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90-442: American author H. P. Lovecraft refined this style of storytelling into his own mythos that involved a set of weird , pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements. His work was influenced by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe , Algernon Blackwood , Ambrose Bierce , Arthur Machen , Robert W. Chambers , and Lord Dunsany . However, Lovecraft was keen to distinguish his work from existing gothic and supernatural fiction , elevating

180-441: A background element. Lovecraft himself humorously referred to his Mythos as "Yog Sothothery" (Dirk W. Mosig coincidentally suggested the term Yog-Sothoth Cycle of Myth be substituted for Cthulhu Mythos ). At times, Lovecraft even had to remind his readers that his Mythos creations were entirely fictional. The view that there was no rigid structure is expounded upon by S. T. Joshi , who said Lovecraft's imaginary cosmogony

270-414: A continuation of his Hugo Award-winning ERB-dom which began in 1960. It ran for 75 issues and featured articles about the content and selected fiction from the pulps. It became Pulpdom Online in 2013 and continues quarterly publication. After 2000, several small independent publishers released magazines which published short fiction, either short stories or novel-length presentations, in the tradition of

360-426: A few films using lovecraftian horror themes. 2007's The Mist , Frank Darabont 's movie adaptation of Stephen King's 1985 novella by the same name , featuring otherworldly Lovecraftian monsters emerging from a thick blanket of mist to terrify a small New England town, and 2005's The Call of Cthulhu , made by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society , a black and white adaptation using silent film techniques to mimic

450-424: A few quick dollars could bolster their income with sales to pulps. Additionally, some of the earlier pulps solicited stories from amateurs who were quite happy to see their words in print and could thus be paid token amounts. There were also career pulp writers, capable of turning out huge amounts of prose on a steady basis, often with the aid of dictation to stenographers , machines or typists . Before he became

540-405: A life of their own beyond the pages of Lovecraft's works. According to author John Engle, "The very real world of esoteric magical and occult practices has adopted Lovecraft and his works into its canon, which have informed the ritual practices, or even formed the bedrock, of certain cabals and magical circles". The Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft is considered to have been highly influential for

630-483: A magazine called Pulp Adventures reprinting old classics. It came out regularly until 2001, and then started up again in 2014. In 1994, Quentin Tarantino directed the film Pulp Fiction . The working title of the film was Black Mask , in homage to the pulp magazine of that name , and it embodied the seedy, violent, often crime-related spirit found in pulp magazines. In 1997 C. Cazadessus Jr. launched Pulpdom ,

720-663: A magnificent cathedral, and your senses, vectors of unutterable derangement, will map out an integral delirium that will be lost in the unnameable architecture of time. Michel Houellebecq , H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life The core themes and atmosphere of cosmic horror were laid out by Lovecraft himself in " Supernatural Horror in Literature ", his essay on gothic , weird , and horror fiction . A number of characteristics have been identified as being associated with Lovecraftian horror: Much of Lovecraft's influence

810-435: A novelist, Upton Sinclair was turning out at least 8,000 words per day seven days a week for the pulps, keeping two stenographers fully employed. Pulps would often have their authors use multiple pen names so that they could use multiple stories by the same person in one issue, or use a given author's stories in three or more successive issues, while still appearing to have varied content. One advantage pulps provided to authors

900-528: A number of films that have been classified as Lovecraftian horror. This includes the themes of human fragility, impotence in the face of the unknowable, and lack of answers in Picnic at Hanging Rock , and The Dunwich Horror , with its source in Lovecraft's work and emphasis on "forces beyond the protagonist's control." The 1979 film Alien has been described as Lovecraftian due to its theme of "cosmic indifference",

990-454: A package that provided affordable entertainment to young working-class people. In six years, Argosy went from a few thousand copies per month to over half a million. Street & Smith , a dime novel and boys' weekly publisher, was next on the market. Seeing Argosy ' s success, they launched The Popular Magazine in 1903, which they billed as the "biggest magazine in the world" by virtue of its being two pages (the interior sides of

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1080-498: A rescuing hero . Cover art played a major part in the marketing of pulp magazines. The early pulp magazines could boast covers by some distinguished American artists; The Popular Magazine had covers by N. C. Wyeth , and Edgar Franklin Wittmack contributed cover art to Argosy and Short Stories . Later, many artists specialized in creating covers mainly for the pulps; a number of the most successful cover artists became as popular as

