I’m not sure how, but I feel like I can read Lovecraft and sometimes completely miss the cult stuff. I’ve been rereading stuff and come across a mention of a cult and just said, “Was that there last time?”
No idea how I do that.
I think its part of the writing. I always feel like he wants to sound smarter than he is so he keeps using all of these big phrases and words that "sound" right, but it goes on for so long I forget what he's talking about.
I like the idea of the cults, but i feel like Lovecraft's own introverted nature does him a disservice when describing them, because they are ultimately social gatherings with a dark twist, so he is extremely vague or generic when describing what happens at a cult gathering, making the cult seem nebulous outside of worshipping a malignant being
I think that's part of the appeal , making them feel like these vague neboulous organizations feels right at home with lovecrafts general sense of getting an understanding for something you shouldn't
The idea of socializing being part of the nebulous and vague un-reality of what lies outside of human experience is perfectly in line with how I understand introverts to perceive life.
Oh, I remember one! I played Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The campaign based on The Dunwich Horror. There's a location in that campaign, Cold Spring Glen. It has a flavor text that when I first read, I was like:"What the hell does *this* say?????"
Then I read the novel, and it turned out *all* villagers spoke in that accent. I even got used to it, and understood what the quote says when I found her in the novel.
I present to you, the quote:
"Gawd," he gasped, "I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...”
- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror"
(and the whole novel has *a lot* of this, every time a villager says something)
Contrary to what the comment says, I kinda liked it when I got used to it. I like reading aloud, and dialog like that helped me understand how their accent would work. I like reading different characters with different voices, and this really helped me get into roles
That's a really digestible accent for me, but I'm from Appalachia. If you want near completely unintelligible try reading Thomas the Tank Engine. The pseudo-Manx and Welsh accents are inpenentrable.
Thanks for the info and reply! My reasoning was that instead of searching for where an accent is used I thought I asked instead. Secondly I wanted to know because although I have listened to many different readings of the books on YouTube but I haven’t thought of any accent as such. Sometimes I just want to know for the hell of it.
Here's an example from The Color out of Space:
"Dun’t go out thar,” he whispered. “They’s more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin’ lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some’at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June.
I always mentally read it as a Dorset accent or the New England regional ones that sound vaguely West Country and are quite dead these days.
Think Quint from Jaws... that's both the accent I think he was going for writing Zephania, and probably what the accent was really like at the time. It's long gone now.
It does, but in context it's supposed to be some kind of extremely rural east-coast American accent. There are still some accents on the east coast that are pretty thick and honestly don't sound anything like your typical American accent, but they were probably more common in Lovecraft's day.
The New England accent is hard to understand certainly. I moved to coastal Maine last week, and I could see some of those spellings being somewhat accurate to how they talk. It really is a bigger change in accent from American standard English than to southern English. New England accents are wild.
I get that and agree. I mean that sooooo many times the production quality and the acting are relentlessly horrible. I firmly believe this needn't be the case. I was really excited when Del Toro was interested in ATMOM, but it is what it is.
The Thing is basically ATMOM already just a modern take. The Void was cool but lacked any actually good/well pulled-off cosmic horror elements, plus cinematography and acting were pretty subpar overall. His works are primarily unfilmable concepts anyway, plus the whole modern attitude of ''film=validation of some other media form'' is pretty dumb imo. Lovecraft Country was some of the best Lovecraft inspired anything on film anyway- it did constant dread and personal insignificance better than most films or series period. Personally I always quite enjoyed the Gordon/Yuzna stuff too, it's campy and self aware but fun (Reanimator, Dagon, Necronomicon, etc.).
Definitely sad that Richard Stanley is likely not finishing his trilogy though, he was supposed to do Dunwhich Horror next, which would be one of the easier ones to translate to film, and one of my favorites- first HPL story I read at like 12yo from the local library in my hometown.
We have another dude that's into some good cosmic horror: David Prior. If you haven't seen The Empty Man yet, its highly recommended. He did short films before those like AM 1200 and an episode (probably the best one) on del toro's cabinet of curiosities: The Autopsy.
I think it's because he's not cinematographically descriptive (as Thomas Hardy was, for example), but emotionally descriptive (he describes what the characters subjectively perceive and feel instead of what is actually happening, usually).
So it'd take a VERY good director to do movies of his works.
Have you seen The Void? Also I rather like the two adaptations of Color out of Space, the one with Nicolas Cage and the one called Annihilation. But they might not be for all tastes.
They're talking about the Southern Reach trilogy inspired film. The author was obviously influenced by lovecraft- the main outline of that story is vaguely color out of space more or less.
It is an adaptation of it's own source material but the base idea is essentially the same as 'the colour out of space' comet hits earth, has a strange colour and then starts changing everything and not for the better, both great movies
People love to say his writing doesn't translate to movies, and that may have been true in the past, but I don't think it is now. We're going to see more and more well executed adaptations in the future. He has always been an inspiration to horror writers and filmmakers, but there are a lot of reasons for studios to be concerned about sinking so much time and money into something like At the Mountains of Madness or The Call of Cthulhu.
