-04:00Xann Black Plays... Resident Evil 5, Part 1<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZlEHjABwd7s" width="459"></iframe><br />
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JS Wolfwood and I roll back the clock eight years to 2009, and try our hand at guiding Chris and Sheva through the newest outbreak. Do all fruit piles conceal grenades? Watch to find out!Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-41676016987577469522017-05-06T00:13:00.001-04:002017-05-06T00:24:43.740-04:00Xann Black Plays... Prey Night 1, Part 2<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wd1EttRjq1w" width="480"></iframe><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: YouTube Noto, Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">After a brief technical hiccough, I return to continue exploring the Talos-1 station. Little did I know that lurking in the Twitch chat was something even worse than a mimic...</span></span><br /><br /><span style="color: #333333; font-family: YouTube Noto, Roboto, arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">It was a troll. Who said I was too old for games and called me a pedophile. Spoiler alert.</span></span></span>Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-30914059114871335382017-05-06T00:12:00.001-04:002017-05-06T00:22:24.769-04:00Xann Black Plays... Prey Night 1, Part 1<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/il-WuTHZKqw" width="480"></iframe><br />
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After being surprised by the demo, I decided to pick up the new Prey reboot from Arkane Studios, the team behind the Dishonored franchise. Watch me dive into the opening section! Along the way, I learn about life, chair love, and giving flowers to tentacle monsters.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-39662129598202369802017-04-29T23:49:00.001-04:002017-05-06T00:20:31.627-04:00Xann Black Plays... Prey Demo<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lIs8nug1vi0" width="480"></iframe><br />
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The Prey franchise started as a sleeper hit on the Xbox 360, followed by a sequel which languished in development Hell - despite having one of the most awesome E3 trailers of all time - until it was ultimately cancelled.<br /><br />The franchise has been "rebooted" - after only one prior entry, yes I know - by Bethesda with Arkane Studios at the helm. The trailers didn't impress me at all, but the demo...Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-26295957183165963042017-04-19T02:21:00.001-04:002017-04-19T02:21:15.574-04:00Heleus Cluster Blues<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqH7mDShDE11w0-ob3Mh9OYcQisguGLE2pYxC9sf9SYD1K6VYxh9pkpN9Y2oXRJjXq3sfICJbGQNQ2FK0eorSABBYEUbEH1yOxrIBkZj2oEvAo4J98N43cEdqduBSvapZojNO-YzOcCPHc/s1600/Andromeda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqH7mDShDE11w0-ob3Mh9OYcQisguGLE2pYxC9sf9SYD1K6VYxh9pkpN9Y2oXRJjXq3sfICJbGQNQ2FK0eorSABBYEUbEH1yOxrIBkZj2oEvAo4J98N43cEdqduBSvapZojNO-YzOcCPHc/s320/Andromeda.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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“Dear BioWare: Stop making open-world games” is the title of
an op-ed recently posted on Polygon. I’ll leave it up to you if you’d like to
go find it and read it; I agree with some points and disagree with others, but
it sparked a discussion with Scott and Erich that I’ll build from here.
Essentially, I stopped playing Mass Effect: Andromeda very early on – I’ve
landed on Eos, but haven’t even walked over to the first outpost after you land
– because I was losing interest rapidly, and what I’ve seen when watching my roommate
Oz play does not endear me towards continuing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The basic through line of the Polygon piece is that BioWare
excelled when they focused on story-driven games that – while allowing for some
freedom of mission order and exploration – were more linear in structure than ME:
Andromeda’s vast planets. Neither Knights of the Old Republic was truly
open-world, they simply allowed for freedom within set boundaries; Dragon Age:
Origins was structured linearly; Dragon Age 2 was notoriously “restrictive”
according to most players, though I like the way Kirkwall was set up; finally,
the first three ME games weren't open-world in the same way as games like Skyrim,
Dark Souls, or Witcher 3. Even DA: Inquisition, which provided the player with
more options for moving around the world map and featured huge environments,
isn't as open-ended as Andromeda.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Except that ME: Andromeda isn’t actually an open-world game,
but rather a game which features open-world segments which you can (or are
forced to) visit and explore both on foot and in the Nomad. These segments are
interrupted by times when you need to revisit your ship the Tempest to progress
a quest, or even travel to other regions of the Heleus cluster to converse with
different characters. Now, I realize none of that is beyond the pale for any
game of this genre, but the implementation is sorely lacking. Here are some
cleaned-up versions of my rambling thoughts from earlier, which you didn't
specifically ask for, but by Andraste you're getting them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Transitions are a major issue, especially given how
frequently they’re put to use while doing even the simplest of tasks. I spend
too much time moving from between the Tempest, the galaxy map, things on the
galaxy map, and the surface. This is even more egregious in a game with an
inordinate amount of loading screens. Witcher 3 loads when you boot the game,
or load a save. All other transitions - including fast travel – take you out of
the game for the briefest of intervals, and don’t even require a full loading
screen. The cumulative effect is that you rarely have time to lose your sense
of immersion; in Andromeda, I found myself keeping my phone handy just in case
I walked through a door and the game needed thirty seconds to powder its nose.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Right after landing on Eos I realized I had equipped the
wrong armor, so wanted to go back in and switch it out; despite the Tempest’s boarding
ramp being lowered, I got to watch the whole launch sequence as we took to the
stars once more. Why does the Tempest lift off just because I board it? Does it
really have to be in space for me to run around inside? In that same vein, as
cool as it is to watch your view sweep from one interstellar object to the next
when you’re moving around within a system, it quickly makes exploring new areas
tedious. An option to turn that animation off would be nice, except those
transitions are obviously miniature loading screens, so mapping the entire cluster
will involve one repetitive camera sweep after another. Also, in case you’re
thinking “Trey already said he hasn’t done much, though, so how can he have
these gripes,” let me share some thoughts from folks who have already played most
of / beaten the game. I think you’ll find some common ground.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Scott: “When you are on a planet and then go to the Tempest
to find out you have an email saying someone needs something ON THE PLANET YOU
WERE JUST ON!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Scott: “This is why I wondered why people complained about
Witcher load times. It was loading a no transition open world. I will wait on
it to do that. Thank you.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Next up: The. Fucking. Nomad. No three-hour session of an ME
game should be spent driving around in the latest semi-functional space SUV.
Yes, thankfully it is slightly more durable than the Mako, and the controls don’t
make me want to break my controller. I personally was a fan of the Firewalker
missions – which I might apparently be in the minority about – because they
were self-contained enough for it not to get repetitive. Traversing terrain in
an open-world game / environment is obviously going to be a major piece of the
puzzle, though, and so you’d think BioWare could have come up with something
more interesting than what essentially amounts to running errands with a
dysfunctional family where one of the children is a seven-foot bird woman with
a shady past. (That’s not a shot at Vetra, by the way. I already love Vetra.
