The Dream Cycle doesn't get nearly enough love
Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2009 12:45 am
Once upon a time, I didn't think much of "The White Ship." But since I re-read it a couple of weeks, I haven't been able to get it out of my head, and now it's actually one of my favorite stories. "Celephaïs" is great too, and now I'm restarting on the big one, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (mind-blowing clusterfuck that it is).
Part of it, I think, is because the horror stuff is all anyone ever talks about, and it gets a little old. That vast system of name-drops, in-jokes, and merchandise that is the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of the official face of Lovecraft in pop culture, and it's nice to read something that shows he wasn't just a one-trick pony. A man can only take so many tentacles and HORRIBLE REVELATIONS, y'know?
But the dream stories stand on their own merit, and there aren't nearly enough of them. They're just a little hard to process, that's all.
For one thing, they present their own intoxicating brand of weirdness. True to their nature as dream stories, they operate on their own weird Wonderland logic. They're distinct in their forms. They have the feeling of myth and fairy-tale without quite being either. They're Lovecraftian dream-tales, and there's no mistaking them, not even for Dunsany.
But their real strength - one of Lovecraft's main strengths in general - is their imagery. We all know HPL tended toward "purple prose," and in his horror and "real-world" stories, that can be a liability. In the Dreamlands, though, he REALLY lets himself go, and the result is exactly what he's going for: sensory overload. He goes from purple to downright ultraviolet, piling adjective on adjective to paint these stupendous, Walt-Disney-on-mushrooms scenes that, in many cases, he probably actually saw (we all know the man had a vivid dream-life). In the dream stories, he can indulge his love and talent for overpowering imagery, and it works in a way that it never could in a realistic story. For all their pretty flowers and moonbeam bridges, they seem to gush from some deeper, more sincere part of the writer. The alien horror stories reflect his cynical, pitch-black attitude toward the world. The dream stories, on the other hand, reflect his deepest yearnings for wonder and beauty, the flip-side to the Cthulhu coin.
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," though it's got quite a different tone and can be unreadable at times, is about a thousand times stranger than "At the Mountains of Madness," and if there's one thing Lovecraft fans can all agree on, it's that the man gave good Weird. That's 99% of his appeal; there are plenty of other, more conventional writers who could craft scarier or more human tales, but none of them could match HPL for sheer brain-melting lunacy. And the Dream Cycle is some of the craziest and most compelling material he ever put down on paper.
Part of it, I think, is because the horror stuff is all anyone ever talks about, and it gets a little old. That vast system of name-drops, in-jokes, and merchandise that is the Cthulhu Mythos is kind of the official face of Lovecraft in pop culture, and it's nice to read something that shows he wasn't just a one-trick pony. A man can only take so many tentacles and HORRIBLE REVELATIONS, y'know?
But the dream stories stand on their own merit, and there aren't nearly enough of them. They're just a little hard to process, that's all.
For one thing, they present their own intoxicating brand of weirdness. True to their nature as dream stories, they operate on their own weird Wonderland logic. They're distinct in their forms. They have the feeling of myth and fairy-tale without quite being either. They're Lovecraftian dream-tales, and there's no mistaking them, not even for Dunsany.
But their real strength - one of Lovecraft's main strengths in general - is their imagery. We all know HPL tended toward "purple prose," and in his horror and "real-world" stories, that can be a liability. In the Dreamlands, though, he REALLY lets himself go, and the result is exactly what he's going for: sensory overload. He goes from purple to downright ultraviolet, piling adjective on adjective to paint these stupendous, Walt-Disney-on-mushrooms scenes that, in many cases, he probably actually saw (we all know the man had a vivid dream-life). In the dream stories, he can indulge his love and talent for overpowering imagery, and it works in a way that it never could in a realistic story. For all their pretty flowers and moonbeam bridges, they seem to gush from some deeper, more sincere part of the writer. The alien horror stories reflect his cynical, pitch-black attitude toward the world. The dream stories, on the other hand, reflect his deepest yearnings for wonder and beauty, the flip-side to the Cthulhu coin.
"The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," though it's got quite a different tone and can be unreadable at times, is about a thousand times stranger than "At the Mountains of Madness," and if there's one thing Lovecraft fans can all agree on, it's that the man gave good Weird. That's 99% of his appeal; there are plenty of other, more conventional writers who could craft scarier or more human tales, but none of them could match HPL for sheer brain-melting lunacy. And the Dream Cycle is some of the craziest and most compelling material he ever put down on paper.