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HP Lovecraft's "The white ship"

This is my first time ever reading an HP Lovecraft story. At first glance, I can feel the gothic style of writing in this piece. I've read Frankenstein before, so the word choice and rhythm of the piece feel familiarly gothic. 
As soon as I finished the piece, I immediately thought it felt like a dream sequence, not quite horror, just disturbing. The passage of time feels relative, I can't help but compare it to Frankenstein, in the sense that both main characters in these pieces have a desire for the forbidden. Victor wants to create life, Elton wants to go to a forbidden place no one has returned from. 
The piece is also very straightforward with it's message.. It seems like Lovecraft was letting us know that pursuing pleasures and wonders is worthless.
The melodrama of Basil fantasizing and thinking with such passion about the places he cant reach, again, comparing it to Frankenstein. Victor wants to do something similar, the impossible, play God. There’s recurring themes of temptation towards the forbidden
Another thing that stood out to me was the bearded man. The bearded mysterious man in media is usually a wise man who initiates the call to adventure. Like in The Hobbit or The Legend of Zelda. This time the bearded man isn’t only calling out main character to an adventure, but to a journey showing him all the places he shouldn’t go. Another particuraly gothic element is the atmosphere. The mystical islands under the moonlight, a ship wrecking storm. Islands where no man has ever been, the edge of the world. The atmosphere gets even more surreal when its revealed that it was all a dream journey.
The melodrama of Basil fantasizing and thinking with such passion about the places he cant reach, again, comparing it to Frankenstein. Victor wants to do something similar, the impossible, play God. There’s recurring themes of temptation towards the forbidden.
In this day and age, the gothic elements are not that recurrent in horror. Nowadays it tends to focus less on the supernatural, unreal aspects and more on the psychological. However, the almost surrealist atmospheres can be found in some horror movies today, For example: Midsommar’s almost folkloric Swedish town. It might not be the color palette we picture gothic environments to be in but it’s still a sort of surreal environment away from society. 

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