"an otherworldly being so terrible that it can never be seen directly, but is manifested by various attributes"
There's a pretty great New York Review of Books article on H.P. Lovecraft now that he's gotten into the Library of America, as he deserves to. My favourite bit is this:
He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his otherworldly manifestations—Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua—are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"
Sante deftly nails one of the great things about Lovecraft, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record again, it's one of the things Grant Morrison almost certainly took from him; think of the declamatory style with which his superheroes tend to announce perils (in JLA, although to be fair this is a tendancy that some of the characters in The Invisibles share, albeit mostly the "evil" ones...), the similar way in which Morrison is more interested in evoking than telling.
And since the difference between evoking and telling feeds into a lot of issues I've written about here before (Borges, childhood terrors, Sapphire & Steel, disturbing art, etc, etc), is it any wonder I'm borderline obsessed with Morrison and (to a lesser extent, possibly since he is a lesser craftsman) Lovecraft?
He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his otherworldly manifestations—Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua—are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"
Sante deftly nails one of the great things about Lovecraft, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record again, it's one of the things Grant Morrison almost certainly took from him; think of the declamatory style with which his superheroes tend to announce perils (in JLA, although to be fair this is a tendancy that some of the characters in The Invisibles share, albeit mostly the "evil" ones...), the similar way in which Morrison is more interested in evoking than telling.
And since the difference between evoking and telling feeds into a lot of issues I've written about here before (Borges, childhood terrors, Sapphire & Steel, disturbing art, etc, etc), is it any wonder I'm borderline obsessed with Morrison and (to a lesser extent, possibly since he is a lesser craftsman) Lovecraft?
