H.P. Lovecraft was, perhaps, one of the most influential horror writers ever. The mythos he created around Cthulhu has become so deeply seated, some of his creations have gained a life such that people seem to have forgotten they have only existed for about one hundred years.
You don't agree? The idea of The Elder gods; The Great Old Ones; The Necronomicon... Places that have been referenced in other materials time & again... the Miskatonic University; Arkham; The Mountains of Madness...
But I am deviating, my chain of thought is drifting from what I was going to say...
I read Lovecraft as a teen... I loved how the good guys may have survived to tell their tale; they may have prevented the catastrophe; but they didn't really win... Maybe I understood, even then, that life was never as clear-cut as so many other stories try to tell us: That no one "wins", we just get through life and have the scars (and Lovecraft did love to give his heroes psychological scars) to tell of our journey. My wife tells me of how, when she read them as a teen, she couldn't sleep with the light off for a fortnight...
"I have seen the dark universe yawning, where the black planets roll without aim, where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge, or lustre, or name." (The Haunter of the Dark)
"Enough rambling... you sound like you've had a trip to R'lyeh!"
About 8 months ago... I started to try and work on some designs to go with some of the stories I loved. I struggled. I came up with ideas... worked on them... scrapped them. They were all too... cartoon-ish? Too literal! Obvious! And although I liked the principal of the designs, the practice let them down.
So... World Goth Day 2020 was fast approaching: I knew I wanted to get something appropriately dark for the celebrations. Then it came to me; I had learned some new tricks; I went back to my Lovecraftian Cthulhu inspired ideas... And much like the heroes Lovecraft wrote of I nearly went mad trying to get the designs finalised for World Goth Day... and I still failed to meet the deadline; But Cthulhu is here, one day later than planned, but he is here...
So... belated "Happy" World Goth Day!
“Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory re-inspires all the original horror.”
―H.P. Lovecraft,At the Mountains of Madness
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