Lovecraft uses description of people that human beings do not (and should not) use. “And I looked out the window and saw a bunch of weird people chanting and dancing to this big black pyramid and I screamed loudly for what seemed to be an hour in sheer horrible terror.” When he does describe actual horror, it’s not very horrific. He will write what is basically a wordy version of “And it was so horrible and I could never describe it without going crazy/dead and I really don’t want to bring those memories back in my mind so yeah just trust me it was horrible.” There are lazy attempts at shewing horrific things. “It was very horrible but my own scientific curiosity for the horrible made me very curious as to what lay forward.” Sometimes the narrators are completely unnecessary, with an obvious case of this being in The Call of Cthulhu, where the narrator summarizes other people’s actions or journal entries, when it would have been much more effective to just show the journal entries or articles themselves. Admittedly this only happens once every couple pages, but it’s still distracting. “Shewn”, “coördinated”, “reëmbarked”, etc. Lovecraft makes random misspellings in an attempt to sound archaic. Here are some notes I jotted down while reading: Before actually reading anything, I was always delighted to see the occasional “CTHULHU”-fish emblem on the back of a car or a creative homage to the famed monster on DeviantArt, and I was eager to become a loyal member of the fanbase, but it just wasn’t for me. After reading some of his most famous works (Call of Cthulhu, Call of Cthulhu, and don’t forget, Call of Cthulhu) I am completely lost to why they’ve achieved the memetic status they’re at now. I admit my strong reaction to these stories is due to the huge hype I’ve heard around them and the high expectations I had starting them. The narration, pacing, and lazy writing wreck whatever interest I had in the premises of the stories had, such as the twist to Arthur Jermyn and The Color Out of Space. I am not horrified by the stories, or at least not by any intended reasons. I am largely underwhelmed by this “master of horror.” I find the writing simply dull, repetitive, anti-climactic, and that it uses the same tricks over and over and over again. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.Īlthough Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
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