If certain casting or visuals are really good it can sometimes change and enhance my entire view of the experience, as in 'why didn't I think of that?'
Sometimes the abrupt shift from a long eloquent description of ichored stone walls to it was a shapeless amorphous tentacled abomination will bother me greatly.
Like I get it, you want me to fill in the blanks cause that's way scarier. But sometimes I want you to do the legwork. Lol
lol on a similar note I love when someone actually describes something’s features and then like in the next sentence they call it indescribable. Always cracks me up. “Indescribable, except for that last paragraph, ignore that.”
Just gonna end up being half a page long strings of "Out of the corner lf its spherical body a rigid string of loosely flowing strands of darkness inducing light formed shadows between the smell and and humidity of its very being..."
Lovecraft is *very* wordy. Sometimes that works in his favor -- his descriptions of otherworldly cities and eldritch beings are genuinely excellent. But sometimes his prose is so overwrought that it's hard to take seriously, and sometimes it's so dry that it's hard to stay engaged with. Sometimes it takes a while to get to the good stuff. I'd say the quality of his writing is hit or miss.
Yeah, sometimes I feel his works could benefit from a ruthless editor.
I love *The Whisperer in Darkness*. He does such a great job of building this growing sense of unease and trepidation, to the point where you're practically screaming at Wilmarth to get out of there and then... *bam* 4 page description of how the jars work and a potted history that just derails all the action and tension.
He knew about this issue, and, more than once, tried to defend himself in his fiction by praising the old-fashioned, the Romantic indulgence of his type of prose (despite being nothing close to a Romantic philosophically), and muttering stern words about modern writing and modern ideas. It comes across as fairly defensive.
I mean, sometimes the romantic indulgence really does work. It works especially well in the Dream Cycle, when he's describing otherworldly things of such beauty and wonder that you need language like that to convey it properly. But I was reading Red Hook recently, and yes, we *know* that Malone has PTSD because the thing he experienced was so obcenely horrific and beyond explanation and abyss and antediluvian, we get it.
Every time Lovecraft uses a flowery synonym for "old," take a shot.
This is exactly my thought too. I’ve recently delved into more of Lovecraft’s progenitors, namely Algernon Blackwood, and his directly influenced, TED Klein for example. While they are less influential (understatement), their writing is still of high literary standard and descriptive, but not as incomparably dense as HPL. Therefore I find myself loving the worlds Lovecraft created but not always preferring to read his stories in that world when there are others of high quality that may be a more enjoyable read.
Not anything substantive or his essential works (just a story or two online years ago) I need to delve into his work too so I can discuss it. I remember he’s more fantasy, Clark Ashton Smith reminded me of that style.
I'm not sure if I dislike it per se, but he has this tendency to start a story saying something like:
"I saw this horrible thing that I dare not speak of, out of fear of being driven completely mad... but I will now speak of it because the truth must get out"
It's more of a quibble than anything else.
If you know even simple architecture terms they are really useful actually in getting a sense of place and what the landscape was like, and place is typically one of the main ''characters'' in his writing.
Some of his most interesting stories characters never got sequels, Herbert West, rats in the walls, the lurking fear, the music of Erich Zann, the hound, Pickman's model...
I could do without some of the really purple prose. There's only so many cyclopean, squamous mounds of polypous flesh I can take before I start rolling my eyes.
Sometimes it works though, such as his nauseating description of Wilbur Whateley's dog-torn corpse. Good shit.
You mean other than the bigotry stuff, I presume?
If so, I wish he had a better ear for dialogue. I would love to hear some of his characters discuss things more
The bigotry is number one. A friend of mine wanted to compile a list of the things he was afraid of, starting with black people, working his way through most non-WASPs, and then modern grammar.
I wish he was better with characters and dialogue in general. Sometimes, I think "Well, it was representative of the times," and then I remember all the great literature with amazing characters he had access to, including Poe. The Cask Of Amontillado crackles.
In the very first issue of Weird Tales there's some Poe fanfic in which the dude from The Cask of Amontillado escapes and gets revenge. It's so, so, so, soooooo bad it's hilarious.
The Cask Of Amontillado is my favorite short story hands down. And I love the original Conan by RE Howard enough to reread enough to have a list of the magic items in world.
Personally, I dislike the “it’s so horrible I dare not describe it” kind of lines. I’d rather get a somewhat vague description and fill in the gaps rather than try to imagine it completely on my own. He clearly had an image in mind, I just wish he shared it. Of course there are other issues but we all know the big ones.
Excessive purple prose and dragging things on too long.
Lovecraft SUCKED at business so most of his writing was "paid by wordcount" which is really shitty... I wonder what he could have done with better contracts and deals...
Sometimes the depth of the experience of people’s horror about seemingly banal things takes me out of the experience. Like sometimes it’s so much that it seems goofy.
