I didn't like Prisonner of Ice at all, I found it very very far from Lovecraft, contrarily to Shadow of the Comet (lasergun-totting future aliens and time travel stuff, beh). It had the nice touch of featuring Jorge Luis Borges as a character, though. He has written some very nice pages about Lovecraft, and is also linked to the lovecraftian lore by urban legends. As the director of the Buenos Aires public library, he is supposed to have hosted an edition of the Necronomicon there, and some like to claim he had lost his sight by reading it.
One thing I like in the Lovecraft universe is the role of books. I love stories about evil tomes, and Lovecraft's are a bit paradigmatic of these. Heck, even Evil Dead (at least 2 and 3, I think) feature the Necronomicon. But stories such as Perez-Reverte's Club Dumas (Ninth Gate) also play with this concept of dangerous rare volumes of ancient arcane mystery.
One OTHER cool thing with that stuff, is that it merges with reality. The Borges urban legend is an exemple, but I've known people who were into occultism and stuff, and they truly believed that Lovecraft described reality, and that there were planes of existence around us, populated with unthinkable entities that some enlightened humans could go meet through decorporation. Discussing with such people is always awesome, and I love authors who manage to generate beliefs (even though Lovecraft himself was clearly not taking himself seriously). There's something magical and dreamy about that.
Also, there's a mediatic french writer that I dislike a huge lot, named Michel Houellebecq, who, I must admit, wrote a very nice biography of Lovecraft. It got translated in english as "[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft:_Against_the_World,_Against_Life]HP Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life[/url]", and I really recommend it. It's the coolest writer biography I've read, along with Emmanuel Carrere's (very subjective) book about PK Dick.
(And yes, I should totally try that Quest for Glory game, some day. I loved the first 2 episodes, on the Amiga.)
Post edited June 05, 2012 by Telika
