There’s a moderately interesting discussion about H.P. Lovecraft going on over at Metafilter, including mention of a unidentified underwater sound that researchers have nicknamed “Bloop” (listen here) and that some people joke could be Cthulhu. Looking for something to add to the discussion, I came across this interesting excerpt from a Salon interview with Stephen King:
Does your evocation of the Maine landscape owe anything to the fiction you read as a kid — H.P. Lovecraft in his books set in the woods of Massachusetts?
No, not really. I mean, it did at the time, when I was 13, 14, 15 — which I maintain is the perfect age to read Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the perfect fiction for people who are living in a state of sort of total sexual doubt, because the stories almost seem to me sort of Jungian in their imagery. They’re all about gigantic disembodied vaginas and things that have teeth. And that sense of the ancient New England landscape … very kindly, Lovecraft was a lot less interested in using the landscape as a place where reality was thin and sort of deserted in the New England community as he was in trying to express that kind of feeling of ancient life. So I had a tendency to copy that when I was a kid, and I think later on I just tried to go back and find a more realistic way to talk about the quality of that landscape. For instance, you know, when Lovecraft writes “The Dunwich Horror,” about Dunwich, Mass. I mean, in a way it’s a lot of idealized crap — he was a city boy. He didn’t live in the country. And what he knew about it he saw from the windows of buses going between Providence and New York City.