Modernizing Conan vs. Lovecraftian horror, Keeping the most important themes Options

[Wounded Ronin]

I'm sure most here know about H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. They were both seminal American authors writing in the 1930s who corresponded with each other. Howard even used some of Lovecraft's monsters in his famous Conan stories. In many ways, the two men could not be more different. Lovecraft was a New Yorker who was afraid of fish and whose stories often center around a theme of disgust or revulsion, as well as sanity-rending cosmic horror. Although Howard suffered from his own demons, being a rural Texan, one of his themes was the rugged virtue of the rural mind, in contrast with the supposed decadence and moral intransigence of city-dwellers. By virtue of his barbarian purity, Conan is able to defeat Lovecraftian monsters that would dissolve the minds of city folk.

Underlying all this is a certain conflict between the urban and the rural minds in the United States. This conflict or dichotomy was illustrated on some level back in the 1930s by comparing the work of Lovecraft and Howard, but lives on today, most notably in politics which have become very culturally divided along urban vs. rural lines. There's a cultural essence there that still holds true on some level today.

So, I was thinking, what if we were to modernize a Howardian approach to H. P. Lovecraft's horror? The idea first occurred to me over ten years ago, when I wondered over an IRC chat to a friend what would happen if a heavily armed militia group were to encounter Lovecraftian horror out in the wilderness. How would their reaction be different than that of urbanized city folk? With the power of Americanized civilian firepower combined with blue collar jerry rigging and know how, would they be able to defeat certain entitites from Lovecraft? Obviously it might not help against incorporeal horrors, but for anything that has a body, what would happen if the militia group decided to make a Somalia-style technical out of an old Toyota pickup, and use it to battle the unknowable horrors from beyond? Would their lack of urban intellectual introspection actually inure them somewhat to the highly abstractified horror of the Lovecraftian universe?

At the time, my friend told me that he thought the whole point of Lovecraftian horror was their invulnerability and your relative insignificance and weakness. But looking back on it, I would argue that's not how Robert E. Howard wrote about it. What if we took Howard's themes of rural virtue, re-imagined Conan as a brooding rural militia man, and pitted him against the latest appearance of the Mythos horror?

[Glyph]

I think Lovecraft and Howard were not really that different in how they treated otherworldly creatures. In Lovecraft's works, people were not always meek and helpless in the face of horrors, whether it be law enforcement arresting cultists, the military invading Innsmouth, or a group of hardy men assaulting the Curwen farm. Even the original appearance of Cthulhu had him getting rammed with a ship.

Lovecraft also, like Howard, seemed to believe that having a straightforward mindset was a protection of sorts. From The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, describing the aftermath of the raid: "It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed." It is the citified and gentrified folk who come out the worst in Lovecraft's stories.

Most of them, anyways. Some of them have a determination to face evil down, delving into dangerous knowledge - and they often succeed, bearing mental scars but not succumbing to despair or madness. Banishing the Dunwich horror, turning the sorcerer Curwen back to dust, etc.

I don't think Howard differed from him too much in that respect, either. Conan encountered a lot of supernatural horrors, but he also received a surprising amount of aid from friendly, or at least allied, wielders of magic.

So... I think Conan the rural militia man would probably fare pretty well against Lovecraftian horror, although he would probably do even better if he had someone like Dr. Willet helping him.

[Iduno]

So you need both do-ers and thinkers, and specialists do better? That might also come down to characters who are the best at both make for uninteresting stories.