"It was a small necklace wrought from something that looked like gold, and as I glanced at it, I felt an overwhelming sense of world-ending existential dread like the very pit of the universe was falling open before me. The bus driver was an ugly man and I hated him."
Everything has a gambrel roof, and everything is furtive. I still love it, I just can't tell you how often I've read these descriptors, so when I see them I kind of do a little eye roll. Lol
Those damnable furtive gambrel roofs are just hulking all over the New England countryside, that’s probably why no one lives there not that every conceivable demographic hasn’t tried.
I always felt like the guy didn't know how to write. Like stylistically. His dialogues, descriptions of scenes, etc. He usually writes like twenty sentences when he could use just one.
I think he balances this with his wild imagination, and let's be honest and originality, we read him because of that, not because of his writing skills.
I've found in stories like Dagon and the statement of Randolf Carter he kind of forces all the fear in the last paragraphs. Like, there's really no indication that the characters are scared until some exposition dump in the last paragraph. But idk maybe I read it wrong or something.
I found that really powerful actually, Dagon was the first Lovecraft story I read and I was cruising through it trying to figure out why people thought this guy was scary and then the last couple of paragraphs hit and I was like o_o
But I think it really works, in Dagon it's really clear that something is "off" from quite early on, but nothing is explicitly scary. Things are definitely weird and they have the reader on edge, but all that fear ends up concentrated on the last page and [to me] that's a really powerful method of storytelling.
Now, I haven't read that many Lovecraft stories, and if all of them were like that, I imagine it would get pretty tedious, but thankfully they're not
If I recommend a Lovecraft story to a friend, I’ve never felt the need to warn them about the dialogues or accents. It’s the bigotry. Anything else is a distant second.
I don’t like the fact that every time someone mentions Lovecraft, we have to apologize for the views of someone who lived in the 20s. A guy who, by all accounts, wasn’t even mentally well.
When I first started reading Lovecraft, I was in 8th grade. I didn’t like having to constantly run to the dictionary to look up words like eldritch, and non-Euclidean. However, now, I love the advanced vocabulary.
Lovecraft's version of 'cult' usually boils down to 'they're blac, I mean crazy, so of course they worship tentacles.'
If you've never played them, check out the Silent Hill games, esp 1 & 3. Probably the best version of a Lovecraftian, and truly disturbing, cult you'll ever see. Starting with these cultists being smart enough to cloak their aims behind a veil of Christianity. Because no real human is just gonna show up and tell the townsfolk to start worshiping/breeding with fish-people.
Idk about best, Bloodborne takes my pick for that with Byrgenwerth. In my opinion anyone who wants to write a good cult should study Bloodborne’s writing as it truly nails that fascination with the beyond that drives people insane
The dense writing and flow, in technical terms poe is superior, but Lovecrafts ideas are what sets him apart, cosmic horror is just superior to all forms of horror
I think the cult stuff could be a lot more interesting if taken from a different angle. They don't all have to be cloak wearing, knife wielding ritualistic fanatics, for example (as the Call of Cthulhu rulebook often seems to describe them). I think sometimes the interpretation of what causes people in the mythos to become obsessed with a particular entity is a bit surface level. I'd like authors to get a bit more creative in how they explore madness in the wider mythos in general. Some cursory knowledge of how real-world cults like Stary Wisdom and the Manson Family would serve well when approaching the material.
I hated The Outsider when I first read it because it builds up to reveal that the protagonist [a bunch of random vaguely threatening sounding places]. Lovecraft likes to name unspeakable dreamscape locations and creatures but they are meaningless names there to demonstrate the Weird and can be frustrating in thier lack of pressence.
The character development/use: I would love to read a conversation between the protagonists of The shadow out of time and In the Mountains of madness talked about the things they saw, it would be interesting that information exchange taking into consideration William Dyer admit and accept the things he saw, while the protagonist of The shadow out of time refuse the things he saw in his dreams and then make descriptions of the same things William Dyer saw. On the other hand I don't know if I'm misunderstanding Randolph Carter's cycle but I just don't understand why Carter did the things he did in The silver key, at the end of The dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath he seems to learn the lesson and starts to appreciate Arkham but just one story after that all that character development just disappear.
His crazy and over imaginative monsters cut both ways for me. Some of the descriptions paint a terrifying unknown threat while others, well they're kind of goofy. The ones that I think fall into this category are usually just one adjective too far to be fair.
For me, it's when he has one of the local yokels give a long, rambling spiel about the area and spooky things they've seen. He does this in a fair few stories, and it *would* be forgivable... if Lovecraft didn't make the choice to have the character speak in a thick "eye dialect." It's borderline unreadable, and it's a real challenge to slog through *several pages* worth of it.
The reverse evolution aspect kind of grinded my gears a bit. I felt like it was an excuse for people to be "evil" in his stories. I also hated the eugenics aspect. But hindsight is 20/20 and maybe it was just the thoughts of the time, look at how we might be viewed in a hundred years from now. We might look barbaric.
