The effectiveness of Lovecraft’s fiction has little to do with its purely literary qualities, which are minimal, but with another feature that’s harder to pinpoint: the ways it casts a spell. Fiction like Lovecraft’s can be brutally hypnotic; the young reader, intellectually undefended and easily shaken, enters the writer’s fear-drenched universe and can’t easily get out of it. The mood of unappeasable, apocalyptic menace gradually overcomes those who are unprepared for it.
I’ve been reading The Complete H.P. Lovecraft and, I guess, looking for someone to have said something intelligent about it online. What I like about this piece isn’t so much the author’s scathing summary of the core Lovecraftian personality as “adolescent,” but that it so profoundly describes Houellebecq, at that. Man, just @ the dude next time.
(I’m personally inclined to be more generous, if only because I tend to cut profoundly depressed people some slack for being neurotically unpleasant -- I’m very impressed by my depressed friends who aren’t unpleasant as I don’t think I could personally manage it -- but I do find it hilarious that Houellebecq genuinely seems to believe Lovecraft was a nice person. If Lovecraft were alive today he’d be on the Internet 24/7, being terrible. In that alternate universe I hope Charlotte Brontë doxxes him.)
Anyway; I would actually estimate my own ideal age for encountering this guy as pre-teen, 9 or 10 -- which I strongly suspect is when, say, Guillermo Del Toro read him -- and since I didn’t, I’m often sitting here like “well dude I... see you’re terrified of non-WASP people and seafood. Yup.” But I’m largely in agreement with the rough canonical quality ranking of the stories, if only because they point so strongly and unexpectedly in the direction of stuff I do like a lot. “The Color Out of Space,” for instance, is basically Annihilation: 1880, which you think would’ve come up in any number of Film Twitter takes, but none I’ve read.
7/10 so far, would readily play a 90s D&D expansion campaign.
