What are some non-Lovecraft “Lovecraftian” media, either new or old? I want to make a list of works whose style is reminiscent of Lovecraft without being H.P. himself. Take the definition of Lovecraftian to be your own, I want a bigger list rather than a more defined one. Though if you add a one-line description of why you think it’s Lovecraftian, it would give other readers some orientation.
I’ll kick off with a few on the modern-ish side:
Thomas Ligotti. Author with works featuring asylums, old gods, weird dream-like sequences. I might like Ligotti more than Lovecraft, personally.
Laird Barron. Author who does a mix of hard-boiled detective story and cosmic horror. I think the jaded detective-minded characters give a slightly different flavor to investigations of ancient malignant entities.
Anchorhead by Mike Gentry. A 1998 interactive fiction game. I picked this up a few summers ago and have gotten back into it. It’s a straight up homage to Lovecraft: backwater towns, creepy people, and a town called Innswich. It has me “brooding eternally over old New England secrets…”
Very modern (and possibly too meta), but the HBO series Lovecraft Country springs to mind for me. It’s Lovecraftian in the sense that it more or less presents the same world that Lovecraft did (the in-fiction world is one with H.P. Lovecraft in it, but one where his writings were based on real-world experiences in a specific town). Plus…you know…it’s right there in the name. The series was a…sequel?..to a novel of the same name by Matt Ruff, so though I haven’t read the novel, I have to assume the novel would belong on the list, too.
Alien. What the crew is fighting is only the shadow of the bigger entities.
To Cast a Deadly Spell. It’s the best Lovecraft movie out there, even though this isn’t a Lovecraft movie, despite the main character’s name.
The Void. It’s the best Lovecraft movie out there. Yes, this one, not that other one. It is not a Lovecraft movie but uses the Lovecraftesque structure.
I’ve been getting into horror audio drama podcasts lately and I’ve just finished the Magnus Archives’ first five seasons, very good British cosmic horror/anthology/thriller -drama. MA is also CC 4.0 which is cool.
My second big one is Kollok 1991. The name itself is an intentional palindrome. It’s an actual play series using the Kids on Bikes system. CANNOT RECOMMEND IT ENOUGH. I also don’t know how to recommend it without spoiling things.
Magnus Archives has been on my radar for a while and seeing a recommendation for it out in the wild got me to finally give it a listen, can’t believe I didn’t check it out sooner!
I’m a huge fan of John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness.” It would work well for fans of occult detectives, even though technically Sam Neil is an insurance fraud investigator. He’s tracking down Sutter Kane, a reclusive Stephen King type who may or may not have disappeared into one of his own novels. The movie is disturbing at times, funny others, and captures a lot of what makes Lovecraftian horror unsettling while still managing to be fun.
I second Laird Barron. As much as I like his two-fisted supernatural detective stories, I think my favorite stories of his take place in modern times. Procession of the Black Sloth is fantastic, and available to read for free as a sample chapter on Baen’s website.
last night, i finished a big moment of COMMIT TO THE BIT: reading aloud house of leaves to my 12 year old son. he loves the backrooms, etc.
quick impression here: there is a lot of 90’s cringey writing in house of leaves. a bad macho hunter s thompson, cormac macarthy bit with TYPEWRITER MAN as we called him. and the post modernism stuff in the TIMES NEW ROMAN part is… well, obviously not meant to be read aloud. so i’ll judge that less.
however, like a lot of great art, the core idea is just so good, it carries the whole book.
JUMPING here to another book I read aloud to my kid that I greatly prefer, hodgson’s the house on the borderlands. source material for a lot of Lovecraft, that … well for me, I greatly prefer. not only do I think he does the adventure story bits a bit better than Lovecraft, but the cosmic horror parts I think are stronger as well. maybe it’s because I am on a ROMANTIC/GOTHIC kick, but hodgson def channels those influences more. I love how excessive the whole thing is… (without being the night land excessive). those (3?) chapters where the main character experiences deep time… oh, that was a hard read aloud, but in retrospect, I LOVE that section. makes a strong impression. and honestly, wow, so far ahead of its time. basically it goes full sci-fi horror on you IN 1908. amazing.