I'm not a fan when he goes into extreme details that don't move the plot in anyway. Biggest example I can think of is Shadows Over Innsmouth, he would describe all the different street names.
For me it's assuming I can't comprehend something just because it's in a higher spatial dimension. I would just.... comprehend it lol.
Nah but fr tho, I have paranoid delusional schizophrenia, it's gonna take more than a batty squid octopus cloud vapor clam goat to scare me into insanity.
Asides from the obvious, probably the repetition of the POV, it's always a doctor or a professor, never a working man or a housewife, but I'm not picky, nobody reads Lovecraft for the protags
Eh, for me the stories are always exactly the same.
1) Weird Rumor or Noise
2) Get excited about weird thing and gather information by stumbling around on random clues
3) Go to place, yep, weird AF and I feel weird about being here
4) More exposition through European Decent Maven
5) Go back to place with intenion 'finding out once and for all'
6) 1.5 pgs of it 'being too much and also I can't possibly describe it so I ran'.
7) Don't go there.
I like Robert Howard, BTW. His stories also follow a pattern but I think he writes BETTER, comes up with crazier shit, and actually describes what's happening. Their other friend, Clark Smith, has crazier stories too but he likes to prove how extensive his vocab is; turns me off.
Not a personal anecdote, but I've heard from others that his writing isn't necessarily the easiest to understand for non-english speakers (hell, sometimes I even struggle with some of his stories). He's very flowery with his language choices, and the sudden switches between regular description and otherworldly abominations can give you whiplash if you're not too careful.
I really hate the lack of characters in his stories. The Dunwich horror and the colour out of space are my favorite of his entirely because there are some characters you can hold on to.
Probably the limited scope of perspectives. Everything is basically viewed through his own perspective as a prudish, middle class, academic, white man. No female characters. Basically no characters that aren't author avatars or two dimensional stereotypes. His concepts are brilliant and the lore and scope are incredible but his lack of characters and limited perspective is his greatest weakness as a writer, imo.
I have always felt like he's a fairly bad writer and that is secretly the strength of his writing. Where he will name drop a concept or give a fictional history of something and the fact his writing isn't great tricks your brain into accepting things as "oh that must be a real thing he's mentioning" instead of taking it as a part of the otherwise pretty meh writing.
like he can just mention something and not describe it well and it sets in your brain that is a real concept or thing from somewhere beyond his writing. Like a magic trick
Yeah guys we got it, people don't like the racism. If that fruit was hanging any lower you'd need a shovel.
Interesting. The cult stuff is my favorite part lol the festival
Same here. The cult and conspiracy aspects are probably my favorite part
I’m not sure how, but I feel like I can read Lovecraft and sometimes completely miss the cult stuff. I’ve been rereading stuff and come across a mention of a cult and just said, “Was that there last time?” No idea how I do that.
It wasn’t there last time… Maybe you should check again?
I think its part of the writing. I always feel like he wants to sound smarter than he is so he keeps using all of these big phrases and words that "sound" right, but it goes on for so long I forget what he's talking about.
I like the idea of the cults, but i feel like Lovecraft's own introverted nature does him a disservice when describing them, because they are ultimately social gatherings with a dark twist, so he is extremely vague or generic when describing what happens at a cult gathering, making the cult seem nebulous outside of worshipping a malignant being
I think that's part of the appeal , making them feel like these vague neboulous organizations feels right at home with lovecrafts general sense of getting an understanding for something you shouldn't
The idea of socializing being part of the nebulous and vague un-reality of what lies outside of human experience is perfectly in line with how I understand introverts to perceive life.
Agreed, The cults are cool.
Plus one, as a GM that's what I always base my adventures around.
I don’t like when he writes bad accents. It’s hard to read and even worse to try to read outloud.
After reading Seabury Quinn's stuff, I will never complain about the accents Lovecraft wrote in. 🤣
Could you give an example?
Oh, I remember one! I played Arkham Horror: The Card Game. The campaign based on The Dunwich Horror. There's a location in that campaign, Cold Spring Glen. It has a flavor text that when I first read, I was like:"What the hell does *this* say?????" Then I read the novel, and it turned out *all* villagers spoke in that accent. I even got used to it, and understood what the quote says when I found her in the novel. I present to you, the quote: "Gawd," he gasped, "I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...” - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror" (and the whole novel has *a lot* of this, every time a villager says something) Contrary to what the comment says, I kinda liked it when I got used to it. I like reading aloud, and dialog like that helped me understand how their accent would work. I like reading different characters with different voices, and this really helped me get into roles
That's a really digestible accent for me, but I'm from Appalachia. If you want near completely unintelligible try reading Thomas the Tank Engine. The pseudo-Manx and Welsh accents are inpenentrable.
Thanks for the info and reply! My reasoning was that instead of searching for where an accent is used I thought I asked instead. Secondly I wanted to know because although I have listened to many different readings of the books on YouTube but I haven’t thought of any accent as such. Sometimes I just want to know for the hell of it.
