Check out this post by a *different* Steve Hayes in response to the guest post by Stephen Hayes that I’ve just recently put up! And revel in the dance of responsive, relational internet-writing.
I’ve just been reading a blog post by a namesake of mine, which set me thinking about how the order in which one reads things could affect the way in which one interprets them.
This other Stephen Hayes discovered me on Twitter a few years ago when someone made a comment to him on something I wrote that didn’t seem to fit, and we’ve followed each other there, and I’ve linked to his blog about apples. But this time he was writing as a guest blogger on The Oddest Inkling, and I felt more able to comment on it than on apples. H. P. Lovecraft, C. S. Lewis, and Me. | The Oddest Inkling:
I became addicted instantly [to H.P. Lovecraft]. Like my beloved Tolkien, and to a lesser extent Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Trilogy) Lovecraft had created an imaginary world which was strange and different. Unlike Tolkien…
View original post 1,151 more words
The Oddest Inkling 
The omnipotence works in mysterious ways.
Last night I went to see a film “The Endless”. It is basically an HP Lovecraft story set in modern times. (Well worth seeing)
In it one of the characters says something along the lines of
“Lewis suggested it, Lovecraft perverted it, we’re making it happen.”
Suddenly another CSL/ HPL connection.
LikeLike
Thanks for the consideration of “the order in which we read the books”. I enjoyed your saying (of some Lovecraftian stories by Smith), “That was where I first encountered the word ‘eldritch’, which has ever since then been for me the mark of bad horror writing.” Lovecraft was where I first encountered ‘eldritch’, and ‘gibbous’ – and probably a good lot of other previously unknown words, but they had a savor for teenaged me (which makes me think of James Brabazon saying of Dorothy Sayers that her youthful “ecstasy of great words and great phrases never deserted her”). But, not having reread any Lovecraft and friends for a goodly number of years, I did begin to fear it might be a disappointing experience. (Surprisingly, John Wain told me something like that was his experience of rereading Williams’s late Arthurian poetry after a long gap: ‘dead on the page’!) Was this a specifically youthful taste – savory because read at that time in that order? But, returning to him after something like 30 years or more, that was not the case. Lewis variously discusses liking writers and works – assorted science fiction, and notably The Voyage to Arcturus, but also George MacDonald! – despite features of their styles. But with Lovecraft and co. it seems a more complicated mix of both because, and in spite, of, for me.
LikeLike