HPL as "bad writer"

I'm picking this notion up from its recent mention in the "Recent purchases" thread.

This morning my daughter was watching a streamed episode of Scooby Doo before school. It involved the "H.P. Hatecraft" character (voiced by Jeffrey Coombs!) and his sycophant Howard E. Roberts (and Cthulhu stand-in Char Gar Gothakon). If you haven't caught this already, check these links:
http://scoobydoo.wikia.com/wiki/H.P._Hatecraft
http://scoobydoo.wikia.com/wiki/The_Shrieking_Madness

Anyway, Hatecraft was presented as a hack justly excluded from the literary establishment. The idea that he was a "bad" writer seemed to be an integral part of the allusion to HPL. I thought with the Library of America volumes and the glut of scholarship over the last decade or two, it was pretty well established that there was real value in the HPL corpus, so it kind of startled me to see that characterization used to frame even a parody of him.

What do you think? Is there still pervasive rejection of HPL as a literary figure of significance, and does anyone make any interesting arguments along those lines today?

Well, my very casually garnered sense is that, amongst other things, there is still a knock against HPL for allegedly cramming adjective against adjective or using adjectives like "unnameable", "unspeakeable", etc. too much. Then there is the usual knock against his characters and their type. I believe I've heard sf critic gary Wolfe make this criticism of Lovecraft. (My suspicions are that, if you did a mathematical comparison of the density of HPL's adjectives and their percentage of his overall word count, you would not find it that different than many more acclaimed writers.)

Several people claim to love him and then, in the next breath, almost apologize for his alleged faults. (I'm thinking, specifically, of Neal Gaiman who alleged the structure of "The Call of Cthulhu" was a mess in a documentary on Lovecraft.)

So, yes, HPL still seems a taste one must apologize for in certain circles even in terms of literary quality to say nothing of issues of sexism and racisms and xenophobia.

Of course, one can love a writer and not be blind to his faults, but I think many of the purely stylistic criticisms of Lovecraft are unjustified.

Caveats: I'm not a native speaker (of English), and I read a lot of his works in translation.

Do I think HPL was a literary genius? - frankly: no! Do I think he had a brilliant imagination? : yes! Weigh those against each other as you please.

Genre fiction always has difficulty with the literati (cf 'Ooh, Those Awful Orcs!' by Colin Wilson). And Lovecraft's style is subject to a lot of potential parody.

Kenneth Hite's Tour de Lovecraft is imho the best and fairest critique of Lovecraft's writing. Ken doesn't spare HPL when dealing with the truly awful stories, but Ken also notes that HPL wrote some stunning works of fiction as well. And almost every writer (notable or not) has some clinkers in their body of work.

Yes, I think that like every other genre writer, HPL is dismissed as a minor light in a dismal genre (at best) by many literaty critics. Much like works acknowledged as great literature can't be fantasy, horror, or science-fiction, because 'everyone knows' that nothing written in those fiedls are any good.

>1 paradoxosalpha:

Posts 142-147, to date:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/126593

I'll watch those Scooby-Do's later. I know that Harlan Ellison did a voice (playing himself?) in "The Shrieking Madness". Not sure about the other one.

Contemporary literati wouldn't exist if it weren't for genre ghettos. It looks bad when the inmates escape.

Joshi makes a very cogent argument throughout I Am Providence as to HPL's oft-underestimated talent as a writer. He certainly wasn't a uniformly excellent writer of fiction (his letters are another story altogether), but when he hit it, he was onto something as uniquely expressed as his means to convey it can only be described as driven.

I tink the crux of the problem re: the acceptance of HPL as a serious writer comes down to this... We're all familiar with the story of how Lovecraft submitted "The Call of Cthulhu" to Farnsworth Wright, Wright rejected it, and HPL sent it back to him with that famous letter, right? Remeber what that letter said?

