HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

rogermexico otm

Yup

But what in the text is good

Like idk Poe invented detectives but Holmes is orders of magnitude better than Dupin, surely, to the point where Dupin is a curiosity for the learned.

Confidential to darragh I am not trolling, this is not trolling

I did recently read Poe's Dupin story "Marie Roget" and that was stunningly boring. Some of the Dupin stories are very clever but I never felt it was anywhere near his best.

'The Colour Out Of Space' was pretty unfocused and kind of dragged for a movie under two hours but it did look pretty sometimes.

I think Shadow over Innsmouth is great. Lovecraft doles out information so the reader identifies with the narrator as they both make new discoveries. This identification means the final twist is genuinely shocking, creepy, and unnerving as if it is happening TO THE READER. This, to me, seems to be a major, not minor innovation/achievement, though I haven't read any real predecessors except Poe.

Dismissing Lovecraft because of his writing is similar to people who dismiss Tolkien because he didn't write real characters and say Game of Thrones is more modern and "better." They are foundational and their antiquarian ways are part of their charm.

I’m not charmed by poor writing. His fans admit he’s a poor stylist and I’m like…ok…

There is more to writing than style.

In this guy’s case I can’t get past it. Anyway post spoilers if you’re gonna talk about the twist being good imo like I said I’m not giving it another go personally.

But I shouldn’t try to argue really

SPOILERS TO 90 YEAR OLD BOOK: Narrator recounts his visit to creepy New England port town where he discovers stories of the Deep Ones, a race of fishy humanoids who live in the sea and breed with humans. The half-breeds start out mostly human and become progressively more fishy as they age. Narrator narrowly escapes the town as he is chased by Deep Ones and their cult. Years later, narrator finds his ancestors came from the town and he notices not so subtle changes in his appearance. Narrator accepts his transformation and returns to the town to swim beneath the sea with his Deep One brethren forever more.

His fans admit he’s a poor stylist and I’m like…ok…

― silby, Saturday, March 14, 2020 1:14 PM

Not really. Despite some awkwardness that gets to be a pain and an over-usage of certain words, I think he's a good stylist; the atmosphere and gnarly ornamental physicality of the prose is a big part of what makes the stories beautiful and memorable. I find it amazing that some "fans" miss this but a lot of fantasy fans want their prose as transparent as possible and think Joss Whedon is exemplary. Yet I don't think he would be nearly so popular if he'd gone for a plain style.

I haven't read everything yet but I think Innsmouth is one of his greatest achievements.

counterpoint: he only used the word squamous once but the world never shuts up abt it

i'm in the "important figure couldn't write for fuck" camp and have always found him exhausting (joshi is worse tho lol): a reason why he counts as "important (if unreadable)" is that his descriptions (even and perhaps especially the bad ones) created lots of unrealised visualisable space for comic book art which took his ball and ran with it (in less racist directions) (mostly)

Lovecraft’s prose style is kinda like Kirby’s drawing style imo - full of force and power and barely able to contain groundbreaking ideas, sort of crude and rough and bizarrely grotesque, but also capable of beauty and awe. both foundational figures.

(running w mark s ref to comics there)

Technically both did a lot of things “wrong”, but it doesnt matter ultimately

I know that he didnt use sqamous much but then his fans read his letters too and he might have used it more in them.

The visuals were already there in many cases. Again, "Shadow Over Innsmouth" is lovely.

Even worse: I fear that many fantasy readers get impatient with visual description and carefully created textures and believe that's what movie adaptations are there for.

Also should have noted one of his greatest strengths: descriptions of settings. MMmmmm… terraces and gambrel roofs.

That's one area even a lot of my favorite writers disappoint me. But I don't feel I can give examples until I've read at least the majority of any given writer.

at Hoover Dam recently I had the experience of sighting down a massive structure with angles that were just a little wrong. it’s disorienting af

Of Lovecraft’s antecedents - Poe is def a better stylist, but his ideas are more earthbound. Dunsany is unreadable imo. Machen is frustrating. RW Chambers is occasionally incredible, but v inconsistent. Lovecraft surpasses them all.

he doesn't surpass m.r. james :D

(never read chambers, agree on all the others)

The titular story in King in Yellow is just chefskiss.jpg, perfect

I always wonder if Nabokov read it, cf Pale Fire

I think all in all, Machen and Dunsany are much better prose writers but debatable whether they more worthwhile.

I'm surprised you found Dunsany unreadable. I've only read his Time And The Gods collection (not the omnibus) so far but despite the occasional mannerism I didn't like, I thought he was terrific.

MR James can be annoying as any of these writers at times.

It's strange that Poe can be such an easy read, but there are a bunch of his stories that I've found more difficult than anything else I've read.