More on that later.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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Erich: “A lot of the character bits are amazing. The story stuff can be great, but the places
n between can be so boring. I spent hours the other day running side quests,
and other stuff, without anything interesting happening except for a great
conversation between Vetra and Liam.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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That ties neatly into my next point: There's so little of
substance to do on the planets. All the myriad bits and quests and collectibles
and crafting work in other open-world games because they're interwoven with the
crux of the main game. I don't have to board a ship, sail to an island, and
then ride Roach for ten minutes to find the one person in that region who plays
Gwent. I can play Gwent with just about fucking anyone, because Gwent is a part
of an organic, living world. Even if I did have to travel that far, at least
there’d be something to look at. Hell, if we’re talking about running the roads
in games, I actively enjoy spending time in the Regalia in FF XV because it’s
executed almost perfectly. Rarely has a game done a better job of showing you a
majestic landmark and then given you a sense of wonder at actually making your
way there. Huge stretches of the planets in Andromeda are just barren wastelands,
separating myriad tasks such as finding a mining spot, or exploring an alien
ruin for a bit of loot or research data. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While I get that these worlds are supposed to be
inhospitable when you first arrive, that doesn’t cover for what is essentially
a lack of cohesive structure tying different bits of content together. From
what I've read / heard / seen while watching people play, these are things that
Horizon: Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild get right. Horizon has an
entire storyline woven into it that reveals itself organically through
exploration. Meanwhile, BotW "hides" rewards and shrines all over the
place; according to Tycho, co-creator over at Penny-Arcade, basically if it
looks like a puzzle / secret within the game then it almost certainly is. Open-world
games necessitate more effort in keeping the player engaged, be it in the form
of areas populated by flora and fauna, free-form quests that emerge as you
play, or even just stunning landscapes and vistas. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Erich: “Yeah, all the backstory for the world itself is told
in the most organic way possible. There have been a few times where I wished
Andromeda had taken mechanics from Horizon. I know that that would have been
difficult timing wise, though.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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It was at this point in the conversation that I realized
Andromeda shares numerous similarities with another game in a beloved franchise
which tried to go open-world.<o:p></o:p></div>
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!<o:p></o:p></div>
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Literally, exclamation point! It's MGS V! That is, it's got
some of the same inherent flaws, at least. Both are games that aren't willing /
able to commit to being either open-world or linear. Both force you out of the
free roam environment, sometimes for little more than a cutscene or to be given
an objective back in the area you just came from. The Tempest taking off just
because you get on it really, really bothers me; now I’ve realized it’s because
my mind correlates it to the constant helicopter trips between the main game
world and Mother Base. Both feature meta-systems for sending out teams,
gathering resources, and managing R&D projects which – if we’re all being
honest – aren’t really critical to the core gameplay. Erich did point out that
Andromeda’s story is executed in a more approachable manner, and I agree on
that point; that doesn’t alleviate any of my frustration at having that story buried
under a mountain of lackluster content, though.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I want to play Andromeda. Or maybe, I want to want to play
Andromeda. Your crew seems to be pretty great, and Oz says some of the story
moments and set pieces are really cool. I love the concept of the Initiative,
and unlocking your father's memories via SAM has struck a real chord with me.
Vetra and Jaal both interest me from the word go; a few of the others feel like
archetypes we’ve already met, but one area I’ll always give BioWare the benefit
of the doubt is characters. More than once, I’ve booted up single-player to
check on my loot from strike teams – I might be addicted to that particular
meta-system – and almost decided to just play for a while. Then I'll realize I
have to spend hours listening to the whine of the Nomad, or shooting yet another
Kett / Remnant / outlaw patrol, or swooshing between stuff on the map, or looking
at loading screens. In contrast, if I really wanted to dive back into even DA: Inquisition,
I could mitigate most of my impatience by just forging ahead for a while and
ignoring my need to tick all the little boxes. That goes even more so for
Fallout 4, or Witcher 3, or FF XV, the latter of which rivals even Witcher in
terms of making an open world feel populated and fun to traverse.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Does that mean BioWare should give up on open-world games? I
don’t think so, although they certainly need to tweak the formula. That’s
something they’ve been doing since Knights of the Old Republic, though, and so
maybe they can pull it off. To that point, all three of the original ME games
are vastly different; the exploration, mission structure, dialogue and combat
mechanics were tweaked with each successive entry. The changes were praised by some
players as helping streamline the tedious sections, while others lamented the
loss of features they felt were core to the spirit of the franchise. I won’t
delve into the divisiveness of ME 3 here – there’s plenty of info out there if
you’re interested – but suffice to say many fans did not share my enthusiasm and
sense of closure afforded by the ending. Not having reached that point in
Andromeda myself, I’ll let some other folks weigh in.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Scott: “The ending of Andromeda makes me want to play more
but I don't want another game like Andromeda.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Erich: “Yeah, I really like how straightforward the first
game is.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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So while maybe it's not that BioWare can't make an
open-world game, perhaps they shouldn't make a straightforward story-driven RPG
with one hand, make a mediocre sandbox space exploration game with the other,
then try and shove them into the same box. Truly successful open-world gameplay
requires a marriage of the macro and microscopic; there’s a way to do it that
allows for and enriches narrative-driven gameplay, but clearly that’s not what
happened in this case. You don’t have to take my word, or even the word of my
friends, and I’m not trying to dissuade you from giving Andromeda a try. If you’re
like us and came in expecting “Mass Effect,” though, I can’t help but advise
you to temper or at least adjust your expectations. I said earlier that I want
to play Andromeda, but I have no qualms about admitting most of that impetus is
because of my love of the franchise as a whole. I’m a huge proponent of making
up your own mind about media, rather than just relying on reviews, but in this
case general critical reception – and, one would suspect, the sales numbers
over the rest of the year – seems to have hit the nail on the head. Now if you’ll
excuse me, I have to go send my strike teams out one more time before bed; at
