HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

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.”

I pretty much still think everything that I used to think about HP Lovecraft, though I am now perhaps more conscious of his problematic racism.

seafood cults

Dread Lobster

On a random whim, I started reading the Illuminatus! trilogy after skipping it all my life and there’s a surprisingly amount of Lovecraft in it. He must have been having a moment in the mid-70s

in the early-mid 70s Ballantine published almost all of Lovecraft's fiction in paperbacks ... prior to that I think most of it was available only in pricey Arkham House editions

I think my first ever was this paperback:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VdU2lrV0L._SX373_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

A friend of mine who has a kid says that Cthulhu is now in the Beano, which is something.

Can never wrap my head around kawaii + Lovecraftian grotesque
https://imgur.com/gallery/L76LU

this SCP short, SCP Overlord, (i couldn't find an SCP thread on ilx) is a v good mix of tactical warfare, videocam supernatural perception (think Ringu), and modernised, new england lovecraft:

trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZUj1fNQL8

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-discover-strange-creatures-under-a-half-mile-of-ice/

Whisperer in Darkness was dope, even though I felt at times the narrator had to be the dumbest smart person in the history of man

"Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant bholes"
"Below him the ground was festering with gigantic bholes; and even as he looked, one reared up"
"There were hideous struggles with the bleached, viscous bholes"

OH COME ON

Dud.

I always thought that story was terribly padded, badly structured and he kind of goes overboard to keep talling you how old the place is, but it's got some cool stuff. Shadow Over Innsmouth will probably always be my favorite.

I have a collection of other writers (Ramsey Campbell, Gaiman, etc.) expanding on the Innsmouth mythos... it's not all great but it's pretty fun. Lovecraft was known for encouraging other writers in this kind of shared world-building

N.K. Jemisin wrote a short story (expanded into 2 books) specifically to tackle Lovecraft's racism https://www.tor.com/2016/09/28/the-city-born-great/

She is explicitly not a fan while Victor LaValle takes a more - not sympathetic but maybe more steeped in some level of appreciation to Lovecraft in The Ballad of Black Tom a response to The Horror at Red Hook