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

This gets quoted all the time, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone comment on what an astonishing and transgressive thing that was for a fiction writer to say. Let's compare those remarks to some an even more famous one made by HPL's contemporary William Faulkner in which he said that the only thing worth writing about was "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself". Another respected writer's remarks: I'm reading a Kurt Vonnegut book right now (Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons) in which he stresses the importance of writing stories that are not "weak on dialogue and motivation and characterization". You see the same thing, over and over again, when you read writers instructing other writers on how to write well: character is king, human conflict is king, human interaction is king. And along comes HPL and says, in essence, "Fuck all that. None of that shit is important. The Earth, in cosmic terms, is a flyspeck, and the entire human race is simply a colony of microorganisms living on that flyspeck." So in order to accept the aesthetic validity of HPL's fiction, you have to accept that he's right (or at least can be right, some of the time) and that the likes of Faulkner and Vonnegut are wrong (or at least aren't right all the time), and that's just too big of a leap for many members of the literati (et al) to make.

The thing was indescribable! It was four feet tall, brownish in color…

What a pleasant surprise to have a discussion of writing and critical values. Seems forever since I've seen that on LT. Speaking with praiseworthy honbesty of his own mental life,Paul Valery -- an unquestionably great writer -- pointed-out that he studied what interested him, not necessarily what mattered. We all do that, but we sometimes have the feeling, particularly if we're a little guilty about what might be considered a waste of time, that we have to justify those interests by saying that X or Y is "great". I think that's what's going-on here.
After at-least fifty years -- oy --of reading him. I'll stand aside, in admiration, from Bruce's shrewd observation about literati and genre fiction. He's right, and the matter will never, CAN never, be settled on the purely conceptual level. Meanwhile, Lovecraft is one of those guys whom I want to like, but cannot continually enjoy. His style, and what I will call his "emotional vocabulary" just don't pack the punch which he wants to deliver. The means don't match the matter. It's no good just to say something is eerie, threatening, or nightmarish: the reader must be led to experience those various kinds of dread. And Lovecraft simply doesn't do it -- at-least for me. For me the closest he gets are in "Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Whisperer in darkness".
If I may make some comparisons, I think Lovecraft's conceptual horrors are no more horrible than Anais Nin's erotica ia a turn-on, or Billy Collins' effusions are poetry. But as always, suum cuique. Have a lovely day all. -- Goddard

I think Lovecraft is an acquired taste, and his style is part of that. I get it. It's either effective or both unintentionally funny and effective—I say unintentionally, because I really don't think HPL had a sense of humor about it! But he's a hard writer to introduce to an adult who's sensitive to good writing.

In re #9. You hit all nail and no thumb: Lovecraft was born without a sense of humour, or else had it removed early-on, in some sort of emotional circumcision. To give the poor fellow his due, he was hardly unique among the other toilers in that particular vineyard (Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, and Derleth come to mind at once). Never a boffo to be found amidst their phantasies: that's part of the reason they are so brittle and unconvincing to readers with a full spectrum of thought and emotion.

>9 timspalding:, 10

HPL actually had a great sense of humor, which is borne out in much of his correspondence and in some of the fiction. Something like "At the Mountains of Madness" is of course dead serious, but several tales, such as "The Haunter of the Dark", in which he fictionally does away with his young friend Robert Bloch, are quite tongue-in-cheek. You can practically imagine a wry smile on his face as he was writing.

Like many other "genre" writers, HPL is a challenge to the reigning aesthetics of much literary fiction, that "good writing" consists in richly imagined characters with complex interior lives—a very limited view of literature. Personally, I'll take Lovecraft's best stuff—fewer than 5 stories, I think—over anything appearing in the New Yorker in the last few years. I'm tired of the stunted concerns of yet another Park Slope genius.

>12 timspalding:

Hiya, Tim! Good to hear from you, by the way!

HPL is a challenge to the reigning aesthetics of much literary fiction, that"good writing" consists in richly imagined characters with complex interior lives—a very limited view of literature. Personally, I'll take Lovecraft's best stuff—fewer than 5 stories, I think—over anything appearing in the New Yorker in the last few years.

Very good points. I think that the genre ghettos keep an awful lot of good or even great writers from being recognized in their lifetimes by non-genre readers who miss out. Look at someone like Jim Thompson. Another pulp novel trash writer whose writing engine was so powerful that it ultimately would not be denied.

>13 semdetenebre:

I think that the genre ghettos keep an awful lot of good or even great writers from being recognized in their lifetimes by non-genre readers who miss out. Look at someone like Jim Thompson.

Or Philip K. Dick... or Dashiell Hammett... or Arthur Machen... or...