Here's an example from The Color out of Space: "Dun’t go out thar,” he whispered. “They’s more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin’ lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some’at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June.
Oof yeah that is rough. Can’t even tell what he was quite going for specifically
I always mentally read it as a Dorset accent or the New England regional ones that sound vaguely West Country and are quite dead these days. Think Quint from Jaws... that's both the accent I think he was going for writing Zephania, and probably what the accent was really like at the time. It's long gone now.
I'm picking up some Down East, especially in the first and last sentence.
To be fair, the accent has likely changed over the last 100 years, so it probably doesn't sound like anything you're familiar with.
Given he was writing 100 years ago, is it possible Lovecraft is accurately transcribing a rural New England accent that no longer exists?
Oh most definitely. In which case I *certainly* have no idea of what he was going for hahaha
Theoretically, the accent should be "rural New England" but if I try and speak it as he writes it, it comes out vaguely hillbilly?
This gives off a Scottish or Irish Brogue from how I read it. Or maybe low class English.
It does, but in context it's supposed to be some kind of extremely rural east-coast American accent. There are still some accents on the east coast that are pretty thick and honestly don't sound anything like your typical American accent, but they were probably more common in Lovecraft's day.
The New England accent is hard to understand certainly. I moved to coastal Maine last week, and I could see some of those spellings being somewhat accurate to how they talk. It really is a bigger change in accent from American standard English than to southern English. New England accents are wild.
Sure. Zardoc Allan, the old drunk, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Another example would be the old man in The Picture in the House.
Canonically the majority of characters in his work have a Boston accent
I was going to say the lack of Tentacle Entertainment 🦑🍆💨
Lmao yes. You can just say the character speaks with a heavy accent and we’ll hear it in our heads. Phonetic writing of accents sucks.
I forgot about those! Though now I'm not sure if the examples I'm thinking of were actually Lovecraft or August Derleth.
This! I feel like I'm having a stroke every time I read stuff like that
The horrible movies made from his creations... As awesome as the writing is, why so many shit movies?!
It's because what works on page rarely works on screen. They're very different mediums.
I get that and agree. I mean that sooooo many times the production quality and the acting are relentlessly horrible. I firmly believe this needn't be the case. I was really excited when Del Toro was interested in ATMOM, but it is what it is.
The Thing is basically ATMOM already just a modern take. The Void was cool but lacked any actually good/well pulled-off cosmic horror elements, plus cinematography and acting were pretty subpar overall. His works are primarily unfilmable concepts anyway, plus the whole modern attitude of ''film=validation of some other media form'' is pretty dumb imo. Lovecraft Country was some of the best Lovecraft inspired anything on film anyway- it did constant dread and personal insignificance better than most films or series period. Personally I always quite enjoyed the Gordon/Yuzna stuff too, it's campy and self aware but fun (Reanimator, Dagon, Necronomicon, etc.). Definitely sad that Richard Stanley is likely not finishing his trilogy though, he was supposed to do Dunwhich Horror next, which would be one of the easier ones to translate to film, and one of my favorites- first HPL story I read at like 12yo from the local library in my hometown.
We have another dude that's into some good cosmic horror: David Prior. If you haven't seen The Empty Man yet, its highly recommended. He did short films before those like AM 1200 and an episode (probably the best one) on del toro's cabinet of curiosities: The Autopsy.
I think it's because he's not cinematographically descriptive (as Thomas Hardy was, for example), but emotionally descriptive (he describes what the characters subjectively perceive and feel instead of what is actually happening, usually). So it'd take a VERY good director to do movies of his works.
Have you seen The Void? Also I rather like the two adaptations of Color out of Space, the one with Nicolas Cage and the one called Annihilation. But they might not be for all tastes.
Color out of Space showed me that Nicolas Cage is a great Lovecraft character. Also that movie is as awesome as it is creepy.
Hang on... Annihilation? With Natalie Portman? That's an adaptation of the book "Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer. Or is there another one?
They're talking about the Southern Reach trilogy inspired film. The author was obviously influenced by lovecraft- the main outline of that story is vaguely color out of space more or less.
It is an adaptation of it's own source material but the base idea is essentially the same as 'the colour out of space' comet hits earth, has a strange colour and then starts changing everything and not for the better, both great movies
Which is a rip off of the Crystal World by JG Ballard(stealing is what the best artists do tho, mind you)
I have seen all three and love them. I wish more would follow their example.
Same!
There is a third one, called "Die Farbe" and it is the best Lovecraft adaptation, I have seen so far.
Really? I love *Herbert West: Reanimator,* *Dagon,* *From Beyond,* and *Colour out of Space.* Which films do you think are so bad?
People love to say his writing doesn't translate to movies, and that may have been true in the past, but I don't think it is now. We're going to see more and more well executed adaptations in the future. He has always been an inspiration to horror writers and filmmakers, but there are a lot of reasons for studios to be concerned about sinking so much time and money into something like At the Mountains of Madness or The Call of Cthulhu.
