Creature in the Shunned House?

[Litho]

I am trying to find out what the creature in the HPL story Shunned House
was? I checked S Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters and but, could
find nothing. I remember years ago reading Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi
by Brian Lumley and there were similar creatures but, nothing I remember
very well.

If you have a name from CoC I can check really easy.

For those wondering I am re-reading Shunned House and I know there was more
info about the creature and I can't remember where I saw it. For now its
stuck in my head and its really annoying me.

Please Help 8)

[Bobby Dee]

I don't know that CoC ever did a specific critter based on it, but from the description I thought it was a kind of vampire.

[osedax]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2014 02:43:42 -0700 (PDT), Bobby Dee
<ancient...@gmail.com> wrote:

>I don't know that CoC ever did a specific critter based on it, but from the description I thought it was a kind of vampire.

It's astonishing how things, even written words, can mutate into
unintended forms over time. Lovecraft wrote simple prose, albeit in a
depressed, possibly mentally infirm, mien- he never contemplated the
deviant evolution which followed. Fans and mimics changing the tenor
of his stories which were written for money with which to pay rent and
buy food.

Now we have "CoC" instead of The Call of Cthulhu", "from the
description I thought it was a kind of vampire" when Lovecraft never
ever wrote about traditional heebie jeebies such as vampires, strega,
stregoi, and so on. We have Stross and his nonsense, with which
Lovecraft would never have agreed, people like this Indian fellow
penning enormous bigraphical tomes and essentially dissertations on
Lovecraft, when he was just a damn simple city dweller trying to earn
a crust by writing pulp horror.

Unbelievable. Move on.

[Bobby Dee]

Oh for the love of Yog-Sothoth...when was the last time you read "The Shunned House"? Leaving aside your grudge against S. T. Joshi (whose race has nothing to do with anything.) Do you not bloody well remember this paragraph?

"Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires--the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living--whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge."

The whole story is probably inspired by the New England Vampire Panic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic), while it's not what we today would consider a traditional vampire, and a bit unusual for Lovecraft in that respect, it's neither the first nor the last time he worked a traditional monster into his horror - "Psychopompos" featured a werewolf. As for stregoi...well, does "The Dreams in the Witch-House" not qualify as containing an actual witch?

And yeah, CoC is an acceptable and widely-used acronym for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. Deal with it.

[Ramsey Campbell]

On Wednesday, 3 September 2014 13:53:53 UTC+1, osedax wrote:

Lovecraft wrote simple prose...

Well, no. At its best it is very carefully orchestrated and modulated.

Fans and mimics changing the tenor of his stories which were written for money with which to pay rent and buy food...

Quite a few great artists have worked for those reasons.

...he was just a damn simple city dweller trying to earn a crust by writing pulp horror...

I think he aimed a good deal higher than that. He may have felt he failed, but remember what Lawrence said about trusting the tale. Lovecraft's revisions were more like bread and butter work, admittedly.

[W. H. Pugmire, Esq.]

It's astonishing how people who have no understanding of H. P. Lovecraft and his writing mutate his life and his Works so as to reveal their ignorance and bigotry. Anyone who has read Lovecraft's letters knows that E'ch-Pi-El was not a hack, or a "damn city dweller," who wrote only to make money. He was concerned with creating Literary Art, his approach was that of a sincere and excellent artist, one of genius and intellect; and because he was so, his fiction has survived and continues to be published in important hardcover editions.

I am nigh half-way through S. T.'s magnificent new book, LOVECRAFT AND A WORLD IN TRANSITION, and it has me on fire for all things Lovecraftian!!! What a treasure trove of scholarship! It's wonderful to see Lovecraft treated with sympathy in this age where there are so many who treat him with hostility and ignorance. I am nigh at that portion of ye book that investigates individual tales. This new book from S. T. has so affected me mentally, emotionally and intellectually that I burn to write new weird fiction in homage to H> P. Lovecraft.

[bruce turlish]

Pugmire posted:
"...This new book from S. T. has so affected me mentally, emotionally and intellectually that I burn to write new weird fiction in homage to H> P. Lovecraft."

Calm down, Mr. P., calm down--if you get too worked up, you may bust a blood vessel in your brain or something. OTOH, that may be a one-way ticket to your Great Author in the sky--I don't know whether you look forward to that, though...