Having read The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, even knowing that Dagon is not HPL's strongest tale, I was still a little surprised to find that it was one of my least favorite stories in the volume. I suspect that I join the others for whom HPL's cosmic horror just doesn't really work; Orville R. Emerson's "The Grave", on the other hand, still haunts me with a much more claustrophobic story.

Agreed on the examples of good writers "stuck" in genres, though many voluntarily accept their exile.

And I also agree with Tim's point about not all good writing, even good novels, hinging on realistic, subtle characterisation or an inner mental life. I love that, done well, but there's so much more to explore. Yet when writers do explore, they're often thrown to the margins.

If Lord Dunsany had no sense of humour, King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, recently discussed here, must contain a quite good substitute.

12 > Just out of curiosity, which would you list as HPL's four or so best stories?

Kenneth Hite lists 17. The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Music of Erich Zann, The Cats of Ulthar are among them, and some of my favorites.

Back for a moment to Lovecraft's sense of humour. If you don't swing with SUUM CUIQUE, perhaps you can accept DE GUSTIBUS NON DISPUTANDUM EST. I suppose everybody has SOME sense of humour, but that often has little or nothing to do with what others regard as wit or humour. F'r instance, people think I'm somehow deformed if I can sit through hours of Monty Python wih no visible reaction except incessant prayer for a speedy death, whereas others wonder how I couldn't notice that the house was burning down around me. Simple: I was listening to old Bob & Ray routines, and just couldn't be bothered. Same thing for the metaphysics of HPL and his vision of the tiny speck. This may strike some as having been a big breakthrough in the correspondence of author and editor, but that simply reflects the narrowness of one or both correspondents. This idea was old hat centuries before, not just among philosophers, but among creative writers. I think, however, that most of us can agree that whatever his stature, he stands pretty tall compared to the dwarves writing today in most genres, if for no other reason that he obviously gives -- as witness this discussion -- honest pleasure to intelligent readers. He may have stumbled, but it wasn't because he was stooping to write something that he knew was beneath him. Gotta go: there's something coming out of my woods, and it bears an alarming resemblance to Yogg Sotthoth or one of his playmates.

I've only read a small number of Lovecraft stories -- about 2/3 of the Oates-edited collection -- but I thought most of them were pretty good. The Dunwich Horror, however, I thought was a train wreck. My LT review of the story: http://www.librarything.com/work/1632793/reviews/96846605

In re #20. "A train wreck": how well put. In a nut-shell, it wasn't horrible. QED.

It seems there are two ways for an author to continue to be read: voluntary or forced, the authors people find on their own -- often even if dissauded by cultural authority figures -- and those who must be force fed to readers in school. Of course, in reality, the line is never that bright. Some people will continue to read Moby Dick all the way through without it being assigned reading in school. HPL will not appeal to everyone who picks him up out of personal curiosity. Taste and the first age you come to a writer may finally determine your reaction to him. But that doesn't mean the popular writer is bad. And a popular writer read for decades must, almost by definition, be doing at least one thing very well. Personally, I'm not much of a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but he's been read for a century now avidly by people who discover him on their own. I may complain about the coincidences in his plots, but, obviously for others, they're not a deal breaker, and he has many merits in their eyes.

Likewise, HPL may not have the humor people want -- though I'd argue it's there, specifically, I'm thinking of "Herbert West-Reanimator". They may not like the symbolic verbal denotions of the alien ("indescribeable", "unspeakable", etc). They may not like the lack of idiosyncratic characters. But many obviously disagree. Personally, I find Lovecraft more fascinating the older I get -- though I'd admit that part of it is interest in the man and his philosophy as well as his fiction. Lovecraft would admit he didn't invent the idea of horror based on cosmic insignificance (see Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows"). But he brought it to the age of science, the lab, the scientific study of archaeology to give it new, potent symbols.

Think of HPL's fiction to be a bit like the notion that free will is an illusion. You have to not think about it to proceed in life. You probably don't want to think about how your death and the insignificance of everything you do, every valiant struggle, every arbitrary moral code you seek to uphold. You'd go mad. But HPL's fiction and his writings show him -- and the learned men he chose as characters and probably thought of as examplars of what he most admired in humans -- confronting that reality.

