The end of the first season of True Detective makes twice as much sense to me now. I am now at about a 60% level of understanding.
That was robert w chambers actually.
I think Delver is more an expression of your english gothic romance than it is the more modern american grotesque honestly, it reeks of mr hyde and doctor frankenstein and the classical vs romantic conflicts that infected the writing at the time.
Since you mention it, I think it's pretty telling that Chambers, Robert E Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft were all american I think the relative isolation and post colonial racism they experience did a lot to inform their work and the feeling of settlers anxiety could be blown way out of proportion by the fantasy element. I think it also helped that they all mostly had an antiquarian or historian bent, but studied cultures (whether native or intercontinental) that were completely alien to them.
Zendikar's original 2 sets channeled some of this feeling pretty well to me, because I feel like it captured some of the pulp sword and sorcery atmosphere pretty well and they left enough unstated. The people were new there and no one was telling them anything so they kept rubbing their noses into it. The looming hedrons, cards like
Grim Discovery and the expeditions, especially
Soul Stair Expedition are great spice when you aren't paying attention to idiotic vampire and ally synergies. The fact that the place was completely alien did sorta channel the pulp horror, or at least lovecrafts poetry, the big reveal in the 3rd set did even sorta follow suit, though much too much of it was done in the daylight and framing any of this like a big stupid war was a dumb decision.
Anyway lastly Lovecraft was racist in a really werid way because he seemed very self aware about it, he used to call himself a pure white racist and tell people he only had faith in nordic or germanic peoples but in his relationships he told a sort of different story, forming relationships with european immigrants of all stripes and marrying a jew. I think xenophobia was something essential to his conception of the world and something he held onto like a safety blanket his lack of range in his writing really spoke to the use of crutches if you know what I mean. Anyway by then racism was already becoming something you were supposed to keep to yourselves in america, but you have to remember in the port cities of the east people all kept to their own kind so there were even vast differences in language to go with your differences in culture and class so its easy to think why he may find the bohunks impossible to deal with and probably up to something (I'm allowed to say it being one myself).
I'm not sure magic is capable of enough looming enormity and fear of the unknown while its sticking to its "building to epic conflict" style of block structure but maybe the 2 set block will change that. Just give me 2 blocks of atmosphere and a story about a white black human searching for her sister in a sinister city and you'll be on your way there rosewater.