1170-662: A similar format to American pulp magazines, in that it was printed on rough pulp paper and heavily illustrated. During the Second World War , paper shortages had a serious impact on pulp production, starting a steady rise in costs and the decline of the pulps. Following the model of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1941, some magazines began to switch to digest size : smaller, sometimes thicker magazines. In 1949, Street & Smith closed most of their pulp magazines in order to move upmarket and produce slicks . Competition from comic-books and paperback novels further eroded

1260-651: A sort of fire elemental when a fan, Francis Towner Laney, complained that he had neglected to include the element in his schema. Laney, the editor of The Acolyte , had categorized the Mythos in an essay that first appeared in the Winter 1942 issue of the magazine. Impressed by the glossary, Derleth asked Laney to rewrite it for publication in the Arkham House collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943). Laney's essay ("The Cthulhu Mythos")

1350-565: A story set two years later. 1992's The Resurrected , directed by Dan O'Bannon , is an adaptation of Lovecraft's novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward . It contains numerous elements faithful to Lovecraft's story, though the studio made major cuts to the film. The self-referential Necronomicon (1993), featured Lovecraft himself as a character, played by Jeffrey Combs . The three stories in Necronomicon are based on two H. P. Lovecraft short stories and one Lovecraft novella: "The Drowned"

1440-517: A video games beyond a visual aesthetic are recognized. Lovecraft was an influence on Dungeons & Dragons starting in the early 1970s, and initial printings of AD&D Deities & Demigods included characters from Lovecraft's novels. Dungeons & Dragons influenced later role-playing games, including Call of Cthulhu (1980) which influenced later board games such as the adventure board game Arkham Horror (1987) and Arkham Horror: The Card Game (2016), and recruited new fans for

1530-500: A workable framework emerges that outlines the entire "pantheon"—from the unreachable "Outer Ones" (e.g., Azathoth , who occupies the centre of the universe) and "Great Old Ones" (e.g., Cthulhu, imprisoned on Earth in the sunken city of R'lyeh ) to the lesser castes (the lowly slave shoggoths and the Mi-Go ). David E. Schultz said Lovecraft never meant to create a canonical Mythos but rather intended his imaginary pantheon to serve merely as

1620-618: A world where the Mythos, while existing as fiction written by Lovecraft, is also very real. As well as appearing with Fort in two comics stories, Lovecraft has appeared as a character in a number of Lovecraftian comics. He appears in Mac Carter and Tony Salmons 's limited series The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft from Image and in the Arcana children's graphic novel Howard and the Frozen Kingdom from Bruce Brown. A webcomic , Lovecraft

1710-470: Is " The Call of Cthulhu ", which was published in 1928. Lovecraft broke with other pulp writers of the time by having his main characters' minds deteriorate when afforded a glimpse of what exists outside their perceived reality. He emphasized the point by stating in the opening sentence of the story that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Writer Dirk W. Mosig noted that Lovecraft

1800-423: Is Missing , debuted in 2008 and takes place in 1926, before the publication of " The Call of Cthulhu ", and weaves in elements of Lovecraft's earlier stories. Boom! Studios have also run a number of series based on Cthulhu and other characters from the Mythos, including Cthulhu Tales and Fall of Cthulhu . The creator of Hellboy , Mike Mignola , has described the books as being influenced primarily by

1890-521: Is a collection of "pulp fiction" stories written by such current well-known authors as Stephen King , Nick Hornby , Aimee Bender and Dave Eggers . Explaining his vision for the project, Chabon wrote in the introduction, "I think that we have forgotten how much fun reading a short story can be, and I hope that if nothing else, this treasury goes some small distance toward reminding us of that lost but fundamental truth." The Scottish publisher DC Thomson publishes "My Weekly Compact Novel" every week. It

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1980-524: Is based on " The Rats in the Walls ", "The Cold" is based on " Cool Air ", and "Whispers" is based on The Whisperer in Darkness . 1994's The Lurking Fear is an adaptation of Lovecraft's story " The Lurking Fear ". It has some elements faithful to Lovecraft's story, while being hijacked by a crime caper subplot. 1995's Castle Freak is loosely inspired by Lovecraft's story " The Outsider ". This period saw

2070-603: Is inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's " The Dreams in the Witch House ". It has been confirmed by Toonami that the series Housing Complex C was meant to invoke Lovecraftian themes. Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities features two episodes adapted from Lovecraft's " Pickman's Model " and "Dreams in the Witch House." Elements of Lovecraftian horror have appeared in numerous video games and role-playing games . These themes have been recognized as becoming more common, although difficulties in portraying Lovecraftian horror in

