Are you willing to take a look into the depths of the universe?

Would you like to read something that has the power to challenge your mind, and maybe also your sanity?

Are you curious and brave (or stupid) enough to tear the curtains that hide what should not be seen and to continue on a dark road even if you’ve been told, for your own good, to step away and never look back?

Then you might want to pick up a book from H. P. Lovecraft, choose one of the many short stories, and start reading it.

If life hasn’t made you too dry to perceive the beings lurking behind his pages, you’ll probably be reading something that will change you forever.

We live on the border with things that would drive us mad (in the best of cases…) if we could only see them, or sense their presence, and Lovecraft does all he can to give us a glimpse of what those things are.

Ancient gods and spirits, far more powerful than we could ever imagine have lived our earth eons before the human race was created, creatures that lived through the creation of the universe and maybe were already there before that.

They might be floating in the air we breathe; an ancient wall in a collapsing castle might hide a stairway to something worse than hell itself, the bottom of the ocean might be full of the ruins of cities and temples that we should hope never to discover.

Lovecraft opens a door on madness, on bliss and death, the only ways to escape after having opened the wrong door or read the wrong pages.

Man is not more than a small insect in his vision, and his writing makes us feel exactly like that.
Small, weak and powerless, we live because we are too small to be noticed, but may God have mercy of the insect that happens to bother the spirits.

It’s an interesting and scary point of view, especially in a world that has grown to think man capable of anything, a world who can’t understand why sometimes nature is stronger, why sometimes a simple wave or storm can put our certainties in discussion.

We are a world that has lost its sense of proportions, and Lovecraft helps put things back in place.

Here’s some information on his life, from http://www.biography.com:

“Writer, born in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He was self-educated and lived in Providence all his life, working as a freelance writer, journalist, and ghostwriter. During 1914–18 he was an astronomy columnist for the Providence Evening News and was the publisher of The Conservative magazine (1915–19, 1923). He was also president of the United Amateur Press Association (1917–18, 1923). Using many pen names, he contributed his supernatural/horror and science fiction/fantasy stories to various pulp magazines, but his reputation as a writer rests mainly on the 60 or so stories he published in Weird Tales, starting in 1923. Although not much appreciated in his day, he came to attract a small, sometimes fanatical following both in the USA and abroad, particularly France.”

But for the ones of you that would like to know more about him (and there’s a lot more…), here are some other links:

http://www.hplovecraft.com/

http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lovecraf.htm

Don’t make the mistake of considering Lovcraft a “horror” author. He isn’t.

Horror is just one of the characteristics of the world Lovecraft creates .

“But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.”
H. P. Lovecraft