The Case of Charles Dexter Ward Podcast - Episode 01 - Get it First on Sounds

[@Saltybuher]

Its brilliant.

[@davidwhite7294]

This is appalling, you have taken one of the most interesting and unique stories in literature and labouriously and systematically kicked it to death. Why?

[@theengine]

Oh, because "laboriously" is how I would describe Lovecrafts writing. It's awful. He has a few interesting ideas, and if you eliminate the racism, you're left with a couple of morsels of an idea that more talented people can turn into worthwhile art.

[@leokneedus]

@@theengine I know this comment is a year old but this is probably one of the worst if not *the* worst I’ve ever seen. More disappointingly it’s has three likes. How much Lovecraft have you actually read? Racism is really only present in the rats in the walls in the form of the name of the cat. Hardly worth mentioning. Stephen King has called him the greatest horror writer of the 20th century. If it was so easy for “more talented people” to turn his work into “worthwhile art” then why has there been so little of it? One podcast and a recent tv show? No movies I can think of. At least none worth watching. Please just stick to commenting on Harry Potter or Percy Jackson videos. *Your mind clearly doesn’t have the ability to correlate all it’s contents.*

[@theengine]

@@leokneedus All of it. I've read all of it. And of you can't see that the core themes of the works, the fear of the alien, the other, then you need to retake remedial freshman English again. The Dunwich Horror alone is explicitly about how swarthy poor people are tainting their race with half breeds. The resulting "spawn" is teased and tormented and then killed by a dog. The three bookish white guys with money drive out to the poor area and kill the other with weed killer. The overtones aren't even "over"; they're explicit. You seem to think racism consists of simply saying the n-word. We could go over each and every story line by line for you, but I'm not gonna waste my time talking to someone who thinks "Stephen King said so" is a relevant or productive thing to say in a conversation. Oh, and as to your reference at the end, the whole thing by Lovecraft is that no human mind has the ability to correlate its contents. Even when you try to reference the material, you fuck it up.

[@Rardlesot]

@@leokneedus Dude ... First, there is plenty of obvious racism. Try The Medusa's Coil (a story which I think is actually pretty good) or the Horror at Red Hook, or the frequent references to 'swarthy' types in the Call of Cthulhu itself. Then there is the less obvious but more pervasive horror about social inversions, the crude slaves rising up and over throwing the cultured ruling class in The Mountains of Madness. He's more willing to identify a star headed semi-vegetable alien as a human ("They were men!") than he would a black person. For all that, I like some of his work. I don't think he was actually more significantly racist than others of his time; Hell, my favourite writer is Joseph Conrad and he wrote this book called well, google his ibbliography ... and if you don't know why Peter Jackson's Damnbusters remake has never been finished, find out the name of the black Labrador which was used as a codeword in the real mission. But there is no point in trying to ignore or erase Lovecraft's issues around race. The vaguely good thing is he seems to have become somewhat less bigoted over time, and might have evolved in a reasonable human being if he'd lived a bit longer.

[@Rardlesot]

It isn't appalling. It's pretty good. Well produced, slickly performed and with some interesting takes on what was, bluntly, a creaky and over written (even by Howie's standards) novel.