2160-491: Is mostly based on two Lovecraft stories, " The Thing on the Doorstep " and The Shadow Over Innsmouth . 2007's Cthulhu , directed by Dan Gildark, is loosely based on the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). The film is notable among works adapted from Lovecraft's work for having a gay protagonist. Since 2010, a number of popular films have used elements of cosmic horror, notably Alex Garland 's Annihilation (based on

2250-741: Is secondary, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many authors who developed their own notable works. Many of these writers also worked with Lovecraft on jointly written stories. His more famous friends and collaborators include Robert Bloch , author of Psycho ; Robert E. Howard , creator of Conan the Barbarian ; and August Derleth , who focused on extending the Cthulhu Mythos . Subsequent horror writers also heavily drew on Lovecraft's work. While many made direct references to elements of Lovecraft's mythos , either to draw on its associations or to acknowledge his influence, many others drew on

2340-478: Is still broadly and deeply felt in some of the most celebrated authors of contemporary fiction. The fantasias of Jorge Luis Borges display a marked resemblance to some of Lovecraft's more dream-influenced work. Borges also dedicated his story, "There Are More Things" to Lovecraft, though he also considered Lovecraft "an involuntary parodist of Poe ." The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has also cited Lovecraft as an influence in his essay H. P. Lovecraft: Against

2430-553: The Zork series. Alone in the Dark (1992 video game) contains Lovecraftian elements and references. Shadow of the Comet , a game which takes place in the 19th century, is strongly inspired by the myth of Cthulhu. Cthulhu mythos The Cthulhu Mythos is a mythopoeia and a shared fictional universe , originating in the works of Anglo-American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft . The term

2520-500: The Cthulhu Mythos ; 1965 also saw Boris Karloff and Nick Adams in Die, Monster, Die! based on Lovecraft's short story " The Colour Out of Space "; The Shuttered Room (1967), based on an August Derleth "posthumous collaboration" with Lovecraft, and Curse of the Crimson Altar (U.S. title: The Crimson Cult ) (1968), based on " The Dreams in the Witch House ". The 1970s produced

2610-548: The Lovecraft Circle . In 1981, The Evil Dead comedy horror film franchise was created by Sam Raimi after studying H. P. Lovecraft. It consists of the films The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), and Army of Darkness (1992). The Necronomicon Ex-Mortis , or simply The Book of the Dead , is depicted in each of the three films. John Carpenter 's "Apocalypse Trilogy" ( The Thing , Prince of Darkness and In

2700-462: The Nobel Prize in Literature , worked as an editor for Adventure , writing filler paragraphs (brief facts or amusing anecdotes designed to fill small gaps in page layout), advertising copy and a few stories. The term pulp fiction is often used for massmarket paperbacks since the 1950s. The Browne Popular Culture Library News noted: Many of the paperback houses that contributed to the decline of

2790-456: The speculative fiction genre. It has been called "the official fictional religion of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, a grab bag for writers in need of unthinkably vast, and unthinkably indifferent, eldritch entities". Sollasina cthulhu , an extinct ophiocistioid echinoderm , is named after the Cthulhu Mythos. Pulp magazine Pulp magazines (also referred to as "

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2880-512: The " Great Old Ones ", a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and have since fallen into a deathlike sleep. While these monstrous deities were present in almost all of Lovecraft's published work (his second short story " Dagon ", published in 1919, is considered the start of the Mythos), the first story to really expand the pantheon of Great Old Ones and its themes

2970-414: The "Dunsanian" (written in a similar style as Lord Dunsany ), " Arkham " (occurring in Lovecraft's fictionalized New England setting), and "Cthulhu" (the cosmic tales) cycles. Writer Will Murray noted that while Lovecraft often used his fictional pantheon in the stories he ghostwrote for other authors, he reserved Arkham and its environs exclusively for those tales he wrote under his own name. Although

3060-412: The "monumental bleakness" of its setting, and leaving most questions unanswered. Rod Serling 's 1969–73 series Night Gallery adapted at least two Lovecraft stories, " Pickman's Model " and " Cool Air ". The episode "Professor Peabody's Last Lecture", concerning the fate of a man who read the Necronomicon , included a student named "Mr. Lovecraft", along with other students sharing names of authors in