the very least I don’t have to watch the Tempest take off to make that happen.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-55431668275577343922017-03-07T20:13:00.000-05:002017-03-07T20:13:40.515-05:00Better Late Than Never - Game of the Year 2016<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLDwpA5xxsKnBDxvNKWBakvvyu8AnDpDWlnzjJPnAmnHpNiNQTUp8gnyJMiDP7foeVCIAKcbWCK6KXWTLjL53Xet3k-m9Yz6AYIjvqkids5rw6ApxUMb2AFeBjgQIWgJe8BRsZiZxBuIMN/s1600/GOTY+2016.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLDwpA5xxsKnBDxvNKWBakvvyu8AnDpDWlnzjJPnAmnHpNiNQTUp8gnyJMiDP7foeVCIAKcbWCK6KXWTLjL53Xet3k-m9Yz6AYIjvqkids5rw6ApxUMb2AFeBjgQIWgJe8BRsZiZxBuIMN/s320/GOTY+2016.png" width="213" /></a></div>
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Welcome back, fellow nerds! Sorry for my prolonged absence
from the site; life has been a whirlwind this past year. Which also
unfortunately means, like in 2015, that I didn’t play all that many games to
completion. Oddly enough, I paradoxically may have picked up more games this
year than I did in the past few; rather than buying things at launch, I waited
until the big summer and holiday sales and picked up multiple titles over a few
weeks. For instance I picked up Bloodborne, Until Dawn, and The Order: 1886
during sales even though I don’t own a PS4 yet, just so I could have them (my
roommate has a PS4, so I’ve at least tried them out). 2016 did continue the
trend of having a core group of folks I play games with on a regular basis each
week* and that meant slightly less time for single-player stuff, but I still
dipped my toes into most of this year’s big releases.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To an extent, though, I also continue to realize that it may
simply no longer be feasible to play every major new release each year, and by
that I just mean try them out, let alone finish each one. Part of this
realization stems from getting older, and though I love video games every bit
as much as I always have, but there are other events and concerns which occupy
both my time and money more frequently. Over the past year-and-a-half or so
I’ve been getting into board and deck-building games; I’ve been reading more
and focusing on the writing I want to do as a profession; I started getting
into model-building again. That means being more discerning in which video
games I invest in, because otherwise I’m going to end up with an empty wallet
and a bunch of titles I don’t ever get the chance to fully appreciate. With
that in mind, here are my picks for our 2016 Game of the Year accolades.<o:p></o:p></div>
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*Shout-out to J S Wolfwood, GarlicWalrus, Eeeeerocket, and
Valturen!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><u>Game of the Year<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLv2RDdOL88hu8Yzud9vknnD_up-QjqgCBZonp15opA5-bBfhHPDPBK_uygR8dPy4hIjVaWXtjh9TRHWlnlH2Qt1rFPMnhyphenhyphen72X4J3PS8hOwY25HUPTYPcDmTuqzqcEYEUwP8Mjikk7xuLo/s1600/GOTY+2016+QB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLv2RDdOL88hu8Yzud9vknnD_up-QjqgCBZonp15opA5-bBfhHPDPBK_uygR8dPy4hIjVaWXtjh9TRHWlnlH2Qt1rFPMnhyphenhyphen72X4J3PS8hOwY25HUPTYPcDmTuqzqcEYEUwP8Mjikk7xuLo/s320/GOTY+2016+QB.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<u>Quantum Break<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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“What’s that?” I can almost hear a good portion of our
readership asking themselves that question as they gaze at the banner image for
this article. Others may vaguely recall a game from the makers of Alan Wake
which features highly-detailed digitized versions of Iceman, Meriadoc Brandybuck, and Petyr
Baelish involving time travel. Quantum Break also featured live-action,
thirty-minute-long “episodes” of content between game story chapters which
changed based on decisions the player made. It received relatively high
reviews, was largely panned by most people representing themselves as gamers on
the web, and then limped off into the mists of early-in-the-year titles.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What most people missed out in as a result was a stylish,
well-crafted action game in which you use time in incredibly cool ways during
both combat and puzzles, in a story that genuinely managed to surprise me at
more than one turn. The decision-making system, while not necessarily as
intricate was you might find in Mass Effect or The Witcher – nor nearly as
nuanced as something like Metro 2033 – made things interesting by having it be
the primary antagonist making the choices. The much-maligned live-action
sequences are one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen a developer have the
guts to invest in, and the game would be significantly less interesting without
them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If you like Alan Wake or Max Payne in the slightest, you should
give this game a shot; that goes ditto if you enjoy movies such as Looper and
12 Monkeys, or the stories of Philip K. Dick. I still want to go back and play
back through making the opposite choices from what I did before, especially
since they can significantly change the game from very early on. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><u>Runners-Up<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghe3gq_nbYV3i1mYeQhnQXcOSf1EtbAdBH3ChfnLbMnX_VhpnktO7r2EHyqTZo0GOXETykD6nVWmG2Tp2R25mzEVQoUZ3D8iAqbPutdkVHtNSd7hN_t-ARfNygFdK09u73HEzWD2jzZKW7/s1600/GOTY+2016+FF+XV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghe3gq_nbYV3i1mYeQhnQXcOSf1EtbAdBH3ChfnLbMnX_VhpnktO7r2EHyqTZo0GOXETykD6nVWmG2Tp2R25mzEVQoUZ3D8iAqbPutdkVHtNSd7hN_t-ARfNygFdK09u73HEzWD2jzZKW7/s320/GOTY+2016+FF+XV.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<u>Single-Player: Final Fantasy XV<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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Let’s just get this out of the way: FFXV deserves most of
the flak it gets for being a J-Pop boy-band road-trip simulator with action
bits. That being said, I’ve rarely enjoyed pouring 30+ hours into a game as
much as this one, and I genuinely look forward to diving back in and wrapping
it up. Noctis, Gladiolus, Ignis, and Prompto have already sky-rocketed to near
the top of my list of favorite FF characters, and this adventure is worth
taking just to watch their friendship play out and grow. FFXV recaptures what
the series does best – and what some recent entries have forgotten – in that it
focuses on giving you relatable characters first, followed at close second by
putting them in a truly spectacular setting.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The open world is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen,
with only Witcher 3 and Skyrim really challenging it in terms of both scale and
scope. Driving from one end of the map to the other while listening to the
soundtracks from previous games is incredibly fun, especially given some of the
jaw-dropping vistas you encounter. The world is also densely populated with new
characters to meet and countless side-quests, hunts, dungeons, and secrets to
discover; it manages to walk that fine line between immersive and overwhelming
even better than the aforementioned Skyrim in my opinion. Everything is there
for you to either dive into or just skim the surface of as you like, and
anytime you want to get back to the story the game gives you the tools to do so
with minimal delay.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If you’re a fan of FF or JRPGs, chances are you’ve already
picked this up; if not I can recommend it wholeheartedly, especially if you
also like Kingdom Hearts. Thanks to the active battle system, I would also say
that if you’ve avoided games like this in the past due to combat, I’d give this
one a shot. Otherwise you’ll never know the joy of buying a new rare ingredient
and having Ignis announce he has a new recipe for you to try.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidrIEe6MTZHY-N3IQ_4ULBKI9htZlGjsXaGJLUunB3zkYAeOpxBeN_jJ0hzJBHDm5KgrHqpE-aGDpjQy-XTMbgUF5r8PupbhWQgqKEY32F7iVbyPQaDh_H6lSM7P0VXvwYky5pmif-00Mn/s1600/GOTY+2016+Division.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidrIEe6MTZHY-N3IQ_4ULBKI9htZlGjsXaGJLUunB3zkYAeOpxBeN_jJ0hzJBHDm5KgrHqpE-aGDpjQy-XTMbgUF5r8PupbhWQgqKEY32F7iVbyPQaDh_H6lSM7P0VXvwYky5pmif-00Mn/s320/GOTY+2016+Division.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<u>Multiplayer: The Division<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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Rarely have I had less excitement for a game leading up to
