2 things i keep noticing in these cthulu mythos writers outside lovecraft himself: hastur as another of the "ancient ones", and a division between the evil "ancient ones" and "the elder gods", who are i guess the good guys? I don't remember either hastur or the elder gods ever being mentioned in lovecraft's stories and the whole "good gods vs evil gods" seems like something he wouldn't really agree with on paper. he never even really drew connections between all the weird extra-dimensional beings like yog-sothoth and cthulu and all the rest of them aside from the fact that nyarlothep was the messenger of evil, and that they sometimes came into conflict like the spawn of cthulu fighting with the star faced alien race confusingly called "the old ones" in At the Mountains of Madness, and yog sothoth made a cameo at the end of that story too. and hastur? who invented him? can't have been lovecraft. i dunno, i like august derleth's stuff for the most part but a lot of these guys working on the cthulu mythos apart from lovecraft himself seem to kinda... not get it?
It's like they wanted to mix the epic adventures from Robert E. Howard's work and the cosmic horror of Lovecraft but they lack that understanding both writters have on eachothers writtings.
August Derleth is notorious for not getting Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism and interpreted the mythos through his Catholic faith, looking for a way out of the inevitable doom for humanity Lovecraft seemingly reveled in. Hastur was the benign god of shepherds in a poem by Ambrose Bierce, it was then mentioned by Chambers in "The King in Yellow", and picked up by Lovecraft, although from the brief mentioned it is hard to know if Lovecraft referred to Hastur as a creature, place or object!
Shub Niggurath: the goat with way too many babies.
Absolutely fantastic story! Enjoyed this immensely
great stuff
Oooooooooh another one!
Thank you (:
This was a good one!
2 things i keep noticing in these cthulu mythos writers outside lovecraft himself: hastur as another of the "ancient ones", and a division between the evil "ancient ones" and "the elder gods", who are i guess the good guys? I don't remember either hastur or the elder gods ever being mentioned in lovecraft's stories and the whole "good gods vs evil gods" seems like something he wouldn't really agree with on paper. he never even really drew connections between all the weird extra-dimensional beings like yog-sothoth and cthulu and all the rest of them aside from the fact that nyarlothep was the messenger of evil, and that they sometimes came into conflict like the spawn of cthulu fighting with the star faced alien race confusingly called "the old ones" in At the Mountains of Madness, and yog sothoth made a cameo at the end of that story too. and hastur? who invented him? can't have been lovecraft. i dunno, i like august derleth's stuff for the most part but a lot of these guys working on the cthulu mythos apart from lovecraft himself seem to kinda... not get it?
It's like they wanted to mix the epic adventures from Robert E. Howard's work and the cosmic horror of Lovecraft but they lack that understanding both writters have on eachothers writtings.
August Derleth is notorious for not getting Lovecraft's cosmic pessimism and interpreted the mythos through his Catholic faith, looking for a way out of the inevitable doom for humanity Lovecraft seemingly reveled in. Hastur was the benign god of shepherds in a poem by Ambrose Bierce, it was then mentioned by Chambers in "The King in Yellow", and picked up by Lovecraft, although from the brief mentioned it is hard to know if Lovecraft referred to Hastur as a creature, place or object!