3150-692: The 1920s–1940s, the most successful pulps sold up to one million copies per issue. In 1934, Frank Gruber said there were some 150 pulp titles. The most successful pulp magazines were Argosy , Adventure , Blue Book and Short Stories , collectively described by some pulp historians as "The Big Four". Among the best-known other titles of this period were Amazing Stories , Black Mask , Dime Detective , Flying Aces , Horror Stories , Love Story Magazine , Marvel Tales , Oriental Stories , Planet Stories , Spicy Detective , Startling Stories , Thrilling Wonder Stories , Unknown , Weird Tales and Western Story Magazine . During

3240-535: The 1950s. Pulp magazines often contained a wide variety of genre fiction , including, but not limited to: The American Old West was a mainstay genre of early turn of the 20th-century novels as well as later pulp magazines, and lasted longest of all the traditional pulps. In many ways, the later men's adventure ("the sweats") was the replacement of pulps. Many classic science fiction and crime novels were originally serialized in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales , Amazing Stories , and Black Mask . While

3330-667: The 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer ) with its strong themes of incomprehensibility and outside influence on Earth. Robert Eggers ' 2019 movie The Lighthouse has been compared to Lovecraft's works due to the dreary atmosphere, deep sea horror imagery and the otherworldly and maddening power of the titular lighthouse that drives the protagonists to insanity. Ridley Scott 's 2012 science-fiction horror epic Prometheus and Gore Verbinski 's 2016 film A Cure for Wellness have been noted for their Lovecraftian elements. HBO's 2019 miniseries Chernobyl has been described as "the new face of cosmic horror", with radiation filling

3420-521: The Amazon Queen by E.A. Guest, their first contribution to a "New Pulp Era", featuring the hallmarks of pulp fiction for contemporary mature readers: violence, horror and sex. E.A. Guest was likened to a blend of pulp era icon Talbot Mundy and Stephen King by real-life explorer David Hatcher Childress. In 2002, the tenth issue of McSweeney's Quarterly was guest edited by Michael Chabon . Published as McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales , it

3510-504: The Bold was heavily influenced by the works and style of Lovecraft. In addition to using pastiches of Cthulhu, the Deep Ones , and R'lyeh , writer J. Michael Straczynski also wrote the story in a distinctly Lovecraftian style. Written entirely from the perspective of a traumatized sailor, the story makes use of several of Lovecraft's trademarks, including the ultimate feeling of insignificance in

3600-568: The Cthulhu mythos. Magic: The Gathering expansions such as Battle for Zendikar (2015), Eldritch Moon (2016), and Shadows over Innistrad (2016) contain Lovecraftian components. The tabletop co-op game Cthulhu: Death May Die is also based on Lovecraft's works as it is set in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos and has the players taking the role of a group of investigators trying to interrupt

3690-518: The Mouth of Madness ) feature Lovecraftian elements, which become more noticeable in each film. The blackly comedic Re-Animator (1985) was based on Lovecraft's novella Herbert West–Reanimator . Re-Animator spawned two sequel films. Released in 1986, From Beyond was loosely based on Lovecraft's short story of the same name . The 1987 film The Curse was an adaptation of Lovecraft's " The Colour Out of Space ". Its sequel, Curse II: The Bite

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3780-508: The Mythos by including any passing reference to another author's story elements by Lovecraft as part of the genre. Just as Lovecraft made passing reference to Clark Ashton Smith's Book of Eibon , Derleth in turn added Smith's Ubbo-Sathla to the Mythos. Derleth also attempted to connect the deities of the Mythos to the four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), creating new beings representative of certain elements in order to legitimize his system of classification. He created "Cthugha" as

3870-460: The Mythos was not formalized or acknowledged between them, Lovecraft did correspond, meet in person, and share story elements with other contemporary writers including Clark Ashton Smith , Robert E. Howard , Robert Bloch , Frank Belknap Long , Henry Kuttner , Henry S. Whitehead , and Fritz Leiber —a group referred to as the "Lovecraft Circle". For example, Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in

3960-460: The Woods , a comedy horror which deliberately subverts cosmic horror conventions and tropes.The concept of a sky-creature was part of an homage to the imagery evoked by H. P. Lovecraft , the 2010 film Altitude is a Canadian horror direct-to-video film directed by Canadian comic book writer and artist Kaare Andrews . William Eubank , director of the 2020 film Underwater , has confirmed that