Aristotle said the unexamined life wasn't worth living. In his own way, HPL said just the opposite.

>19 HarryMacDonald:

He may have stumbled, but it wasn't because he was stooping to write something that he knew was beneath him.

Another important point, and one that goes back to something paradoxosalpha was talking about in the first post, which is that the HPL-parody character in the TV show that he mentioned was depicted as a hack. This is really quite incredible. I just read a biography of Lovecraft by a guy named L. Sprague de Camp (himself a writer of fantastic fiction) which basically spends 400+ pages complaining that HPL wasn't enough of a hack, and if there is a person that such a complaint could be made about, it's Lovecraft; the guy lived on vegetable soup, crackers, and cold baked beans (and went to an early grave probably largely because of this) so he could write the kind of fiction that he wanted to. HPL had his failings, but being a hack wasn't one of them.

>23 artturnerjr:

the guy lived on vegetable soup, crackers, and cold baked beans (and went to an early grave probably largely because of this) so he could write the kind of fiction that he wanted to.

And ice cream. Lots of ice cream. Good point, Art.

>22 RandyStafford:

Very well, put Randy. I was also thinking of Edgar Rice Burroughs early on in this thread as another example of a writer not held in high regard by the literati, yet whose work nevertheless endures to this day and has spawned a cottage industry, much as with HPL. Does that make ERB a good writer? I think so, but I don't think we'll be seeing a Library of America volume for Burroughs. There is still a line of demarcation there. It's really a shame that more genre fiction isn't pushed in schools. I've often said that if Robert E. Howard was required reading in high school English classes, we'd be a nation of voracious readers-for-pleasure.

But he brought it to the age of science, the lab, the scientific study of archaeology to give it new, potent symbols

Not only that, but he did it with great deliberation.

>24 semdetenebre:

I don't think we'll be seeing a Library of America volume for Burroughs.

Actually, there are two Burroughs volumes published by the LoA (although neither one is in the "official" LoA series):

http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=364
http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=365

>25 artturnerjr:

Yeah - neither has the traditional somber black cover, but I stand corrected anyway! Maybe LOA is leading the way as far as breaking down some genre ghetto barriers...

>24 semdetenebre: Actually, when I was in high school in the late Paleocene, the school librarian decided to go on a paperback buying binge to get the students to read. (She rightly thought they didn't like reading hardcovers.) ERB was quite popular amongst a set that didn't normally read. (I have no idea if they kept reading as adults.) Same thing with my wife's cousins -- not big readers except for Burroughs. (And our house has just about any ERB book I want to lay my hands on courtesy of my wife.)

I suspect, as you say, Howard might have do the same for youngsters.

> 27

Marvel Comics tried to break into the then-lucrative British Children's comic market with black and white weekly reprints of various titles all through the '70's and into the '80s. I was introduced to Robert E Howard through the Roy Thomas/Barry Smith (as he was then) Conan adaptations in about 1975. I would have been seven or eight years old.

More to the point there's a Doctor Strange story that's more or less an unacknowledged adaptation of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" that they reprinted around the same time. It stayed with me, so to speak.

I don't think I can track down a specific quote, but I'm sure Aldous Huxley criticised Edgar Allan Poe for "vulgarity". I think it was specifically aimed at his poetry, but there seems to be - in the UK, at any rate - a lingering critical opinion against Poe, for the jingles and rhythms in his poetry and for a similar quality - would "febrile" be the word? in his prose. I think perhaps HPL suffers from the same sort of condescension.

"Does H.P. Lovecraft belong in the canon?"

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/08/does_h_p_lovecraft_belong_in_the_canon_partner/

>30 paradoxosalpha:

This is an excellent article, thanks for posting! I like seeing the term "cosmic horror" being used more and more in mass media pieces on HPL. As this concept was probably first and foremost on his agenda, it seems to finally be bearing fruit.