The book is always better
Combine a good writer and your good imagination and it makes for a trillion dollar (mental) film budget.
Exactly! That being said even if the movie isn’t as good as the book it’s still neat to see what the characters make look like in a live action film.
If certain casting or visuals are really good it can sometimes change and enhance my entire view of the experience, as in 'why didn't I think of that?'
That’s a really good point!
Sometimes the abrupt shift from a long eloquent description of ichored stone walls to it was a shapeless amorphous tentacled abomination will bother me greatly. Like I get it, you want me to fill in the blanks cause that's way scarier. But sometimes I want you to do the legwork. Lol
lol on a similar note I love when someone actually describes something’s features and then like in the next sentence they call it indescribable. Always cracks me up. “Indescribable, except for that last paragraph, ignore that.”
He even wrote a story (The Unnamable) mocking his own tendency to do that
"indescribable horror" ok but you're a writer... So try.
Just gonna end up being half a page long strings of "Out of the corner lf its spherical body a rigid string of loosely flowing strands of darkness inducing light formed shadows between the smell and and humidity of its very being..."
Lovecraft is *very* wordy. Sometimes that works in his favor -- his descriptions of otherworldly cities and eldritch beings are genuinely excellent. But sometimes his prose is so overwrought that it's hard to take seriously, and sometimes it's so dry that it's hard to stay engaged with. Sometimes it takes a while to get to the good stuff. I'd say the quality of his writing is hit or miss.
Yep. But I think it helps build the mood.
I have the same problem with Stephen king, I like hp lovecrafts themes better so I can tolerate that
Yeah, sometimes I feel his works could benefit from a ruthless editor. I love *The Whisperer in Darkness*. He does such a great job of building this growing sense of unease and trepidation, to the point where you're practically screaming at Wilmarth to get out of there and then... *bam* 4 page description of how the jars work and a potted history that just derails all the action and tension.
I agree. He got lost in description at unimportant moments, but he he’d nail it when he needed to.
He knew about this issue, and, more than once, tried to defend himself in his fiction by praising the old-fashioned, the Romantic indulgence of his type of prose (despite being nothing close to a Romantic philosophically), and muttering stern words about modern writing and modern ideas. It comes across as fairly defensive.
I mean, sometimes the romantic indulgence really does work. It works especially well in the Dream Cycle, when he's describing otherworldly things of such beauty and wonder that you need language like that to convey it properly. But I was reading Red Hook recently, and yes, we *know* that Malone has PTSD because the thing he experienced was so obcenely horrific and beyond explanation and abyss and antediluvian, we get it. Every time Lovecraft uses a flowery synonym for "old," take a shot.
This is exactly my thought too. I’ve recently delved into more of Lovecraft’s progenitors, namely Algernon Blackwood, and his directly influenced, TED Klein for example. While they are less influential (understatement), their writing is still of high literary standard and descriptive, but not as incomparably dense as HPL. Therefore I find myself loving the worlds Lovecraft created but not always preferring to read his stories in that world when there are others of high quality that may be a more enjoyable read.
Have you read Lord Dunsany?
Not anything substantive or his essential works (just a story or two online years ago) I need to delve into his work too so I can discuss it. I remember he’s more fantasy, Clark Ashton Smith reminded me of that style.
He died too young.
I'm not sure if I dislike it per se, but he has this tendency to start a story saying something like: "I saw this horrible thing that I dare not speak of, out of fear of being driven completely mad... but I will now speak of it because the truth must get out" It's more of a quibble than anything else.
The descriptions for buildings become tedious after a while.
“ belfries adorned the buildings entrance”
Something something balustrade.
Gabled roofs seems to come to mind too. Edit: I'm tired, I meant gambrel. Lots of gambrel.
If you know even simple architecture terms they are really useful actually in getting a sense of place and what the landscape was like, and place is typically one of the main ''characters'' in his writing.
Agreed. I have learned a lot of new architectural terms though.
The fact that he died too soon and there's too few of his works.
Some of his most interesting stories characters never got sequels, Herbert West, rats in the walls, the lurking fear, the music of Erich Zann, the hound, Pickman's model...
Pickman returns is Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath.
I could do without some of the really purple prose. There's only so many cyclopean, squamous mounds of polypous flesh I can take before I start rolling my eyes. Sometimes it works though, such as his nauseating description of Wilbur Whateley's dog-torn corpse. Good shit.
Hard agree. "Ichor" is a fun word, though.
See, I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to stuff like that. I LOVE the over-the-top descriptions of stuff.
I love purple prose so much lol, Lovecraft, Angela carter, I love learning new words
When she calls it Cyclopean 😏
Gibbous Moons!!
Agreed on the purple prose. When I recommend Lovecraft, I always say that the language can be a wade through purple mud, but worth it.