4050-417: The World, Against Life in which he refers to the stories written in the last ten years of Lovecraft's life as "the great texts". Lovecraft's penchant for dreamscapes and for the biologically macabre has also profoundly influenced visual artists such as Jean "Moebius" Giraud and H. R. Giger . Giger's book of paintings which led directly to many of the designs for the film Alien was named Necronomicon ,

4140-522: The X-ray Eyes featuring a protagonist driven to insanity by heightened vision that allows him to see God at the heart of the universe. Though not direct adaptations, the episodes of the well-known series The Outer Limits often had Lovecraftian themes, such as human futility and insignificance and the limits of sanity and understanding. Amongst the other well-known adaptations of this era are Dark Intruder (1965) which has some passing references to

4230-653: The annual pulp magazine convention that had begun in 1972. The magazine, devoted to the history and legacy of the pulp magazines, has published each year since. It now appears in connection with PulpFest , the summer pulp convention that grew out of and replaced Pulpcon. The Pulpster was originally edited by Tony Davis and is currently edited by William Lampkin, who also runs the website ThePulp.Net. Contributors have included Don Hutchison, Robert Sampson, Will Murray , Al Tonik, Nick Carr, Mike Resnick , Hugh B. Cave , Joseph Wrzos, Jessica Amanda Salmonson , Chet Williamson , and many others. In 1992, Rich W. Harvey came out with

4320-428: The art was black lines on the paper's background, but Finlay and a few others did some work that was primarily white lines against large dark areas. Another way pulps kept costs down was by paying authors less than other markets; thus many eminent authors started out in the pulps before they were successful enough to sell to better-paying markets, and similarly, well-known authors whose careers were slumping or who wanted

4410-513: The authors featured on the interior pages. Among the most famous pulp artists were Walter M. Baumhofer , Earle K. Bergey , Margaret Brundage , Edd Cartier , Virgil Finlay , Frank R. Paul , Norman Saunders , Emmett Watson , Nick Eggenhofer , (who specialized in Western illustrations), Hugh J. Ward , George Rozen , and Rudolph Belarski . Covers were important enough to sales that sometimes they would be designed first; authors would then be shown

4500-447: The awakening of the titular deity by a group of cultists in order to make him vulnerable and slay the eldritch god once and for all by shooting him in the face. Video games, like films, have a rich history of Lovecraftian elements and adaptations. In 1987, The Lurking Horror was the first to bring the Lovecraftian horror subgenre to computer platforms. This was a text-based adventure game , released by Infocom , who are best known for

4590-521: The classic horror tale." By the late 20th century, Lovecraft had become something of a pop-culture icon, resulting in countless reinterpretations of and references to his work. Many of these fall outside the sphere of Lovecraftian horror, but represent Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture . Lovecraft's work, mostly published in pulp magazines , never had the same sort of influence on literature as his high-modernist literary contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald . However, his impact

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4680-487: The cover art and asked to write a story to match. Later pulps began to feature interior illustrations, depicting elements of the stories. The drawings were printed in black ink on the same cream-colored paper used for the text, and had to use specific techniques to avoid blotting on the coarse texture of the cheap pulp. Thus, fine lines and heavy detail were usually not an option. Shading was by crosshatching or pointillism , and even that had to be limited and coarse. Usually

4770-426: The cover price rose to 15 cents and 30 pages were added to each issue; along with establishing a stable of authors for each magazine, this change proved successful and circulation began to approach that of Argosy . Street and Smith's next innovation was the introduction of specialized genre pulps, with each magazine focusing on a particular genre, such as detective stories, romance, etc. At their peak of popularity in

4860-458: The creatures of his film are tied to the Cthulhu Mythos . Masking Threshold (2021) uses Lovecraftian story elements. Director and writer Johannes Grenzfurthner confirms the influence in interviews. Churuli (2021) an Indian Malayalam-language film directed by Lijo Jose Pellissery follows two undercover police officers in search of a fugitive in a mysterious forest, encountering bizarre and otherworldly phenomena. The 2022 horror film Venus

4950-448: The direct precursors of pulp fiction. The first "pulp" was Frank Munsey 's revamped Argosy magazine of 1896, with about 135,000 words (192 pages) per issue, on pulp paper with untrimmed edges, and no illustrations, even on the cover. The steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels; prior to Munsey, however, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in

