Today’s incredibly petty complaint: people who write “Lovecraftian horror” are almost all doing it wrong.
Lovecraft wrote about the existential horror of being destroyed by threats we can’t even comprehend. His monsters were new and bizarre and incomprehensible, the better to call up existential fear. The easiest to picture is an octopus-dragon-giant, and things escalate from there to the literally indescribable.
Modern Lovecraftians… make us read about Cthulu. Everyone knows who that is, guys. Your readers have plush toys of him and can recite the R’lyeh quote from memory. It is the exact opposite of an incomprehensible mystery. Saying “the King in Yellow is an avatar of Hastur and has these properties” is similarly non-mysterious. And god forbid you introduce good guys and bad guys among your monsters - do that and there’s nothing existential left!
(Charlie Stross gets a pass because he’s crossing it with other things and is just having so damn much fun with it.)
I can’t blame modern writers for this entirely, August Derleth started the whole trend. But with every ‘Cthulu for President’ bumper sticker sold, keeping to the monster everybody knows becomes a little further from the original sentiment. You can even keep to Lovecraft, people! Go set something in Leng or write about Bokrug, just keep it unfamiliar!
At this point it feels like the best “Lovecraftian” stuff coming out abandons the mythos completely. Amnesia and Alice Isn’t Dead capture the feel of it all far better than yet another game set in Innsmouth.
You see this framing of “Lovecraftian horror” a lot. I am not a huge fan.
For one thing, HPL talks a big game about the horrifically incomprehensible cosmos that will blast your sanity with their eldritch alienness, but even his own writing doesn’t really bear that out in a lot of cases. Kuranes becomes King of the Dreamlands. Randolph Carter actually creates a noteworthy part of the Dreamlands, by dint of his sheer imaginative awesomeness, and then goes on to merge with an Outer God (or to have been so merged all along) and become a cosmic Time Force. Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Gate itself, mates with a human woman and produces half-human spawn. Nyarlathotep, the Soul and Messenger of the Outer Gods, who is pretty much the most horrific and alien and eldritch creature out there, is willing to dress up like an Egyptian and monologue like a B-movie villain. Time after time, the horrific alien cosmos turns out to be pretty darn accessible to human intelligence. And those are some of the most interesting, memorable parts of his corpus. Certainly they have a lot more impact than the umpteenth repetition of “It was very scary! So scary that you cannot fathom it! Be scared of this vaguely-described thing!”
But beyond that…
Yes, HPL wants us to be scared of all the stuff that he writes about. But HPL is scared of everything. He is scared of seafood. He is scared of swarthy minorities. He is absolutely plumb terrified of the prospect that he might be something other than entirely human, that there could be a touch of the weird and unfamiliar inside him. And, more than anything, he is scared of the dying of the Old Medieval Certainties, the loving God and the anthropocentric universe etc. etc.
We are not HPL. We are not shivering basket cases. We are actually not scared of those things. Most of us have made some kind of peace with the idea that the metaphysics of the world do not inherently care about us. Most of us, if we learned that we were part-immortal-fishman, would react with some amount of “awesome!” and “huh” as well as “AAAAARGH.”
You might think that, because of this disconnect, Lovecraft’s writing would just fall flat. But it doesn’t. Basket case or not, he was an imaginative genius, and it shows. Strip away the hyper-neurotic everything-is-terrible mentality of HPL’s usual narrators, and what you’re left with is…one of the first big, sprawling, science-fantasy universes in our fictional canon. And it is fucking amazing, even if it’s not as unilaterally spooooooooooky as Lovecraft himself thinks it is. It is a place where magic works, but not in any way that’s easy to understand or to manipulate, so it has a lot of numinous power. It is a place where all the noble dreams of humanity can come true (in the Dreamlands), but…not in a way that means what you’d expect. It is a place filled with aliens-who-are-genuinely-alien, that holy grail of genre writing. It is a place where gods are real, but they are not the gods of our fond prayers, and they are weird and wonderful and very definitely dangerous. Sometimes it is grand and poetic (Cthulhu lies dreaming-not-dead!). Sometimes it’s just plain goofy (Mi-Go brain cylinders!). Almost all of it is cool.
A lot of the writers who stuck around in the Mythos tradition, both prose writers and RPG writers, understand that pretty well.
So, hells yes, tell me about Cthulhu and what he’s doing, tell me about the avatars of Hastur and how they work, tell me about Tsathoggua and Shub-Niggurath and the Yithians all the rest of that gribbly squamous crowd. At least…do so if you have something interesting to say about them. They’re worth the attention, and adding something to the big science-fantasy tapestry is a lot more worthwhile (as far as I’m concerned) than another round of THE BIG SCARY UNIVERSE IS VERY BIG AND SCARY.
All that said: yes, most of the silly jokey Campus-Crusade-for-Cthulhu stuff sucks, in exactly the same way that most Tolkeiniana kitsch (weed-smoking hobbits etc.) sucks. It takes something numinous and dignified and powerful and grinds it down for the sake of a cheap joke. Don’t do that.
The good-guys-versus-bad-guys thing is…a little more complicated. Certainly having a metaphysically defined “good side” is 100% against the underlying rules of the setting, and is terrible. HPL himself has potent gods who are more or less “on humanity’s side,” most notably Nodens, and there are all kinds of interesting and powerful things you can do with this that are totally in keeping with the rules of the setting. And, well, if you’re opposed to the idea that someone can side with a Mythos monster or monster-god for reasons that he comprehensibly understands to be “good” as a matter of morals/ideology – you and I are going to have to have some more words.