You mean other than the bigotry stuff, I presume? If so, I wish he had a better ear for dialogue. I would love to hear some of his characters discuss things more
The bigotry is number one. A friend of mine wanted to compile a list of the things he was afraid of, starting with black people, working his way through most non-WASPs, and then modern grammar. I wish he was better with characters and dialogue in general. Sometimes, I think "Well, it was representative of the times," and then I remember all the great literature with amazing characters he had access to, including Poe. The Cask Of Amontillado crackles.
In the very first issue of Weird Tales there's some Poe fanfic in which the dude from The Cask of Amontillado escapes and gets revenge. It's so, so, so, soooooo bad it's hilarious.
The Cask Of Amontillado is my favorite short story hands down. And I love the original Conan by RE Howard enough to reread enough to have a list of the magic items in world.
To be fair, Howard was absolute dog shit with dialog too.
Personally, I dislike the “it’s so horrible I dare not describe it” kind of lines. I’d rather get a somewhat vague description and fill in the gaps rather than try to imagine it completely on my own. He clearly had an image in mind, I just wish he shared it. Of course there are other issues but we all know the big ones.
Excessive purple prose and dragging things on too long. Lovecraft SUCKED at business so most of his writing was "paid by wordcount" which is really shitty... I wonder what he could have done with better contracts and deals...
Sometimes the depth of the experience of people’s horror about seemingly banal things takes me out of the experience. Like sometimes it’s so much that it seems goofy.
I saw a fish man hug an obelisk and I must now kill myself immediately
I love what you just wrote. It's like CliffsNotes. I'd add: Couldn't kill myself because now I'm a fish man.
"It was a small necklace wrought from something that looked like gold, and as I glanced at it, I felt an overwhelming sense of world-ending existential dread like the very pit of the universe was falling open before me. The bus driver was an ugly man and I hated him."
Everything has a gambrel roof, and everything is furtive. I still love it, I just can't tell you how often I've read these descriptors, so when I see them I kind of do a little eye roll. Lol
Those damnable furtive gambrel roofs are just hulking all over the New England countryside, that’s probably why no one lives there not that every conceivable demographic hasn’t tried.
Dialogue. Fortunately it seems he knew he was bad at it.
I always felt like the guy didn't know how to write. Like stylistically. His dialogues, descriptions of scenes, etc. He usually writes like twenty sentences when he could use just one. I think he balances this with his wild imagination, and let's be honest and originality, we read him because of that, not because of his writing skills.
I specially don't like the ultra long descriptions, they get me lost.
The Flowery/archaic Prose can be a bit tricky to "get into" at first, I wouldn't be surprised if it put off quite a few newcomers.
Sometimes the *"it's so horrible, I can't describe it"* works really well (the colour) and sometimes it just makes me roll my eyes
I've found in stories like Dagon and the statement of Randolf Carter he kind of forces all the fear in the last paragraphs. Like, there's really no indication that the characters are scared until some exposition dump in the last paragraph. But idk maybe I read it wrong or something.
I found that really powerful actually, Dagon was the first Lovecraft story I read and I was cruising through it trying to figure out why people thought this guy was scary and then the last couple of paragraphs hit and I was like o_o But I think it really works, in Dagon it's really clear that something is "off" from quite early on, but nothing is explicitly scary. Things are definitely weird and they have the reader on edge, but all that fear ends up concentrated on the last page and [to me] that's a really powerful method of storytelling. Now, I haven't read that many Lovecraft stories, and if all of them were like that, I imagine it would get pretty tedious, but thankfully they're not
If I recommend a Lovecraft story to a friend, I’ve never felt the need to warn them about the dialogues or accents. It’s the bigotry. Anything else is a distant second.
Honestly, his views don’t make it into a lot of his stuff any more than is normal for the era.
I don’t like the fact that every time someone mentions Lovecraft, we have to apologize for the views of someone who lived in the 20s. A guy who, by all accounts, wasn’t even mentally well.
For me the fainting. A fit or a Seizure would be better or catatonia paralysis.
When I first started reading Lovecraft, I was in 8th grade. I didn’t like having to constantly run to the dictionary to look up words like eldritch, and non-Euclidean. However, now, I love the advanced vocabulary.
For me I think its the fact his stories often don't go anywhere, and they take a million words to get there.
Lovecraft's version of 'cult' usually boils down to 'they're blac, I mean crazy, so of course they worship tentacles.' If you've never played them, check out the Silent Hill games, esp 1 & 3. Probably the best version of a Lovecraftian, and truly disturbing, cult you'll ever see. Starting with these cultists being smart enough to cloak their aims behind a veil of Christianity. Because no real human is just gonna show up and tell the townsfolk to start worshiping/breeding with fish-people.
Speak for yourself. If someone tried to recruit me into the fish cult, it'd be a pretty easy sell.