5040-735: The economic hardships of the Great Depression , pulps provided affordable content to the masses, and were one of the primary forms of entertainment, along with film and radio . Although pulp magazines were primarily an American phenomenon, there were also a number of British pulp magazines published between the Edwardian era and World War II . Notable UK pulps included The Pall Mall Magazine , The Novel Magazine , Cassell's Magazine , The Story-Teller , The Sovereign Magazine , Hutchinson's Adventure-Story and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story . The German fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten had

5130-466: The end of the "pulp era"; by that date, many of the famous pulps of the previous generation, including Black Mask, The Shadow , Doc Savage , and Weird Tales , were defunct (though some of those titles have been revived in various formats in the decades since). Almost all of the few remaining former pulp magazines are science fiction or mystery magazines, now in formats similar to " digest size ", such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact , though

5220-541: The face of the supernatural. From the 1950s onwards, in the era following Lovecraft's death, Lovecraftian horror truly became a subgenre, not only fueling direct cinematic adaptations of Poe and Lovecraft, but providing the foundation upon which many of the horror films of the 1950s and 1960s were constructed. One notable filmmaker to dip into the Lovecraftian well was 1960s B-filmmaker Roger Corman , with his The Haunted Palace (1963) being very loosely based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , and his X: The Man with

5310-462: The feel and tone of his work without specifically referring to mythos elements. Some have said that Lovecraft, along with Edgar Allan Poe, is the most influential author on modern horror. Author Stephen King has said: "Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century's greatest practitioner of

5400-438: The feel of a film that might have been made in the 1920s, at the time that Lovecraft's story was written. 2001's Dagon is a Spanish-made horror film directed by Stuart Gordon . Though titled after Lovecraft's story " Dagon ", the film is actually an effective adaptation of his story The Shadow over Innsmouth . Cthulhu is a 2000 Australian low budget horror film directed, produced, and written by Damian Heffernan. It

5490-570: The front and back cover) longer than Argosy . Due to differences in page layout however, the magazine had substantially less text than Argosy . The Popular Magazine did introduce color covers to pulp publishing, and the magazine began to take off when in 1905 the publishers acquired the rights to serialize Ayesha (1905), by H. Rider Haggard , a sequel to his popular novel She (1887). Haggard's Lost World genre influenced several key pulp writers, including Edgar Rice Burroughs , Robert E. Howard , Talbot Mundy and Abraham Merritt . In 1907,

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5580-951: The genre–Ace, Dell, Avon, among others–were actually started by pulp magazine publishers. They had the presses, the expertise, and the newsstand distribution networks which made the success of the mass-market paperback possible. These pulp-oriented paperback houses mined the old magazines for reprints. This kept pulp literature, if not pulp magazines, alive. The Return of the Continental Op reprints material first published in Black Mask ; Five Sinister Characters contains stories first published in Dime Detective ; and The Pocket Book of Science Fiction collects material from Thrilling Wonder Stories , Astounding Science Fiction and Amazing Stories . But note that mass market paperbacks are not pulps. In 1991, The Pulpster debuted at that year's Pulpcon ,

5670-413: The horror, in his own words, to a "cosmic" level. Stephen King has said the best of Lovecraft's works are "uniquely terrible in all of American literature, and survive with all their power intact." The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism , the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of

5760-482: The idea that the Cthulhu Mythos essentially represented a struggle between good and evil. Derleth is credited with creating the "Elder Gods". He stated: As Lovecraft conceived the deities or forces of his mythos, there were, initially, the Elder Gods.... These Elder Gods were benign deities, representing the forces of good, and existed peacefully...very rarely stirring forth to intervene in the unceasing struggle between

5850-457: The incorporation of the Mythos into new stories. Alan Moore has touched on Lovecraftian themes, in particular in his The Courtyard and Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths (and Antony Johnston 's spin-off Yuggoth Creatures ), but also in his Black Dossier where the story "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?" mixed Lovecraftian horror with Bertie Wooster . Neonomicon and Providence posit

5940-608: The key to the origin of the 'Derleth Mythos'. For in At the Mountains of Madness is shown the history of a conflict between interstellar races, first among them the Elder Ones and the Cthulhu-spawn." Derleth said Lovecraft wished for other authors to actively write about the Mythos as opposed to it being a discrete plot device within Lovecraft's own stories. Derleth expanded the boundaries of

6030-682: The majority of pulp magazines were anthology titles featuring many different authors, characters and settings, some of the most enduring magazines were those that featured a single recurring character. These were often referred to as "hero pulps" because the recurring character was almost always a larger-than-life hero in the mold of Doc Savage or The Shadow . Popular pulp characters that headlined in their own magazines: Popular pulp characters who appeared in anthology titles such as All-Story or Weird Tales : Pulp covers were printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper. They were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress , usually awaiting

