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H.P. Lovecraft

Commonplace Book is a peculiar reading experience. It contains 222 ideas for stories that Lovecraft wrote down, either for himself or to give away to other writers; some he would later spin off into full-blown short stories, others never became more than a brief note. As a collection of stories, it's obviously frustrating; out of all the ideas, barely half are developed enough ("developed", in this case, meaning "consisting of full sentences") to give the reader a vague idea of what would happen in the story, the rest are just brief notes and keywords ("Dead man's hand writes." "Split personality." "Lemmings, Atlantis.") It's not even that the stories are unfinished, in most cases they're not even started yet. And since a good horror story is always more about how it's told than what it's about, there's hardly even a tickle of a chill in the entire book - especially if you're familiar with Lovecraft; almost all his stories can be summed up with "Person A goes to place B, opens book C and finds unspeakable horror." With no actual text to sell the ideas, they mostly look horribly dull.

What it does give, apart from maybe a half-dozen summaries that actually do sound intriguing, is an interesting look into how Lovecraft got his ideas and what he considered scary. Obviously, given Lovecraft's political ideas it's occasionally unpleasant for all the wrong reasons (big fan of racial hygiene, ol' HP was), but at least he's consistent in his approach: find the "nightmare spot", the bit where you can make the reader doubt what's real, the one where you can yank the very thin carpet of sanity out from under him and drop him screaming into the void beneath. The scariest thing in Lovecraft's stories is always the loss of control, the realisation that mankind is just a tiny ineffectual speck in a world that's much bigger than we thought. That he could jot down hundreds of ways to get to that spot is, in itself, interesting, and makes me wonder just what would have happened if Lovecraft and Kafka had gotten the chance to talk.
 
His prose is just terrible , and his stories are ten times longer than it should be. I admit that he had some brilliant ideas , but since when did great ideas alone make a great author ?
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Lovecraft cannot write dialouge, lmao.
Even King admits that.
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I've read On Writing by Stephen King, he talks about many of his influences, including Lovecraft, but he says that he lacks good dialogue, amongst his characters, can't remember what did he said more about him, what his really good at, or was, it's about what he describes, and of course the general ideias and mythos that are known about his works.

I've read many lovecraft's works, and loved it, can't really say if is a great author or one of the best, but if Stephen King and sooooo many others unanimously say good things, or the best things about lovecraft, who are you or me or anyone else to say otherwise. The thing is, just like King said about his writing, and probably many others have their good or bad, or both opinion on HPL, he was one of the most influencial writers to future generations, along with Edgar Allan Poe, probably much better writer that HPL. Stoker, Mary Shelley, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, probably also betters writers, each and everyone of them, marked the horror genre with at least one or two (to say the least) a great masterpieces of literature.

But Lovecraft reminds me of Tolkien, cause he focused on a mythological single world, Cthulu Mythos and all that. Like tolkien and his Middle Earth.

But like someone said already, his ideias are far better than his writing, and of course that is exactly what influenced possibly every writer that lives today.

Did anyone read H.P.Lovecraft: A Life by S. T. Joshi? i've bought it, but it's standing by, for now.
 
I like Lovecraft, or some of Lovecraft. The tales that called 'Dunsanian' from their resemblance to Dunsany's fantasy writing appeal to me most; I also like parts of the Cthulhu mythos. The very grimmest of his horror I'm less fond of.
 
I have noticed this and was wondering if someone would ever write an article on it. :rofl:

I have that plush Cthulhu too. And the mints.
 
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