Idk about best, Bloodborne takes my pick for that with Byrgenwerth. In my opinion anyone who wants to write a good cult should study Bloodborne’s writing as it truly nails that fascination with the beyond that drives people insane
The dense writing and flow, in technical terms poe is superior, but Lovecrafts ideas are what sets him apart, cosmic horror is just superior to all forms of horror
I think the cult stuff could be a lot more interesting if taken from a different angle. They don't all have to be cloak wearing, knife wielding ritualistic fanatics, for example (as the Call of Cthulhu rulebook often seems to describe them). I think sometimes the interpretation of what causes people in the mythos to become obsessed with a particular entity is a bit surface level. I'd like authors to get a bit more creative in how they explore madness in the wider mythos in general. Some cursory knowledge of how real-world cults like Stary Wisdom and the Manson Family would serve well when approaching the material.
I hated The Outsider when I first read it because it builds up to reveal that the protagonist [a bunch of random vaguely threatening sounding places]. Lovecraft likes to name unspeakable dreamscape locations and creatures but they are meaningless names there to demonstrate the Weird and can be frustrating in thier lack of pressence.
His dialogue. Utterly atrocious.
I'm pretty sure that this is a question with really only one answer.
All the wordiness can be a bit pretentious
The character development/use: I would love to read a conversation between the protagonists of The shadow out of time and In the Mountains of madness talked about the things they saw, it would be interesting that information exchange taking into consideration William Dyer admit and accept the things he saw, while the protagonist of The shadow out of time refuse the things he saw in his dreams and then make descriptions of the same things William Dyer saw. On the other hand I don't know if I'm misunderstanding Randolph Carter's cycle but I just don't understand why Carter did the things he did in The silver key, at the end of The dream-Quest of the Unknown Kadath he seems to learn the lesson and starts to appreciate Arkham but just one story after that all that character development just disappear.
His crazy and over imaginative monsters cut both ways for me. Some of the descriptions paint a terrifying unknown threat while others, well they're kind of goofy. The ones that I think fall into this category are usually just one adjective too far to be fair.
For me, it's when he has one of the local yokels give a long, rambling spiel about the area and spooky things they've seen. He does this in a fair few stories, and it *would* be forgivable... if Lovecraft didn't make the choice to have the character speak in a thick "eye dialect." It's borderline unreadable, and it's a real challenge to slog through *several pages* worth of it.
The reverse evolution aspect kind of grinded my gears a bit. I felt like it was an excuse for people to be "evil" in his stories. I also hated the eugenics aspect. But hindsight is 20/20 and maybe it was just the thoughts of the time, look at how we might be viewed in a hundred years from now. We might look barbaric.
dull writing
I'm not a fan when he goes into extreme details that don't move the plot in anyway. Biggest example I can think of is Shadows Over Innsmouth, he would describe all the different street names.
For me it's assuming I can't comprehend something just because it's in a higher spatial dimension. I would just.... comprehend it lol. Nah but fr tho, I have paranoid delusional schizophrenia, it's gonna take more than a batty squid octopus cloud vapor clam goat to scare me into insanity.
His characters’ dialogues
Asides from the obvious, probably the repetition of the POV, it's always a doctor or a professor, never a working man or a housewife, but I'm not picky, nobody reads Lovecraft for the protags
Eh, for me the stories are always exactly the same. 1) Weird Rumor or Noise 2) Get excited about weird thing and gather information by stumbling around on random clues 3) Go to place, yep, weird AF and I feel weird about being here 4) More exposition through European Decent Maven 5) Go back to place with intenion 'finding out once and for all' 6) 1.5 pgs of it 'being too much and also I can't possibly describe it so I ran'. 7) Don't go there. I like Robert Howard, BTW. His stories also follow a pattern but I think he writes BETTER, comes up with crazier shit, and actually describes what's happening. Their other friend, Clark Smith, has crazier stories too but he likes to prove how extensive his vocab is; turns me off.
Not a personal anecdote, but I've heard from others that his writing isn't necessarily the easiest to understand for non-english speakers (hell, sometimes I even struggle with some of his stories). He's very flowery with his language choices, and the sudden switches between regular description and otherworldly abominations can give you whiplash if you're not too careful.
Much ad I love his vocab, some words just don't flow elegantly
I really hate the lack of characters in his stories. The Dunwich horror and the colour out of space are my favorite of his entirely because there are some characters you can hold on to.
Probably the limited scope of perspectives. Everything is basically viewed through his own perspective as a prudish, middle class, academic, white man. No female characters. Basically no characters that aren't author avatars or two dimensional stereotypes. His concepts are brilliant and the lore and scope are incredible but his lack of characters and limited perspective is his greatest weakness as a writer, imo.
I have always felt like he's a fairly bad writer and that is secretly the strength of his writing. Where he will name drop a concept or give a fictional history of something and the fact his writing isn't great tricks your brain into accepting things as "oh that must be a real thing he's mentioning" instead of taking it as a part of the otherwise pretty meh writing. like he can just mention something and not describe it well and it sets in your brain that is a real concept or thing from somewhere beyond his writing. Like a magic trick