6120-594: The most durable revival of Weird Tales began in pulp format, though published on good-quality paper. The old format is still in use for some lengthy serials, like the German science fiction weekly Perry Rhodan (over 3,000 issues as of 2019). Over the course of their evolution, there were a huge number of pulp magazine titles; Harry Steeger of Popular Publications claimed that his company alone had published over 300, and at their peak they were publishing 42 titles per month. Many titles of course survived only briefly. While

6210-519: The most popular titles were monthly, many were bimonthly and some were quarterly. The collapse of the pulp industry changed the landscape of publishing because pulps were the single largest sales outlet for short stories. Combined with the decrease in slick magazine fiction markets, writers trying to support themselves by creating fiction switched to novels and book-length anthologies of shorter pieces. Some ex-pulp writers like Hugh B. Cave and Robert Leslie Bellem had moved on to writing for television by

6300-669: The name of a fictional book in several of Lovecraft's mythos stories. Dan O'Bannon , the original writer of the Alien screenplay, has also mentioned Lovecraft as a major influence on the film. With Ronald Shusett , he would later write Dead & Buried and Hemoglobin , both of which were admitted pastiches of Lovecraft. Lovecraft has cast a long shadow across the comic world. This has included not only adaptations of his stories, such as H.P. Lovecraft's Worlds , H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness , Graphic Classics : H. P. Lovecraft , and MAX 's Haunt of Horror , but also

6390-450: The ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale, and uncompromising negativity. Author China Miéville notes that "Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact." Lovecraft's work is also steeped in the insular feel of rural New England , and much of the genre continues to maintain this sense that "that which man

6480-571: The powers of evil and the races of Earth. These powers of evil were variously known as the Great Old Ones or the Ancient Ones.... Price said the basis for Derleth's system is found in Lovecraft: "Was Derleth's use of the rubric 'Elder Gods' so alien to Lovecraft's in At the Mountains of Madness ? Perhaps not. In fact, this very story, along with some hints from "The Shadow over Innsmouth", provides

6570-433: The pulp magazines of the early 20th century. These included Blood 'N Thunder , High Adventure and a short-lived magazine which revived the title Argosy . These specialist publications, printed in limited press runs, were pointedly not printed on the brittle, high-acid wood pulp paper of the old publications and were not mass market publications targeted at a wide audience. In 2004, Lost Continent Library published Secret of

6660-489: The pulps ") were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, due to their cheap nature. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were

6750-530: The pulps' market share, but it has been suggested the widespread expansion of television also drew away the readership of the pulps. In a more affluent post-war America, the price gap compared to slick magazines was far less significant. In the 1950s, men's adventure magazines also began to draw some former pulp readers. The 1957 liquidation of the American News Company , then the primary distributor of pulp magazines, has sometimes been taken as marking

6840-572: The role of an incomprehensible, untamable, indifferent terror. The films of Panos Cosmatos , Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy take cosmic horror themes and blend them with psychedelic and new age elements, while the work of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead in Resolution , Spring and The Endless has also been described as "Lovecraftian." Other films directly incorporating or adapting

6930-572: The short story "The Children of the Night" (1931), and in turn Lovecraft mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in the stories "Out of the Aeons" ( 1935 ) and "The Shadow Out of Time" ( 1936 ). Many of Howard's original unedited Conan stories also involve parts of the Cthulhu Mythos. Price denotes the second stage's commencement with August Derleth, with the principal difference between Lovecraft and Derleth being Derleth's use of hope and development of

7020-672: The successors to the penny dreadfuls , dime novels , and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid, exploitative , and sensational subject matter, even though this was but a small part of what existed in the pulps. Digest magazines and men's adventure magazines were also regarded as pulps. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as Flash Gordon , The Shadow , Doc Savage , and The Phantom Detective . The pulps gave rise to

7110-464: The term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature. Successors of pulps include paperback books, such as hardboiled detective stories and erotic fiction . Before pulp magazines, Newgate novels (1840s-1860s) fictionalized the exploits of real-life criminals. Later, British sensation novels gained peak popularity in the 1860s-1870s. Sensation novels focused on shocking stories that reflected modern-day anxieties, and were