As far as the new book, I'm also glad to read, "For Luckhurst, Lovecraft’s racism is “typical of its age, but driven towards pathological intensity by Lovecraft’s perception of himself as the last scion of New England civilization.” Luckhurst neither downplays Lovecraft’s racism nor exaggerates it compared to his contemporaries — an anecdote about the racism of Henry James is used to telling effect." I think that dismissively calling Lovecraft a "racist" is has become an easy crutch for those wishing to belittle an author who is widely known, thanks to the likes of films like REANIMATOR, but I'll bet is actually little read, beyond a difficult go or two at "The Dunwich Horror" or "The Call of Cthulhu". NYC-era Lovecraft strikes me more as a ravening xenophobe than a potential Klansman. He was wrong, there were reasons - but not excuses - for his attitude, and he recanted when he came to his senses.

This line is key: "Lovecraft did not create cosmic horror. He recreated it". HPL was in some ways the Richard Matheson or Stephen King of his time. He moved the weird tale or cosmic horror story (as opposed to, say, the traditional ghost story) away from Europe or the wilds of the Canadian wilderness and solidly into middle-or-lower class 20th century American neighborhoods.

>30 paradoxosalpha:

Thanks for that, PA. Always nice to see Jess Nevins' work online. He also does a bang-up job on comic book annotations, particularly on Alan Moore's work (see, for example, http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Annotations%20for%20Alan%20Moore%20Comics.htm).

From the Library of America's LT group, a recent thread recognised HPL as a 10-year best-seller, and (in the blog which was linked in the post mentioning the LOA's top selling titles) a commenter obliged us with his argument for why HPL is a "hack" appealing only to "the masses". See commenter rlan in the comment section of the LOA blog entry itself.

Not particularly insightful, but the timing was uncanny so I felt moved to share.

ETA linky to the relevant thread (see post 5):
http://www.librarything.com/topic/154085#4092201

> 33

rlan: "Mediocrity speaks to the masses." But has HPL's own writing ever actually "spoken to the masses" I wonder? It has been devoured in genre ghettos, with far-reaching effects on other writers, but I still suspect there are more plush Cthulhu dolls in the world than actual readers of Grandpa Cthulhu.

(ETA: Why? Well, I doubt there will ever be mass popularity of the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.)

I think rlan's remarks got the replies they deserved; 3rdcity nailed it. (Including taking the part of the scholastics against the boastfully anti-leftist rlan's Hume citation!)

>34 paradoxosalpha:

Why? Well, I doubt there will ever be mass popularity of the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

Also keep in mind HPL's observation about supernatural and/or horror fiction in general: "It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities." In spite of the inroads made towards reaching a popular audience made by authors like Stephen King and related genres like paranormal romance, horror is (unlike, I think, its sister genres of fantasy and science fiction) always destined to be somewhat déclassé (not an entirely bad thing, imho).

#34: I still suspect there are more plush Cthulhu dolls in the world than actual readers of Grandpa Cthulhu.

He's got four anthologies with more than 1,000 copies in the system. Edgar Allan Poe claims 44,406 members, compared to HPL's 31,372, and HPL's top anthology has 2,117 copies compared to EAP's 6,731. He's not in the top 75 authors, but he's got 18 pixels in the global author cloud, so he's between author #192 and author #265, inclusive. He's in the same block as Italo Calvino, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro, Henning Mankell, Herman Melville, A. A. Milne, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Updike, etc. I think ghetto might be a little extreme. (And however awesome they are, I think you're overestimating the number of plush Cthulhus.)

>36 prosfilaes:

But that's all derived from an unrepresentative sample of the Great Unwashed viz., LTers who catalogue, right? Not from the US reading public, or even the US buying public, let alone from the English-reading world?

>36 prosfilaes:,37

And it doesn't mean that the owners of the books have actually read them, which I think was paradoxosalpha's point. Interesting data, though!

#37: In 2012, of the backlist titles for the Library of America, HPL's volume was #5 in the sales list. The Illustrated Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft is the 69th best selling (paid) Kindle work of horror; the only other thing old was #20, Edgar Allan Poe; with the possible exception of some of King and Koontz's works, I don't see anything else that's not 21st century.

It's #3,073 in the Kindle store overall. The top 100 has 3 older books, The Great Gatsby, Ender's Game and Slaughterhouse-Five. Wildass approximation says Lovecraft makes the top 100 (#92ish) of books that weren't published in the 21st century.

He's one of the most read authors of his era. You could say they've all been confined to a ghetto, but I think that's a little limiting. He's not an A-list modern author, but copies of his books are selling.