playing it and realizing I’m wrong. Wolfenstein: The New Order comes to mind,
but generally I can gauge my enjoyment based on what I’m seeing of trailers and
gameplay clips. Thankfully, we decided to play the open beta of The Division
way back in February of last year, and pretty much immediately decided we would
get it if the first few weeks showed the servers to be in good order. Our
patience paid off, allowing us to miss some of the early headaches - such as
players blocking one another from leaving the starting area – and by the time
we dove in it was all fancy guns, realistic blizzards, and cool lighting
effects.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Division is not a perfect game, and the post-launch
support and content has been a mixed bag, but if you have the right people to
play it with everything else stops mattering. Remember how the PvP “Dark Zone”
was a major focus of the marketing? We’ve rarely ventured there in 100+ hours
of playtime, and yet I don’t feel our experience has suffered any for it. There
have been numerous bugs after patches which caused our characters to behave in
strange ways, such as the “Safe House Dance” in which everyone was constantly
doing the weapon-switch animation. Our reaction? We found it hilarious. We
played an extra hour one night because we realized our characters didn’t have
to wear jackets, which completely changed how we approached picking what
apparel gear to use.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I honestly don’t know if we’ll ever go back to the post-apoc
streets of New York – another game further down the list has taken over game
nights – and it remains to be seen if Ghost Recon: Wildlands will catch our
interest the way this did. I do know that calling out “Lit!” whenever we
ignited a cleaner’s gas tank, watching our turrets chew enemies to little
pieces, and the joyful exclamations of someone getting an awesome new piece of
gear will always stick with me as some of my favorite gaming moments.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><u>Honorable Mentions<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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<u>Battlefield 1<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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WAR. PIGEONS.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u>Inside<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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Look, every year, there’s an indie darling or two which
people simply will not shut up about, to the point where you almost don’t even
want to play it. One of those games in 2016 was undeniably Inside, except I
love Playdead’s previous game Limbo so much I’ve completed it on three
different platforms. Inside both is and isn’t the same kind of game as its
predecessor, and while Limbo still holds a slightly bigger portion of my heart,
this most recent offering kept me captivated from start-to-finish as I
completed it in one sitting. The fabled “secret ending” was definitely a
mind-frag, but I personally found the last few chapters to be the most
interesting sequence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><u>In the Queue<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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<u>Hitman<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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Bought the “Complete Season 1” on sale! I dig it so far;
each episode is one of the open-ended, by-any-means-necessary style missions
that were so heavily advertised for Absolution, but ended up only comprising
about a third of that final game. Some of the challenges and unique kill
methods are insane, and I imagine going for perfect on each stage would
definitely be a fun endeavor. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u>Gears of War 4<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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Also got it on sale, via a random Pizza Hut promo! I’ve made
it to the start of the third act, which is when the game we saw in all the
trailers looks like it’s actually going to get rolling. Act I was absolutely
terrible, in my opinion, and showcased the worst of Gears – mediocre cover-based
shooting against repetitive enemies – while Act II heralded the return of unique
mechanics and larger-than-life set-pieces. Also, JD and company are so much
less interesting than Marcus and crew you can almost taste it, but I’m hoping
the latter half of the game will at least give me some better character moments.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u>King’s Quest<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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I love sales! I’ve only gotten a portion of the way into the
first episode, but what I’ve played so far is brimming with more style and
obvious care than most AAA titles. While still an adventure game at heart, King’s
Quest manages to eschew some of the more tedious aspects of the genre, and just
in what I’ve played so far there have been several cool puzzles and action
sequences. This game just further proves that the adventure genre and episodic
content are a match made in heaven, and one which companies other than the vaunted
Telltale should be exploring.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><u>Best Reason to Buy
a New 3DS: SNES Virtual Console<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhggnPssF-RgT2ESfpMNCd_BiPJVEy7TUvpGvEExnM7o7NkEX9DoQai3loi9HTaBvJx-LeTHYrCpbCAA36w-nVd42cmV4FX0uBzuDBA_5P8reFO-eAYx71b5gqE6Cr1kYyMnkhPzOYWAK1G/s1600/GOTY+2016+Super+Metroid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhggnPssF-RgT2ESfpMNCd_BiPJVEy7TUvpGvEExnM7o7NkEX9DoQai3loi9HTaBvJx-LeTHYrCpbCAA36w-nVd42cmV4FX0uBzuDBA_5P8reFO-eAYx71b5gqE6Cr1kYyMnkhPzOYWAK1G/s320/GOTY+2016+Super+Metroid.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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I bought a *NEW* 3DS (which is a stupid naming convention,
but blame Nintendo, not me) specifically after it was announced at E3 that they
would be rolling out the SNES Virtual Console only on the upgraded version of
the handheld. It was definitely the right decision, as I’ve played more of Super
Metroid, Link to the Past, Mega Man X, and a few others than I have of any
modern-era 3DS game I own.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><u>Best Game Titled
“Saints Row IV: Re-Elected’ not Released in 2016<o:p></o:p></u></b></div>
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<b><u><br /></u></b></div>
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<u>Saints Row IV: Re-Elected<o:p></o:p></u></div>
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<u><br /></u></div>
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…I mean, you saw this coming, right?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-36716933618760697862012-10-07T12:44:00.000-04:002012-10-07T12:44:03.954-04:00The Council of Geeks: "The Dark Knight Rises" My original posting of this link has disappeared, so...<br />
<br />
I participated in a roundtable discussion of Nolan's Batman films. My friend Bryant (Honk Mahfah) moderated, and then put it together all fancy-like on his blog:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-council-of-geeks-dark-knight-rises.html">http://thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-council-of-geeks-dark-knight-rises.html</a>Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-64952463561404816072012-07-24T22:06:00.002-04:002012-07-24T22:06:57.906-04:00Over Encumbered : Side-Quest ShuffleWhen I launched the Over Encumbered project – which, in hindsight, was a tad ambitious – I did so by stylizing the games as quests accepted from a “job board.” <br />