7200-432: The term "Derleth Mythos" to distinguish Lovecraft's works from Derleth's later stories, which modify key tenets of the Mythos. Authors of Lovecraftian horror in particular frequently use elements of the Cthulhu Mythos. In his essay "H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos", Robert M. Price described two stages in the development of the Cthulhu Mythos. Price called the first stage the "Cthulhu Mythos proper". This stage

7290-476: The work of Lovecraft include the 2011 film The Whisperer in Darkness based on Lovecraft's short story of the same name , the 2017 Finnish short film Sound from the Deep incorporating elements from At the Mountains of Madness in a modern-day setting, and Richard Stanley 's Colour Out of Space based on Lovecraft's short story " The Colour Out of Space ". Of note also is Drew Goddard 's 2012 film The Cabin in

7380-434: The works of Lovecraft, in addition to those of Robert E. Howard and the legend of Dracula . This was adapted into the 2004 film Hellboy . His Elseworlds mini-series The Doom That Came to Gotham reimagines Batman in a confrontation with Lovecraftian monsters. The manga artist Junji Ito is heavily influenced by Lovecraft. Gou Tanabe has adapted some of Lovecraft's tales into manga. Issue #32 of The Brave and

7470-486: Was a "mechanistic materialist" who embraced the philosophy of cosmic indifferentism and believed in a purposeless, mechanical, and uncaring universe. Human beings, with their limited faculties, can never fully understand this universe, and the cognitive dissonance caused by this revelation leads to insanity, in his view. There have been attempts at categorizing this fictional group of beings. Phillip A. Schreffler argues that by carefully scrutinizing Lovecraft's writings,

7560-448: Was coined by August Derleth , a contemporary correspondent and protégé of Lovecraft, to identify the settings, tropes, and lore that were employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. The name " Cthulhu " derives from the central creature in Lovecraft's seminal short story " The Call of Cthulhu ", first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. Richard L. Tierney , a writer who also wrote Mythos tales, later applied

7650-429: Was formulated during Lovecraft's lifetime and was subject to his guidance. The second stage was guided by August Derleth who, in addition to publishing Lovecraft's stories after his death, attempted to categorize and expand the Mythos. An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe. Lovecraft made frequent references to

7740-537: Was later republished in Crypt of Cthulhu #32 (1985). In applying the elemental theory to beings that function on a cosmic scale (e.g., Yog-Sothoth ) some authors created a fifth element that they termed aethyr . A number of fictional cults dedicated to "malevolent supernatural entities" appear in the Cthulhu Mythos, the loosely connected series of horror stories written by Lovecraft and other writers inspired by his creations. These fictional cults have in some ways taken on

7830-412: Was loosely inspired by " The Curse of Yig ", originally a collaboration between Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop . The 1991 HBO film Cast a Deadly Spell starred Fred Ward as Harry Phillip Lovecraft, a noir detective investigating the theft of the Necronomicon in an alternate universe 1948 Los Angeles where magic was commonplace. The sequel Witch Hunt had Dennis Hopper as H. Phillip Lovecraft in

7920-523: Was never a static system but rather a sort of aesthetic construct that remained ever adaptable to its creator's developing personality and altering interests.... There was never a rigid system that might be posthumously appropriated..... The essence of the mythos lies not in a pantheon of imaginary deities nor in a cobwebby collection of forgotten tomes, but rather in a certain convincing cosmic attitude. Price said Lovecraft's writings could at least be divided into categories and identified three distinct themes:

8010-477: Was not meant to know" might be closer to the surface of ordinary life outside of the crowded cities of modern civilization. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft , Supernatural Horror in Literature Attack the story like a radiant suicide, utter the great NO to life without weakness; then you will see

8100-851: Was that they paid upon acceptance for material instead of on publication. Since a story might be accepted months or even years before publication, to a working writer this was a crucial difference in cash flow . Some pulp editors became known for cultivating good fiction and interesting features in their magazines. Preeminent pulp magazine editors included Arthur Sullivant Hoffman ( Adventure ), Robert H. Davis ( All-Story Weekly ), Harry E. Maule ( Short Stories ), Donald Kennicott ( Blue Book ), Joseph Shaw ( Black Mask ), Farnsworth Wright ( Weird Tales , Oriental Stories ), John W. Campbell ( Astounding Science Fiction , Unknown ) and Daisy Bacon ( Love Story Magazine , Detective Story Magazine ). Well-known authors who wrote for pulps include: Sinclair Lewis , first American winner of

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