Thread: Tear jerker

When any of you have time available please re-read the Hypnos story and let me know how you feel. Everytime I read it I find it even more soul crushingly depressing than before. Which is dark, even considering Lovecraft's standards.

If you dont have the time, a description of how your last reading made you feel will also do.

I thought it was a pretty good story, it's a credit that I didn't immediately guess the twist ending.

One of the things I always notice about stories from this particular era... They have a very strange view of magic and mystery. In modern times, not very much magic is of the inexplicable variety (it belongs to a system with rules binding it). Also any alien beings in modern stories are always comprehensible, they might be good or bad but there motivations are natural.

Compare any of that to the way Lovecraft describes things, and it always makes me think that all the true magic is bleeding out of the world.

Originally Posted by the_jackass

Which is dark, even considering Lovecraft's standards.

It's interesting you say that. Hypnos is most definitely one of the darkest and saddest short stories in Lovecraft's repertoire, when we look at it from the portrayal of years of loneliness, self-depreciation and self-destruction. But for the reader, the end comes as a bright light of relief, when in the end we witness reality settling in and the natural world coming back into view.

Originally Posted by the_jackass

If you dont have the time, a description of how your last reading made you feel will also do.

Hypnos was a story I read only much later in my Lovecraft obsessive years. Only after I started buying the collective works. This short story was completely unknown to me at the time. The internet was not a thing yet and I don't ever recall it being mentioned on the BBS channels I used to frequent then.

When I first read it I didn't like it. It felt cheap (how can someone just wake from a fit in the middle of the street and immediately accept an undying friendship offer along with "come leave at my place"?). I couldn't understand what was the main theme either. Despite my love for Lovecraft works, I think I wasn't at the time very respectful of the author and didn't think there was probably more to this story than met the eye.

Years later when going through a renewed interest in his works, I read Hypnos again. And again I disliked it. But I knew better this time. I had a better understand of Lovecraft works, much more respect for the author and, being older, also honed with better analytic skills, if I should say myself. Rereading it a second time allowed me to finally understand who the narrator was, who his "friend" was and exactly what was the story main theme. That of a man lost in his loneliness and self-depreciation, committed to drug abuse and how his misery and self-destructive behavior eventually leads his mind to slip into near madness. In the end, despite his delusion, we the readers are given an extremely rare breath of fresh air from an author who rarely ends a story on a positive note.

It gain a spot as one of my favorite Lovecraft stories for its depiction of lonesomeness and the despair that comes with it.