<a name='more'></a>Those pieces were fun to write that way, and my hope was that the concept would resonate even with readers who had only a passing familiarity with RPGs. As I’ve adventured my way through multiple worlds this summer, the number of generically-rendered rectangles with pieces of paper affixed to them encountered is staggering. And as I hammer the “accept quest” button as quickly as possible – only later taking the time to actually asses the various tasks, chores, and errands now assigned to me – I’ve come to realize something about not just job boards, but the main-quest / side-quest dynamic in general.<br />
<br />
Everyone in the game who is not exclusively urging your hero toward their destiny is a selfish, entitled twat.<br />
<br />
With the exception of your character, whose sheer egotism, greed, hypocrisy, and general lack of concern for the well-being of others are every bit epic in scope as the tales being woven around them.<br />
<br />
Confused? I would be too. After all, my characters in RPGs tend to be shining paragons of light, luminous examples of the good inherent within us all. Like my character in KoA: Reckoning, for instance: Brought back from death itself, my Fateless One endeavors to never slip past certain moral boundaries in his quest to save the lands from the Tuatha. Maintaining a strict code of never stealing or killing for sport, he works tirelessly toward this goal… Or, he will, as soon as he finishes clearing an area of beasts for a guard who was too chicken-shit for the post, finds those ancient tomes of lewd verse that were stolen from the local monastery, and goes to tell that one soldier’s fiancé that he knows about her cheating, the marriage is off, and the guy wants his mother’s ring back. (I made up none of those. All three are in my active quest log at this very moment.)<br />
<br />
Now, before we go too much further, I want to establish that I know full well what the arguments are in favor of job boards and side quests and whatnot: they extend playtime, provide experience/gold/loot, and help create more living, immersive worlds. But, for the sake of amusement, let’s take that immersion one step deeper and talk about the implications of these activities:<br />
<br />
<b>Every Potential Adventurer in the Land Hates You</b><br />
<br />
Meet Garthe. After serving in Obligatory Mass Conflict, he came home to find that he didn’t really have any skills outside of the sword-slinging variety; he wandered aimlessly for a while, until finally he found himself in Quiet Village Built Way Too Damn Close to a Cave Full of F*ing Monsters. Here, he found a community full o people who couldn’t perform even basic daily tasks for fear of all the F*ing Monsters, but somehow had access to stockpiles of gold and equipment they would freely give to anyone able to hold a sword the right way long enough to kill a few creatures. Hell, there was an entire house, complete with blueprints for possible expansions, set aside for anyone who could kill the One Big F*ing Monster at the center of the cave.<br />
<br />
Garthe was home. His basic combat skills let him amass a small fortune, acquire a home, take the mayor’s daughter as his wife, and gather enough equipment to form a small army of other soldiers to assist in his tasks. Turns out, this village was on the edge of An Entire Kingdom Unwittingly Built at Ground Zero of an F*ing Monster Breeding Ground. He and his troops travelled the land, killing beasts, recovering lost crap, and reaping the ample rewards from happy customers who seemed exceptionally willing to part with all sorts of fabulous items so long as they never had to venture anywhere they might encounter something more dangerous than a small bug.<br />
<br />
…except in the instance where your character - who should have been off saving The Entire F*ing World - decided to swing by Quiet Village, accept all the tasks, hoard the gold, sell some of the loot for a tiny bit more gold, renovate and then completely desert the house except for that one chest full of all the loot you didn’t sell but will never equip, and marry then abandon the mayor’s daughter, so that she and Garthe could only meet secretly behind the stables where he now slept – because let’s be honest, who would hire Garthe when the Savior of Us All in on the job – until the guilt and shame drove her to suicide and him to a slow death at the bottom of a bottle. Good job there, Your Chosen Oneness.<br />
<br />
<b>Every Potential Adventurer Employer in the Land Also Hates You</b><br />
<br />
Obligatory Mass Conflict has left An Entire Kingdom in the hands of every man, woman, and child not skilled enough in killing to be a soldier, and all the F*ing Monsters make it really, really hard to get stuff done. Who wants to pick herbs or mine ore or travel to Market Hub Town with goods to promote trade and prevent the eventual collapse of the economy when packs of teeth on legs lurk around every turn? Sure, there are the local guardsmen, but they’re all either inept or corrupt; worse most of the land’s sellswords, who have a tendency to become mortally wounded during tasks and then just lie there waiting to tell the next guy where they went wrong. Better to just wander the streets, drink at the pub, or stand outside in one spot staring blankly ahead.<br />
<br />
But wait! The Almighty Scion of Destiny is, for reasons no one ever asks about, stopping in every city, town, and hut around seeking random tasks that are apparently more pressing than freeing everyone from That One Douche. Instead, places Our Last Hope initially visited report great success in getting thankless work accomplished, or at least agreed to. No chore is too menial, no reward too meager; in truth, most people aren’t even talking to the Great One directly, but just writing to-do lists and sticking them up inside the taverns to be collected. Even so, everyone in town will get a personal visit - probably several times over - just to make sure that no opportunity to recover lost invoices or murder local bandits goes unnoticed. <br />
<br />
…although the completion rate of these tasks has dropped off severely since those first few towns reported in. Apparently, Lady Viara’s son still hasn’t been rescued from those bandits; the herbalist in Idyllic Town by the Woods is waiting on the ingredients to mix that plague-curing potion; the guard captain has yet to hear a final report on his recruit who went off to find out why the livestock was disappearing; and the recruit himself has spent the better part of two days sitting just outside an insidious-looking cave, bleeding out, waiting to tell someone that he didn’t see what got him but it sounded terrible and monstrous, before he finally slips quietly into death’s sweet embrace.<br />
<br />
Of course, no one wants to try and re-post the job or finish it themselves, having already promised the position and its payment to an Incarnation of Magic Itself; who, by the way, apparently just added the entirety of Northern Snowy Land to the to-do list.<br />
<br />
<b>Everybody Who Knows Your True Potential Hates Everyone Else and Also Hates You</b><br />
<br />
“Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m looking for the Savior of Eternity? You see, I helped rescue them from a few Generic Prologue Dangers, revealed their true nature, equipped them with some Basic Things Needed to Stay Alive, and told them to head for the Primary Objective Marker.<br />
<br />
That was two months ago.”<br />
<br />
“Oh yes! They came by here around then, looking a little lost, and asked about the road to the Marker thing. Well, I told my entire life story, and then mentioned I needed some Level 3 Critters cleared out of my basement. I had a few gold pieces and a Slightly Better than Basic Sword I was willing to part with, and so your Eternal what’s-it pitched in to help. Of course, everyone around here has need of help, and a bit put aside for payment, so that got taken care of, as well. Then the butcher mentioned something about his son being drunk in the next town over…”<br />
<br />
“Oh for the love of Whatever Pantheon We Worship! Why is it every time I manage to scrounge up a Chosen One, you people have to burden them with every chore you’re too lazy, stupid, or weak to get done yourselves?!”<br />
<br />
“Why, I never…! You watch your tone, mister, or I’ll curse you to Wherever Our Evil Are Condemned. It’s not my fault I inexplicably had better gear to offer your “chosen one” than you did, or that they were so inexperienced that killing some wildlife somehow made them stronger, and you can’t blame me for wanting to get some work done in exchange. “<br />
