I love when he talks about the ancient "reptile men" or "lizard men." Give me the heebie-jeebies. I've read a bunch of his stuff too. What i liked about him is - even though he's writing this creepy shit, you can tell through his voice that he is having the time of his life doing it. Love that.
Lovecraft So Far
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 On 07/17/2017 at 03:30 PM by daftman See More From This User » |
Lovecraft is a pretty big name in internet culture, and "Lovecraftian" is a popular descriptor to throw around. Cosmic horror! But while I have read some Lovecraft—most notably the fantastic "At the Mountains of Madness"—most of his work has remained a mystery to me. But this year I finally broke out the massive Lovecraft book I've had for a while and am slowly working my way through it. 110 pages and 19 stories so far. Since it lists the stories chronologically, I'm still in his earlier works. He obviously improves as he goes because if what I have read so far was the totality of his output, Lovecraft would merely be an interesting footnote in horror history. There have been some good stories, specifically those that deal with deteriorating sanity of the narrator—I especially liked "Polaris" where a man stares up at the North Star both awake and in his dream and anguishes over which life is the real one—but mostly the stories have been overly vague in their supernatural elements and predictable in their endings. Sometimes an unexplained mystery can be compelling, as in "The Temple" or the fantastic final line of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but stories like "The Terrible Old Man" I finished and was like...so? Too many of these early stories are like that, containing the germ of something interesting but failing to flesh it. But on the whole I have enjoyed my time with Lovecraft and, looking to the stories ahead, I'm excited to finally get to the famous stories I have yet to read.
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