HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

95% of his horror-type writing is beyond classic, especially because the stilted writing makes it sound like it's actual lost antique blasphemies that have been hidden in Stygian tombs for eons beyond count. His Dunsany stuff is crap, "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the one thing by him I could never get thru. He has some poetry too which is awful, if you can find it. Have never read his political essays but those are probably pretty un-PC and not really worth reading unless you are ultra-completist.

"As with so much genre fiction, Lovecraft's oeuvre isn't for everyone."

'Look at him, he's too imaginative.' Fuck you, no one's OEUVRE is for everyone. Lovecraft is in a direct line from Nathaniel Hawthorne, EA Poe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Stephen King. But I guess the Wall Street Journal writing about literature is like the Wall Street Journal writing about music.

My two fave Lovecraft stories are The Colour Out of Space, which reminds me(or it should be the other way around, I think) of Brian Aldiss' The Saliva Tree and

Favorite section of any of the CoC roleplaying books: the sidebar in Cthulhu Now! that finally addresses the question of "What happens when you drop a nuclear bomb on Cthulhu?"

A. Cthulhu blows apart but then reassembles back together. Only now he's radioactive.

This may be the dorkiest thread on ILE.

This may be the dorkiest thread on ILE.

-- Edward III (ehonaue...), October 13th, 2006.

hardly!

According to the epitaph on his grave, he *is* Providence.

Examples?

Ned, I assume nobody took you there during Terrastock 6?

Ed -- alas no! We wuz too busy with the rock and roll, I guess.

I've been there too. Even picked up the $$ "Lovecraft's Providence" at the Brown bookstore.

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e66/LimitedLiabilityGirl/hellocthulhu.gif

He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering

Or trying to find breakfast...

Tsathoggua was created by Clark Ashton Smith, not Lovecraft. I hope this Luc Sante moron gets fired for that.

I always loved that one. Anyone know the name so i can go read it....NOW?

The Shunned House.

not too good.

It's not like I'm drawing from a very deep pool of knowledge, but I can't really think of another early 20th century writer who writes about other races and classes with the same virulent and obsessive disgust as Lovecraft. It's probably partly because, as that article says, Lovecraft was afraid of/disgusted by everything, and I don't think it's a reason not to read his books, but it's still pretty notable. At the risk of being condescending, just because everyone was racist back then doesn't mean that some weren't more racist (or at least more actively interested in race) than others.

He was married to a Jewish woman(as I recall), and while he obviously thought black people were more closely related to apes that whites, in doing so he admits he has the same origins and they fall between.
Furthermore, I can't think of an instance where he as an author in any way speaks poorly of a race of people any more 'virulently' than any other author of his time(if possibly a bit more bluntly, subtlety was never his strong suit when it comes to matters of human interaction). He speaks of primitive cultures as the kind who would commit what modern society calls heinous acts and bang away at drums around fires and throw spears at unsuspecting travellers. Thing is, that's
A: a plot device. SOMEONE has to worship the Old Ones
B: not something to be viewed as a negative in that world. THEY are the 'correct' culture in those stories!

He, if anything, was a bit of a narcissist. Anything that related to himself or his tastes was viewed as better. New England is where all his stories take place, or are 'based from' in some way. That's the ONLY place the upper-class people he wrote as could come from in his mind. They were all white, they all liked the same things as him, and so on.
He really comes off more IGNORANT than anything.

And this makes him different from the racists of his era how?