Lovecraft is undoubtedly a master of atmospheric writing. His strength is in setting scenes and crafting an appropriate mood with which to manage the experience he's looking for from his readers. The opening paragraph of The Dunwich Horror is a fine example of this skill:
When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Beyond that, though, I have to make the striking confession that I think I hate H.P. Lovecraft's work.
Reading Lovecraft's stories are, to me, the horror equivalent of reading a trashy romance paperback on a crowded train. You've got to have significant self-confidence to take undampened pleasure in reading this sort of thing in public. Lovecraft's naming conventions and otherworldly jargon always read undeniably cheesy to me. The actions which take place in the story and his characters' absurdly overdone gravitas in reaction to them always strike me as so unnatural and overly saturated that I find them impossible to take seriously:
"Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...." rang the hideous croaking out of space. "Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...."
"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!..."
Perhaps that's part of the charm. I have never been a fan of camp. It often falls deafly on me and I gather no amusement from it whatsoever. I feel a lot of the same vibe shared between Lovecraft's stories and cheesy '80s horror films. So maybe that's what I'm missing here. Either way, the content of these stories and the way in which they are told is not something that appeals to me, and given that I am now several stories into Lovecraft's oeuvre, I expect they will never appeal to me the way they appeal to Lovecraft's fans.
Undoubtedly inspired by far better writers such as Poe, Lovecraft falls into some of the same complaints I have with Poe's work (although I love him, generally); he relies on some of the same woefully overdone dialogue in fruitless attempts to reconstruct the vernacular of the time period which he depicts:
"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front winders. An' then ... an' then...."
I won't mince words here: This is utter garbage. I cannot stand it, and I refuse to read it. Perhaps I'm missing out on key story turns by skipping this stinking trash, but I'd rather stop reading the story than plod through this kind of thing. I level the same complaints towards Poe when he resorts to this crap, and Lovecraft has no excuse because folksy vernacular has already been depicted in a far better manner by writers prior to him from which he ought to have taken inspiration.
I find it more than passing amusing that some works created in the modern day which are undoubtedly inspired by Lovecraft appeal to me far more than the work of the man himself. I think this is a credit to his imagination and the atmospheric quality of his writing, but also affected by his lack of ability as an actual storyteller and his lack of properly managing the tone of his stories. They've never struck me as particularly terrifying, either; this could be due to the fact that he so often leans heavily on fear of the other; that which is foreign to us. This was surely more revolting and disconcerting to one such as Lovecraft, who is often criticized in modern circles for being a racist and a xenophobe. Such an enlightened, open-minded thinker as myself is utterly unaffected by such archaic thinking. Kidding aside; this brand of horror doesn't work for me, although the otherworldliness of his cosmic horror is something I do find enticing. I suspect his aesthetic is strongly responsible for why I gravitate towards Lovecraftian horror, but not Lovecraft's horror.
The more of Lovecraft I read, the less I like him. Which is ironic considering that Lovecraft relies so much on the horror of the unknown, the unknowable, and the other... And his mythology is so much more strange and enticing when you know very little about it.
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