<br />
“But you don’t understand! That One Douche is about to change the course of the Obligatory Mass Conflict by accessing Capitol City So Big It’s Hard to Navigate with help from the king’s Obviously Treacherous Adviser and placing the Magic MacGuffin into the Ancient Device of Unknown—“<br />
<br />
“That’s all well and good, but what do I care about such rot when there’s things in my basement keeping me from the fragile boxes I tossed 23 gold into and stacked down there? I know your type; your kind has been spouting off for ages about such nonsense as you just blathered out. If we’re in such great danger, why does it never come home to roost, eh? Why not let your young charges do a little good here and there?”<br />
<br />
“Argh, I should have never come here. I can’t expect you to conceive of what’s at stake. But I was so sure I’d impressed the importance of the Primary Objective on the Savior; I was certain they understood that going to my Old Acquaintances house and inevitably discovering them dead was the key to starting something much bigger. At this rate, it will be next year before the Act I Boss gets taken out, and everyone involved in the Act II Plot Twist is likely to be dead by then; of course, by that point, we’ll likely be thralls to the Dark Force Behind it All already. Chosen Ones have no sense of responsibility anymore…”<br />
<br />
“If you’re done talking to yourself, I’ve got a few random Level 4 items to lock inside a Master Grade Chest in my pantry. For what it’s worth, I think the people of this land need a helping hand more than a High-and-Mighty World Shaper flitting about altering the course of all history.<br />
<br />
Though if you do meet them again, could you ask when they plan on ridding the Level 5 Gobblegooks from my garden? It’s been weeks and they’re still trampling my herbs.”Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-88734788421657124362012-06-27T22:45:00.003-04:002012-06-27T22:45:46.756-04:00War Stories: Falco vs. SamusThere are few things in history that are as reliable as enmity between brothers.<br />
<a name='more'></a>Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Kay and Arthur, Hamlet Sr. and Claudius, etc. Sometimes the older brother possesses something the younger brother wants; at other times, the younger brother lives his life while the older brother must mind the farm; there are even the scant few tales where each brother has his own pros and cons, and the two must learn to work together.<br />
<br />
Tyberious and I have been all of these things, but for the purpose of this tale, I will be portraying the dick older brother of lore, while Ty shall be the underdog who deals me my comeuppance.<br />
<br />
Since the beginning of our competitive gaming lives, I have been less than subtle about my goals toward Ty: to crush him, at every opportunity, by any means other than cheating. My methods never varied, and the goal rarely changed. When our parents would insist that I stop, I would do so, but only to the level that I gauged it necessary to prevent punishment. His cries of unfair treatment would fall on deaf ears; all he had to do was get better and there would be no issue. The intervening years were not kind to him.<br />
<br />
Street Fighter II. Pokemon Red. Mortal Kombat 3. Jet Moto 2. Need for Speed II. GoldenEye. Mario Kart 64. Pokemon Colosseum. Tekken Tag Tournament. Armored Core: Another Age. <br />
<br />
Then, one summer, he got a GameCube when school let out. The N64 had been his, since the PS One and PS2 were firmly mine. I wasn't overly concerned, since there weren't any GC games I was dying to play, and my PS2 was in the prime of its incredible life. I didn't really pay much attention to the Cube until we got Super Smash Bros. Melee, which I still think is the best of the series. Ty and I had played the original for hours in Toys 'R' Us until we finally got our own copy, and Samus Aran was unstoppable in my hands. Melee, with its faster, floater style, only intensified Samus's aerial ferocity and ability to recover from crazy-long falls. Tyberious must have tried every character on the roster, but our traditional one-on-one duels always favored the morphball mistress.<br />
<br />
That was also the summer I got my driver's license and the one leading up to my senior year, and so I began spending less time at home. At some point, Ty picked up the now cult classic Custom Robo, an anime-style mix of Pokemon and Armored Core. I watched him play it a few times, and it looked cool, but I was spending more time trying to hold girls' hands and game controllers made that difficult. So he kept playing. and I kept nervously squeezing the arms of couches, theater seat rests, and my own knees.<br />
<br />
I don't remember anything about that day, except coming home and finding Ty... waiting.<br />
<br />
"Hey," he said. "Let's play Smash Bros."<br />
<br />
Having spent an entire summer without more than grazing some fingertips, I was in a mood to boost my masculinity by defeating a 13-year-old in a game about Nintendo characters hitting each other. Oh to have known then what I now now.<br />
<br />
I picked Samus. Ty picked Falco Lombardi from Star Fox, who I always thought of as a cheap palette-swap of Fox himself.<br />
<br />
It was a massacre.<br />
<br />
Round after round, match after match, Tyberious and Falco showed me the meaning of pain. No matter what map, or gametype, or how many computer allies I had, Falco took home the crown. The blaster he carried kept me at bay; it made me flinch during aerials so that I couldn't recover from falls; his reflector shield sent my own beam cannon shots back at me; finally, his own melee attacks were every bit as fine-tuned as mine, and getting in close resulted in immediate KOs.<br />
<br />
Apparently, he had spent hours playing, with a single life, against nothing but computer-controlled Samuses ( Sami? Samusi?). Starting with a single mid-range opponent, he eventually worked his way up to three-on-one matches against enemies set to the highest difficulty. He had trained specifically to do this to me.<br />
<br />
Seeming to sense that I was coming to the point of quitting, Tyberious suggested we try something else. Why not, for instance, try out Custom Robo's versus mode. I had played mech games, I knew how they worked, and my mind was dull from the Melee fiasco.<br />
<br />
Admiral Ackbar would have been so ashamed.<br />
<br />
Ty had beaten the game on every difficulty level, and defeated all of the unique CPU mechs in the arena mode. As such, he had every piece unlocked, had built several units of almost deific power, and understand every nuance of the combat system. The final straw came when he offered to scale back the weaponry he was using and let me use one of his designs; not only was I feeling low enough to accept, but it was of no avail.<br />
<br />
I had been taken to school. Twice, in as many hours.<br />
<br />
It would be a lie to say that we've put our competitive ways aside and learned to just appreciated playing, a lie which Wolfwood, Baminatrix, and numerous other would call me on while they laughed in my face. Yet the ground is more level these days, with each of us finding roles in games at which we can excel, and with their still being distinct genre lines we try not to cross. Ty challenging me to a racing showdown would be as foolish as me boasting against his FPS skills, for instance.<br />
<br />
I will say this much, though: when it comes to certain games, Ty attacks them with both ferocity and precision. He learns how they work and utilizes every possible advantage, and demands that those of us playing with him excel just as much, to an almost maniacal level.<br />
<br />
He learned to get better.<br />
<br />
I'm the proudest any older brother could be.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-86885217793362070552012-06-24T19:54:00.005-04:002012-06-24T19:54:52.904-04:00War Stories: The Historian<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In a cramped room at a remote military outpost, two soldiers
stand amidst the dead and dying, comrades and enemies alike among the fallen.