(And who's buying those plush Cthulhu dolls, though? I doubt there have been 31,000 plush Cthulhu dolls sold.)

#38: I don't see him at http://www.librarything.com/tag/unread ; I don't think he hits the read percentage of popular reading, but I doubt he hits the unread percentage of The Silmarillion or something.

And who's buying those plush Cthulhu dolls, though?

I was sorely tempted once. I do have a couple of Cthulhu idols though.

Does it disqualify me from the great unwashed that The Silmarillion is among my most re-read books?

FWIW, the first make of Cthulhu plush I hit on a search on Amazon is apparently the 11,052nd best seller among toys and games. The AH "The Dunwich Horror and Others" is their 1,172,082nd best selling book, and the Kindle edition of just the titular short story is the 315,973rd best selling Kindle item.

Stats being undoubtedly skewed by Amazon being relatively bigger within book sales than toys.

Yes, very interesting numbers, prosfilaes: thanks for posting them, and my comments in no way meant to deride the effort. I'm easily misled by stats, and routinely view them with skepticism in self-defense. I think your general point is a good one: HPL suffers from a public relations gap, in that he's more widely read and sells more books than he's given credit for ... though I think this returns to paradoxosalpha's point of his place in the genre ghetto.

As for the plush Cthulhu dolls, I readily admit to being completely at sea.

I think it's HPL's seeming escape from the genre ghetto that's been giving certain circles the willies.

True! Perhaps I should re-phrase: Many critics and other readers would like to exile HPL to the genre ghetto, and it's irritating that he won't stay there.

>22 RandyStafford: et al.

I think the most significant thing about HPL and his relationship with his readers is this (to paraphrase something the great comics artist Neal Adams said in a recent documentary): people don't read HPL (generally) because someone made them, or because they think it'll make them cooler or smarter* or a better person, but because they love his stories. This, to me, is far more important than any kind of academic or literary acceptance he may or may not have.

*though he will certainly expand your vocabularly!

In his May 16 blog entry, S.T. Joshi takes a wannabe critic of HPL to task for a boatload of mistakes. The points ST makes are highly relevant to this thread.

http://www.stjoshi.org/news.html

>46 semdetenebre:

Thanks for the heads-up. Poor Jess Nevins! S.T. is not a guy you want to take you to task. =:^O

I thought he saved his most hilarious criticism for Roger Luckhurst, however:

Luckhurst did not in fact use my corrected texts, but went back to the pulp magazine texts and made a few “silent” corrections. What possible benefit could be served by this procedure? I have been generous in allowing others to use my texts—including Joyce Carol Oates (Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, 1997) and the Library of America (Tales, 2005), not to mention various foreign publishers going back to 1984. For anyone, at this late date, to resurect the butchered texts of At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” from Astounding Stories is to commit an act of idiocy or insanity.

It's okay, bro - tell us how you really feel! :D

Just realized that the Salon article above is the very same one that Joshi rails against. I still enjoy the article's general tone, and it makes me curious about the Luckhurst volume, but I appreciate S.T.'s rebuttal even more.

> 2, > 7 -- both are on the money.

My problem with the likes of Lovecraft and many other pulp writers is not the redundancy and the atrocious modifiers but the fact that everything I read (if I read enough of it) changes what and how I write.

My experience is that a writer should be as careful of what he reads as a dancer is of what and how (s)he eats. I once saw Richard Simmons on TV for an interview. I can't stand Richard Simmons and walked into the situation by accident, but he did say one thing that struck me hard: "If you don't EAT fat, you won't GET fat." Change that to "If you don't READ slop, you won't WRITE slop, you've got my personal reading program precisely.

The reason I liked writers such Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and Albert Peyson Terhune and Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was a kid is that they wrote for kids, who are (as a group) almost completely uncritical. Kids want adventure and derring-doo. As long as there's plenty of thrills and chills and romance in a book, they'll eat the thing cover-to-cover and don't much care if it makes sense or not. They still believe in magic and Santa Claus and stuff like that there, so their disbelief is easily suspended. You know: like fans of Stephen King or Dean Koontz or Hairy Putter.

