#wheatleyposting

[rhapsoteas]

stars dont twinkle the moon doesnt shine

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

From what I've heard about Dennis Wheatley, he reminds me a lot of H. P. Lovecraft; an occult thriller writer whose racist and classist attitudes are so extreme and pervasive in his work that they'll inevitably show up in any conversation about him. There was even a brief window when they were both writing - The Forbidden Territory was published in 1933 and Lovecraft's last story, "The Haunter of the Dark", was published in 1936.

The obvious difference is that, in their respective lifetimes, Wheatley was a multi-millionaire whose works would reliably sell tens of thousands of copies, while Lovecraft was a poor and obscure man scraping by via publishing in pulp magazines. And after death, Wheatley is almost entirely forgotten and remembered mostly as an artifact of 20th-century English conservativism, while Lovecraft is considered one of the greatest and most popular horror writers of all time. It's very Rich Man and Lazarus. Any idea what caused this situation?

The obvious difference is that Wheaty never created anything quite so distinctive and crowd-pleasing as Cthulhu - which is a shame to say, since he was definitely a pioneer of the pop culture image of the occult, and I firmly believe that both James Bond and The Flashman Papers (and by extension all their imitators) have a very clear Wheatley influence stamped right through their DNA like a stick of Brighton rock.

(The Bond flicks probably draw some influence from Hitchcock's North By Northwest - leading man in a sharp suit, supervillain with an outlandish pad, it's a robust formula - but Hitch actually knew Wheaty, and had been in talks to do an adaptation of The Forbidden Territory long before Ian Fleming ever put pen to paper. If we pursue the metaphor of Bond's DNA, we must conclude he's severely inbred.)

Not far down from that, though, we have to consider both men's writing styles. Wheaty, God love him, was not an accomplished prose stylist. If any given passage isn't ostentatiously mentioning the left-hand path or genderswapping, you wouldn't necessarily know it was Wheatley over any other rough, tough, stodgily conservative author. By contrast, when you read one of Lovecraft's grandiose, florid descriptions of even something as anodyne as an air conditioning system, absolutely nobody could mistake it for anyone else's work. And more broadly, Lovecraft's pulp fiction influences, bouncing off Robert E. Howard and the lads as he was, give his material a tautness that Wheaty completely lacks.

While I don't think this plays too much into how their legacies have panned out, another clear difference is the attitude to sex. As I simply will never stop finding quite funny, Wheatley, despite the conservatism, couldn't keep the horniness out of his books (especially as the years rolled by, and societal standards changed and/or he could simply tell his editors to fuck off), at one point actually penning erotic fanfiction of his own work. Meanwhile, Lovecraft was as straightforwardly scared of sex as he was of sea travel or the Portuguese. Purportedly the young Lovecraft had a very formative moment when, wanting to find out what had driven his parents mad, he cracked upon a medical encyclopaedia to find out just what 'syphilis' is, anyway. And the influence on his later work is obvious when you think about it, his beasties are heavy on fluids and convulsing flesh - to say nothing of how sex is actually treated in his work, most prominently in The Dunwich Horror, where a seemingly incestuous relationship produces cosmic horrors, and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where seemingly interracial relationships produce cosmic horrors.

(If this does play into their legacy in any way, it's probably in that you could give an eight-year-old a Lovecraft collection, but Wheatley would have to be graded as adults only, even though eight-year-olds are basically his ideal audience.)

[misty-wolf-draws]

Hey, another question for the Portal fandom.

What do you call this angle of Wheatley?

Like, it's this specific type of way he looks where he's looking somewhere and his eye isn't angled to look at the player.

[zunra2]

i promised better pictures of them so here they are

here are some other silly moments they got into

(fyi for everyone reblogging, I did end up uploading the downloads!!! https://www.tumblr.com/zunra2/716700042109566976/i-made-the-downloads)

there's a little notepad doc that should answer any questions but of course feel free to dm me anything you may have to ask! have fun with

[afrozenmicrowave]

my friend wanted me to draw The Moron (Humanley to be exact) so :)

[fangshapedmaws]

more wheatlels

[medicatedmenace]

wheatley is so confusing like i have a deep respect for him for no reason and i also want to throw that Aperture Science Intelligence Dampening Sphere into an Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator,,,,,,,

but i also love him very much and want to protect him forever

[fabletally-moved]

Wheatley time