Algernon Blackwood, according to editor David Hartwell in this big Dark Descent horror anthology I'm (still) reading, didn't rate Lovecraft (even tho Lovecraft thought Blackwood was the v tops) - MR James was similarly sniffy abt Lovecraft - what's going on here? A reaction against Lovecraft's vulgarity? Fathers disowning their most loyal son? Literary snobbery - or acute critical discrimination? Has Lovecraft improved over time (readerly time, cosmic time)?

in his piece on LeFanu, James makes a point of trash-talking Poe, so I can see him not getting Lovecraft at all, especially on the basis of early HPL stories

Blackwood must have enjoyed Lovecraft's praise for "The Willows" in Supernatural Horror in Literature but I can imagine him wanting to keep his distance ... HPL's fiction is not much like Blackwood's

for me, Lovecraft has not improved over time, but it seems appropriate that he's canonical now

It might just be a complete disregard for American authors in general... and Blackwood & James were academics, Lovecraft was a pulp magazine writer.

pretty easy to imagine any given reader not grooving on Lovecraft tbh

when I was a young science fiction fiend Lovecraft's rep felt checkered on aesthetic grounds. like, when people would ref him, they'd say he was nuts before they got into anything about the stories. when I started getting more into horror it became clear that to some people he was an absolute giant, but those people still seemed like a sort of those-guys-with-their-obsession sub-category within the broader world of weird fiction. it is interesting to me that the particulars of his imagined cosmos have such broad reach.

Yeah, I feel like MR James's thing was ghost stories and within that frame of reference Lovecraft could easily be seen as just some deranged american sci-fi thing.

I think it was perhaps in correspondence with (Lovecraft's disciple) August Derleth that Blackwood said there was too much love of rotting flesh and not enough spirituality in Lovecraft. He was very polite about it.

Who knows with MR James, he seems like any number of things could make him bristle.

Continuing my evaluation of prose from above, I think Blackwood is often a stunning writer, a lot more deft and agile than Lovecraft, but his longwindedness and belaboring can be irritating.

man, going back through this thread and seeing the "everybody back then was racist" defense being trotted out by one of the worst people ever to post here really brings me back

Still enjoying Dunsany quite a bit, coming to more of a love/hate point with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E Howard, too often a slog but still some of my favorite stuff ever. Despite so much boring work, William Hope Hodgson never grates that much stylistically, my love for him hasn't taken much of a hit yet.

Maybe reading the complete works of most worthwhile writers will make you hate them a little bit?

it is interesting to me that the particulars of his imagined cosmos have such broad reach.

Critics like Clute and Monleon describe the horror/fantasy/sf genres as emerging in reaction to Enlightenment concepts of reason and a rational universe, and Lovecraft, who saw himself as a kind of 18th century philosophe, was a firm believer in that worldview ... despite his gestures toward esotericism, he seems much more skeptical about traditional beliefs in the sacred and transcendent than earlier horror writers were ... that outlook gives his revival of the sacred and transcendent in negative forms a weird SF charge

tl;dr in spite of his archaic style he's a modernist and his cosmic nihilism gets to modern audiences in a way traditional gothic stuff usually doesn't

I'm not sure how Cthulhu plush toys fit into this

Despite my fondness for this stuff it utterly baffles me why people are still so impressed by the cosmic horror concept.

Jess Nevins yet again
http://jessnevins.com/blog/?p=956

Maybe reading the complete works of most worthwhile writers will make you hate them a little bit?

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Wednesday, October 21, 2020 12:54 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't really appreciate Picasso until I took a class devoted entirely to his work and realized that a lot of his work that made its way into the world wasn't actually intended for public consumption and resulted in kinda watering down his genius.

I'm actually working my way through the complete Lovecraft atm and, yeah, I can see why he wasn't big on releasing some of his juvenilia.

Despite my fondness for this stuff it utterly baffles me why people are still so impressed by the cosmic horror concept.

I wonder if it's a lack of satisfaction. The core of cosmic horror is a physical sensation I think most people have felt - a rock at the pit of your stomach, a momentary loss of self, flash attacks of fear and anxiety. The inability of anyone to translate that sensation perfectly into text keeps it alive.

FTR, I find a lot of his stuff effectively creepy in a sui generis way few writers seem able to replicate but his overreliance on xenophobic tropes is easily (and obviously) his weakest point. Beyond even those moments of jaw-droppingly racist shit, it's just this tendency to depict his protagonists as horrified specifically by the physical qualities of some 'monstrous' entity without offering much in the way of non-material reasons for the terror on display. 'It...it's so gross-looking! Ew!'

It's more that I don't get why cosmic horror still seems so new and novel to so many people, even just the idea of there being no god to look after you. This should be a more familiar idea than it seems to be.
I remember people talking about how stoic in the face of grimness the norse myths/old beliefs are I guess not every religion had the idea that the gods are your friends or will do you any favors?

If I was encountering some typical monster of this genre, I think the physical fear and disgust may overwhelm any philosophical horrors.

In the canonical stories, Conan remarks in conversation that it is best to avoid doing anything that would draw Crom's attention, as he hands out only dooms and trouble...

Crom kinda the same way as Cthulu... not much of an ally.

Handled deftly in the first film:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVFpy5UwsAU

And there's so much repetitive formula in horror like this, part of the feeling that I'm slogging through these writers at this point is that there isn't many real surprises after a certain point. Curious to see who will keep it unpredictable. Dunsany really isn't the same though, he changes the mode of his stories more.

I was going to get them later but I just bought Jess Nevins two books on horror, woohoo!

I see in Lovecraft a sort of anti-gnosticism; rather than knowledge bringing power, it brings dread and unspeakable horror. We're really better off not knowing about seafood cults and Mad Arabs.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”