If today I go back to reading Lovecraft, it will be because I'm looking for something specific, say, how he wrote a particular scene or how he plotted this, that, or the other tale. I hope I can admire what he did without necessarily coming to LIKE it. Lovecraft for me, today, is sorta like the measles: It's nice and pretty (I like the color red) but I hope I never catch it. Emulation too easily becomes crap.

> 49

I think the notion that the weird fiction pulps and their contents were "for kids" is so demonstrably false that I don't think I have to bother to demonstrate it.



Pastiche-level emulation is certainly crap, by and large. But other authors who have found inspiration in HPL's work have often sidestepped his style, his settings, and even his "mythos" entities -- not because they are inferior, but because they are so distinctively his that imitations will pale. Instead, he offers themes (alienation, corruption of personal identity, deep time, human insignificance) and methods (confabulation, para-bibliography, regional sensibility) inspiring writers around the world to more sophisticated work than HPL could ever find audiences for.

Based on your post, I wonder whether you actually have read any Lovecraft since childhood, let alone the consequent work of writers like Burroughs, Campbell, Ligotti, or Houellebecq.

Side-notes on other authors you mentioned: ERB is one who is definitely not suited to a well-lettered palate. But his imagined settings and characters have powered a century of science fiction and fantasy, and lie at the core of successes like Star Wars. His inventive plotting formulas for action and adventure have in fact long ago made the leap to the screen where they are so ingrained as to seem "natural" and even "naive."

I think REH was an excellent writer, and I appreciate him more as an adult than I did as a youth, even if my values differ from his somewhat in ways that have become evident to me with maturity. Sadly, he's long been a prime target for middling pastiche. Some of the best results of the sword & sorcery vein descending from Howard's work have been in deliberate contradiction to some of his ideas and writing choices: Moorcock's Elric being a fine example.

>49 dekesolomon:, 50

Luckily, recent astute works like Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy reveal the falsehood of the oft-parroted criticism regarding the supposed "redundancy and the atrocious modifiers" of Lovecraft's work, as if he were madly flipping through an ancient thesaurus as he wrote, trying to increase his word count while pandering to a slavering pulp audience. He actually very carefully and specifically chose every word he wrote in his fiction to achieve an intended effect. It works more often than not.

> 50 -- What? You don't think readers aged 13-to-23 are kids? Have you ever lived in a barracks?

I will give you that everybody loves somebody. I for one like Lovecraft, Howard and all the pulp writers just as much as I did when I was a kid. But liking them and their stories doesn't change the fact that most of their stuff is more than a little purple. The cover of Weird Tales that you posted is plainly designed to attract the small change, sticky fingers and hairy palms of adolescent boys.

I notice, though, that you didn't disagree with me that what you put into your head will, in time, dribble out the ends of your fingers and onto your keyboard.

HPL must be an important author - he's mentioned in Cliffs Notes!

http://books.google.com/books?id=E6EBP7iNaDsC&lpg=PA35&dq=h.p.%20lovecra...

;)

I am, these days, overwhelm'd with a sense of dread when I prepare to read online discussions about Lovecraft as good/bad writer. Too often, so many ignorant morons who have read but a few of E'ch-Pi-El's stories declare what an awful writer he is. The Internet overflows with fools who post things such as "He writes like a ninth-grader" and bemoan how unreadable Grandpa's fiction is. Recent "serious" critics of Lovecraft, online, seem to think that Lovecraft is "defined" by his racism; and others call him a "good bad writer," whatever the yog that means. I come away from all of this with the impression that most of these critics, amateur and professional alike, entirely misunderstand Lovecraft's work and have no real understanding of that which constitutes good writing.

Happily, we have intelligent critics, who do understand, intimately, the mechanics of excellent writing, and who admire Lovecraft's genius. Such books as THE ROOTS OF HORROR IN THE FICTION OF H. P. LOVECRAFT and H. P. LOVECRAFT: NEW ENGLAND DECADENT by Barton Levi St. Armand, LOVECRAFT--A STUDY IN THE FANTASTIC by Maurice Levy, H. P. LOVECRAFT by Peter Cannon, THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR by Robert H. Waugh, H. P. LOVECRAFT: ART, ARTIFACT, AND REALITY by Steven J. Mariconda and H. P. LOVECRAFT: A CRITICAL STUDY by Donald R. Burleson shew clearly and exactly that Lovecraft is indeed excellent in every way. Besides his numerous books on Lovecraft's art & philosophy, S. T. Joshi edited the magnificent study of the oeuvre, LOVECRAFT STUDIES, and now edits the new study of Lovecraft as writer, LOVECRAFT ANNUAL. Thus there is no dearth of material; and this does not include the individual essays by other excellent writers in the genre, such as Thomas Ligotti, which discuss HPL's brilliance, originality, and importance.

