A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore with a friend and he suggested that I should pick up a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories. After listening to my friend praise Lovecraft, I bought the book and eagerly started reading it when I got home.
I soon discovered that reading Lovecraft could be a very frustrating experience. There’s no doubt he was very creative. His Cthulhu mythos is tremendously rich and I enjoyed the many cross-references he managed to work into his stories.
Despite the rich world he built, I was less than impressed with the quality of his actual writing. His prose is filled with tortuous sentences that groan under the weight of their hyperbole. He also demonstrates an inability to murder his darlings. A case in point would be his (over)use of ‘blasphemous’. The first time you come across a reference to ‘blasphemous tracks’ or the like, it’s an interesting and unconventional use of the adjective. But Lovecraft seems rather impressed with his cleverness and so he uses the word again and again so that, by its fifteenth appearance, it’s just annoying and repetitive.
Lovecraft also frequently describes things as being too monstrous for the human mind to behold. That’s fine once or twice, but when it’s repeated across many stories, it just comes across as something of a cop out.
That being said, there are a few Lovecraft pieces that I do enjoy. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” provided some of the inspiration for the plot of A Theft of Bones and “At the Mountains of Madness” does a nice job of using the Antarctic setting to convey terror and isolation.
But, for me at least, Lovecraft’s greatest value lies in his vivid demonstrations of how not to write. A good writers’ group or a critique partner would have probably improved Lovecraft’s writing immensely, allowing him to be a great writer instead of being America’s greatest bad writer.
Codex Lochianus 