This relatively routine mission has gone to Hell, and even if they can hold
this location, chances are good it will be the last act of defiance in a battle
already lost. One of them is thankfully armed with a shotgun, but the other has
nothing more than an SMG and both are rapidly running out of ammo. Before the
end, they resort to bludgeoning their foes until the incoming tide of attackers
grows too much, and their blood-tinged vision slowly fades to black.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><a name='more'></a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Their defeat is certain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But, on that night in late 2006, the Halo 2 scoreboard told
a different story, one in which my roommate and I had helped our team come back
from a massive deficit to win a game of king of the hill on Lockout by
literally one second. The final hill location had been inside the side-room at
the lift empties into, and he and I had held it to the last. The sounds of
unexpected victory brought curious residents to our door, and that match
launched a nighttime adventure fraught with live chickens, power outages, a
search for zombies, and an enormous sleep-over in our dorm’s lobby.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">History is resplendent with pastimes that bring people
together, both to share tales of old and in hope of creating new ones. As a
guy, I’ve admittedly got more experience with traditionally male events:
camping, hunting, fishing, amateur sports, bachelor parties, working on cars,
going out for beers, etc. All of these gatherings are filled with the phrase
“remember the time that…” and the very best ones become “the time that…”
themselves. Now, I admittedly haven’t frequently participated in many items on
that list, yet I have no shortage of such tales.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The reason is simple: video games. While I’ve never been
part of a bowling league or a car club, I have for most of my adult life
participated in bi-weekly, weekly, or even nightly play sessions, either in
person at LAN parties or through online play. These gatherings have helped
shaped who I am, provided stability during personal struggles, created numerous
friendships, helped others flourish, and paved the way for more adventures than
I can probably recall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">But recall them I hope to, and recount them as well, just as
the standard-bearers, chroniclers, scorekeepers, announcers, and historians of
lore have done. You can expect me to take great care to check each and every
fact and facet within my memories, so that not a single exaggerated event or
overblown detail will be left out. If you’re looking for insight into the soul
or analysis of the social condition, feel free; I’m going to be telling tall
tales about playing video games, and random stuff happened along the way. So
prepare yourselves for such thrills as:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Falco vs. Samus!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Guilty Grind X2!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Halo Havoc Nights!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Lobby LAN!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Demon Arts Hurricane!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Ranbow Six Beer Run!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Get In a Car Crash and Die!</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Large Drink Hadouken!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The Baddest Company!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">And so very, very many more!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">With this series of articles, it is my genuine hope to both bring you enjoyment and, flying in the face of my earlier snide comment, share the importance of video games to someone my age in a context far beyond pushing buttons on a controller. It seems like every other week this or that news outlet is talking with an "expert" about how horribly games are destroying young men. And while I certainly won't shy away from the darker side of my favorite hobby - some of the stories wouldn't work without it - for the large part they are positive tales. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I'm writing them as much for myself as anyone else, becuase I'm not joking when I say they're becoming difficult to recollect. I urge anyoen who feels a spark while reading them to do the same. These are our bottom-of-the-ninth-homer, our twenty-pound bass that we threw back out of respect, our Camero that we red-lined and almost flipped; they are also our captain who didn't make it, our choke on the 18th hole, our first love we've never seen again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">These are our war stories.</span></div>Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-69598765851500302802012-06-24T00:16:00.000-04:002012-06-24T01:04:02.363-04:00Out of the Blue: Comics and Social CommentaryA while back, Marvel announced that in Astonishing X-men #50, the character Northstar would propose to his boyfriend Kyle, and they would wed in issue #51. <br />
<a name='more'></a>I'm not an avid X-men reader, but a quick look around the web revealed that plot points on Northstar's sexual orientation and his relationship with Kyle extend back a good many years. Even so, I can't help but feeling that Marvel chose to make this a story focus as a way to drum up publicity in the current political climate. It's not that I don't applaud them for taking a stance on the issue, and can even concede that times like these are arguably when we most need companies to take a stand on important social issues. But the cynic in me sees this as a ploy to drum up readership and public exposure. <br />
<br />
I feel similarly about DC's decision to re-introduce Alan Scott (the original Green Lantern) into the "New 52" universe as a homosexual in Earth 2 #2. This one bothers me more, mainly because there has never been any history of Alan being gay, and I tend to get defensive of original creators' intent. Wolfwood turned that argument back against me by reminding me how much I like the new lesbian Kate Kane iteration of Batwoman. Since her creators' intent was to use her as a love interest for Bruce to dispel rumors that the Caped Crusader might be homosexual, I was initially at a loss. My eventual rebuttal, however, was that the re-invention of a character so blatantly hollow was acceptable as long as it led to good storytelling. Alan Scott was a full-fledged character already, not just some other cape's "beard", and it remains to be seen how well DC will incorporate this orientation change into the great whole.<br />
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And therein, I think, lies the crux of the matter: Is it good storytelling? In Marvel's case, the biggest head-scratcher for several of us was that they are in the middle of their "Avengers VS X-Men" event. It seemed odd to me that during such an event, the focus of one of their main "X" titles would suddenly shift to this marriage. I liken it to anytime a television show decides to do an "after-school special" episode or a "current events" episode in the middle of another major arc. As for Alan Scott, I'm worried we might have a "Dumbledore is gay" situation on our hands; i.e. a developmental non-sequitur that contributes nothing to either the character's motivations or the overall tale. I could be completely wrong, and would gladly have it be so, but the cynicism is strong with this one.<br />