The question of quality cannot be decided on a foundation of popularity: because H. P. Lovecraft is popular as a name among many who have never read a line of his fiction; his popularity grows because of the film industry, the gaming world, graphic books and comics, rock music. I, myself, am too deeply in love with Lovecraft to offer what may be other than impassion'd adoration. I know only that I can return to his poetry & prose day after day, and always find new wonders within its depths. I recently wrote a story inspir'd by "Hypnos," one of Lovecraft's very minor stories, and yet one that is so unusual and so beautifully express'd. He never wrote another story like it. The story is cosmic, weird, and contains an element that it almost homoerotic. I have just re-read "The Dunwich Horror," a superb story that is absolutely successful until its absurd and ineffective climax.

Lovecraft as writer is good on many levels. His writing, except when he gets really carried away, is usually very good. He was the master of his various narrative voices, understanding what he wanted to express in a story and succeeding in so doing. Yet even those examples that are supposedly his slippage into bad writing can be effective and exist for the purpose of dramatically exhibiting narrative emotion. We can grin or grimace as we read, in "The Lurking Fear," such a passage as, "Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky..." -- but I, for one, can admire such a passage, and feel its effectiveness.

Lovecraft is more than a good writer -- he is a Classic. I so look forward to THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT coming out in October in a handsome illustrated folio edition from S. S. Norton, in the same format as their THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES.

>54 wilum:

All very nicely put, Wilum, and thanks for that list of critical studies of HPL. I really enjoyed Barton Levi St. Armand's introduction to the Centipede Masters of the Weird Tale: Lovecraft tome. New England Decadent seems to be the most readily available and reasonably priced of his books to date. I've added it to my wish list. I'll also mention the recent work Weird Realism by Graham Harman once again. I suspect that this will come to be seen as an important book in the canon, perhaps even a kind of mini-Rosetta Stone to understanding the truly astounding nature of Lovecraft's prose. I hope that it doesn't get overlooked owing to to its rather dull, academic-looking cover and the fact that it wasn't written by a well-known HPL scholar.

Based on your recommendation, perhaps we should nominate "Hypnos" for a Spring 2014 DEEP ONES discussion when the next voting session rolls around!

The Introduction to the Masters of the Weird Tale omnibus IS the ENTIRE TEXT of NEW ENGLAND DECADENT! So if you have that Centipede edition you need not buy the individual title, unless you want it as a separate edition that is easier to read than a clunky Centipede omnibus.

I would be extremely interested in reading what others have to say regarding "Hypnos."

>56 wilum:

Thanks for that clarification! I don't believe it's mentioned in the Centipede tome itself. The essay runs a little over 30 pages in length. It must make for a short book unless additional writings by St. Armand are included...

to dekesolomon:-- Lovecraft and Howard DID NOT "write for kids," who on earth gave you that absurd idea? Lovecraft's weird fiction is among the genre's most sophisticated and mature. He was a serious artist and he strove for literary excellence--and achieved it. A writer should read everything and anything. The idea that if a writer reads "slop" they will write "slop" does not exist for mature authors who have, through diligent work, discover'd their voice and vision. Those writers who have contributed to such books as BLACK WINGS and LOVECRAFT UNBOUND are supreme evidence that reading Lovecraft, being inspired by Lovecraft, leads to the creation of GREAT weird fiction, professional and stalwart in every way.

an interesting panel on Lovecraft's phobias
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO5wOys7lBI

>59 wilum:

Thanks Wilum. Watched the first half hour so far. That's "phobia" as in HPL's xenophobia, to be sure. The point that Lovecraft's racism isn't mentioned by his correspondents in their letters (not limited simply to their HPL correspondence, presumably) is interesting, the point being that his racism wasn't necessarily a driving force in his personality (of course, this is not to make any excuse for his attitudes).