Monsters and Flowers
Mar. 4th, 2023 06:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI know it’s not cool to like HP Lovecraft at the moment, but I really like HP Lovecraft. I agree with ST Joshi that he was closely connected to the world he was living in, yet that he was extremely progressive for his time, which you can see in his fiction, in his personal politics, and in the way he treated actual human beings. I’m not stanning him, but I don’t think he was a bad person or a bad writer.
I actually admire Lovecraft’s prose style a great deal, but it’s true that he had a few stories he really liked to tell, and that he told them over and over. Thinking about this made me realize that I have three types of stories I like to write.
My ur-story is “Horned God and Flower Queen.” This is about the cycle of destruction and growth necessary to the continuation of life on this planet, and also about competing impulses within the human psyche. It’s a good story.
I also enjoy writing mature gay romances between people who used to be horrible but have mellowed out as they’ve gotten older. A variation on this is when a horrible old person has to take care of a horrible young person, and they both mellow out as they become friends. The theme of both variations is “regrowth after destruction.”
And finally, I enjoy writing soft horror stories. What I consider to be “hard” horror stories contain explicit and aggressively upsetting violence and punishment. I don’t really understand or appreciate that sort of psychological impulse, and I don’t think I’m capable of writing that sort of story. What I write instead are stories about how horrible things inexplicably happen to normal and decent people, and how that’s not the end of the world. The way I think of this type of story is “unfortunately you got lost in the forest, but congratulations, you live here now.”
I actually admire Lovecraft’s prose style a great deal, but it’s true that he had a few stories he really liked to tell, and that he told them over and over. Thinking about this made me realize that I have three types of stories I like to write.
My ur-story is “Horned God and Flower Queen.” This is about the cycle of destruction and growth necessary to the continuation of life on this planet, and also about competing impulses within the human psyche. It’s a good story.
I also enjoy writing mature gay romances between people who used to be horrible but have mellowed out as they’ve gotten older. A variation on this is when a horrible old person has to take care of a horrible young person, and they both mellow out as they become friends. The theme of both variations is “regrowth after destruction.”
And finally, I enjoy writing soft horror stories. What I consider to be “hard” horror stories contain explicit and aggressively upsetting violence and punishment. I don’t really understand or appreciate that sort of psychological impulse, and I don’t think I’m capable of writing that sort of story. What I write instead are stories about how horrible things inexplicably happen to normal and decent people, and how that’s not the end of the world. The way I think of this type of story is “unfortunately you got lost in the forest, but congratulations, you live here now.”