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All of this helps build up to what I really want to share, which is the following image:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_E6iijafFIJYMKS-9PEMcW4Ks-G405HhLCx7KRpUUHmDOiiX3nKN4hE9XOhyphenhyphenfCESejog3wvRyG8M7pWrixcNnAt4RhIPsi6a8TKfQm4yE1-1om2MdzzNIZ3zLMU7jKykxBCkcBKXP45k/s1600/punisherparents.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_E6iijafFIJYMKS-9PEMcW4Ks-G405HhLCx7KRpUUHmDOiiX3nKN4hE9XOhyphenhyphenfCESejog3wvRyG8M7pWrixcNnAt4RhIPsi6a8TKfQm4yE1-1om2MdzzNIZ3zLMU7jKykxBCkcBKXP45k/s320/punisherparents.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I don't know if I've ever talked about it on the site, but I'm a HUGE Punisher fan, especially when people manage to pull him out of the main continuum and do things like Garth Ennis and Jason Aaron have with the MAX line. My problem with the image above isn't that I think it's ok to expose kids to one and not the other, but rather that I don't think kids should be exposed to either outside of the right context, and without a parent there to talk it through if need be.<br />
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The fact of the matter is, the MAX line (and other potentially violent comics) are rated just like movies and games; they have warnings on them, and good comic shop owners won't sell to underage readers. In addition, the Punisher is a historically violent character, more so than most in the Marvel universe, and it is an integral part of who Frank Castle is and how he interacts with those around him. So any worthwhile comic parent would be aware if their child was coming home with such merchandise. <br />
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While I'm certainly not suggesting that an image of two men holding hands needs a disclaimer on the front, I will argue fiercely that parents have a right to how and when their children are exposed to different sexual orientations so that they can help their kids understand the nature of such things. So I would completely understand how a parent might come across the image on the left inside of an X-Men comic - which have historically used the "mutant" condition dealt with social issues like prejudice and intolerance, but not specifically homosexuality - and be concerned about how their child might have been affected.<br />
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At this point I'd like to come back around to my original statements about making sure that a character's homosexuality is a genuine trait and not just a gimmick, because these companies do have a responsibility to their readership and the public. Baminatrix chided me for being too cynical about the motivations behind these developments, suggesting that I should be proud of a medium I love being used to take a stand against intolerance. I agree wholeheartedly about being proud, but that's precisely why I can't let Marvel or DC skate by if this is just a publicity stunt. Readers who have a history of prejudice might genuinely be affected by well-penned storytelling involving non-hetero characters; parents might find an event like Northstar's wedding to be a welcome way to discuss sexual orientation with their children.<br />
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My father and I have had in-depth conversations about the morality of vigilante justice, including the extreme methods used by Frank Castle. Superhuman registration, anti-mutant sentiment, the ethics of letting the Joker live, Superman's non-involvement in human wars; all of these things require us to ask questions that go far beyond the pages on which they are printed. For years comics have helped guide young people in their understanding of "right" from "wrong," but that can only be effective if the stories being told are told well, with genuine thought put into characters' motivations, beliefs, actions, and the consequences that follow. If anything, I'm scrutinizing these recent developments so closely precisely because of the potential they represent, for good or ill, in helping our youth understand the issues facing our society. That's a great power comics have that I will not suffer to be used lightly, because with great power...Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4931022126565487681.post-75746815520008278142012-06-22T23:30:00.002-04:002012-06-24T01:04:15.809-04:00Over Encumbered : Waypoint 6/22/12In the past week, I've taken some small strides forward in my attempt to save these eight different worlds.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
My friend Senator Awesome was over, and he's a huge Dark Souls fan. After some prodding, he convinced me to pick it up again, and we ended up playing it for around four hours. Having him around was a big advantage; he knows the game really well, and helped me get out of Blight Town (the hellish area where the very ground is poison). Turns out that the guide, while definitely a wealth of knowledge, doesn't necessarily give the best advice on how to proceed through the game. Serves me right for sticking too stringently to a guide in a game like this.<br />
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Truth be told, I think I've been approaching the entire game incorrectly. Ever since it launched, I've been a supporter of its difficulty level and "Prepare to Die" slogan. Somewhere along the way, though, I allowed those aspects to twist the game in my mind. The consequences of dying - losing souls, getting reset to a bonfire, becoming hollow again - created a stress level that rendered the game unplayable; I would start, die once, and quit in frustration. The primary idea in Dark Souls isn't that the odds are impossible, but rather that each death is supposed to teach you a better way to proceed.<br />
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Armed with this new come-what-may attitude, I began wandering the world-map seeking out adventure and fame. Yes, that occasionally meant getting into situations that I couldn't get out of, or coming up against things that I had no business fighting. It also meant taking on two bosses and bringing them down without dying, opening numerous new areas, and even taking on a few PvP invaders (that didn't work out as well; they were power-levelled dicks).<br />
<br />
When the next opportunity arose, I admittedly didn't keep playing Dark Souls, opting instead for Dragon's Dogma. The two share similarities in combat, overworld setup, and inventory management, but Dogma is a more structured game in terms of questing, and the pawn system means you're always playing with supporting NPCs. I played for several hours over the course of two days, finishing some side quests and progressing the main questline to the point where I've arrived at the main hub city.<br />
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I decided to forgo the main quest for a while and just journey through the countryside. This has afforded me the chance to realize that this game, while not as unforgiving as Dark Souls - you can save anywhere in Dogma and die with impunity - this game is definitely on the "difficult" side as compared to most open-world RPGs. Even the most banal of enemy types tend to travel in groups, and can quickly overwhelm your party. But the big challenges are the boss-class enemies just wandering the map, waiting for unsuspecting / arrogant adventurers to cross their path; these enemies take time and skill to bring down, and are nearly impervious until you figure out their weaknesses.<br />
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I was heading to investigate a thieves' hideout and search for a cursed book, but said thieves kicked the ever-loving griffin scat out of us several times over. I'll decide next time I pick it up if I'm going to try it again or just go level with some other quests. I might traverse some more Dark Souls if I can continue to see it as more of a game and less a torture mechanism. I've also got the Amalur itch; it's got a hell of an overworld, and the combat is arguably the best out of the eight.Xann Blackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13906307366981644121noreply@blogger.com0