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Gee, what wou'd Mr. Lovecraft say? (pg. 2)
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| Wow, thank you for your post. My mind has been changed! |
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| bamski |
| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Are you guys joking? Lovecraft is one of the worst writers I've ever read. Shockingly poor. There's a reason he was never published outside the pulps until long after he was dead.
His ideas were very good, and there's no doubt he's the most influential horror writer of the last hundred years, but his prose is awful and his stories contrived and clunky. Pickman's Model and The Rats In The Walls are the only ones I'd give the time of day. |
I'll get back to you on that in strange aeons when I somehow manage to power up to your level of conception. |
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| Meat187 |
| quote: | Originally posted by bamski
I'll get back to you on that in strange aeons when I somehow manage to power up to your level of idiocy. |
Fixed. |
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| igottaknow |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
Wow, thank you for your post. My mind has been changed! |
Come on Hal. I'm sure he didn't mean it. :sadgreen: |
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| bamski |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
Fixed. |
No, because you forgot that he should power 'down', not up.
And instantly I heard an old Arnold line in my head, you used to be somebody I could trust..
:p |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| quote: | Originally posted by igottaknow
Come on Hal. I'm sure he didn't mean it. :sadgreen: |
Nono, you'll see. Give him a few minutes to compose a post on how his literary acumen is obviously so much more sophisticated than ours, thereby rendering our opinions wrong and useless. :stongue:
I respect System-J quite a bit, but it's his typical MO to drop a contrary opinion early in a thread so that he can bicker with people over taste or other things he cannot change. A man after my own pop tart. |
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| Meat187 |
| Albeit, Lovecraft did suck at writing dialogues. |
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| bamski |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
his typical MO to drop a contrary opinion early in a thread so that he can bicker with people over taste or other things he cannot change. A man after my own pop tart. |
For me it wasn't a question of if, but when.
Dear Mr.J, Sir.
I value your opinion around here when it comes to music in general more than only a fraction of a percent could compare with, when it comes to music that is.
But why you exist for the sole purpose of finding the negative aspects in everything is beyond me. And by everything I do mean every, single, thing. Sorry if all this sounds like an attack at your persona, I'm just trying to find a pattern in what you do, and specifically why you do it. I mean, I know for a fact that you're not the worst guy in the world, so I always ask myself why you have to be like that all the time.
Just one question.. as a friend;
When was the last time you had something good to say about, well.. anything? |
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| Meat187 |
| bamski, can you send me weed via mail? |
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| bamski |
| quote: | Originally posted by Meat187
bamski, can you send me weed via mail? |
No, but I can convince you that I can score instantly if you
send me the money. Furthermore, I could even convince you that I'd make it to the post-office, but I couldn't convince myself further than that.. :P |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
There are plenty of examples of awful writing in his work. But that's not the point. If you have anything but overwhelming praise for Lovecraft, YOU ARE THE ENEMY AND ARE CLEARLY IN LEAGUE WITH THE ELDER GODS.
Also, The Hound was a really great story. In the Call of Cthulhu game, there is a creature called The Hound of Tindalos - which we can probably assume is the same one that was stalking our ill-fated gravediggers in the story - but they live in the angles of space and time and will chase people who look right at them forever. although they can only materialize out of angles... so if you sequester yourself in a large sphere of some sort, they can't get to you. Circles, circles, surrounded only by circles until they go away. Go away, go away, go away.
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| SYSTEM-J |
If you think I'm trolling I'm quite prepared to trash his amateurish writing in detail.
Where do you want to begin? His ham-fisted melodramatic diegetic strategies, where he repeatedly violates the law of effective horror writing: to render your prose in the opposite voice to the intended effect? Lovecraft is never content to actually show us why something is horrifying. You can barely get to the monster for the endless lines about how close the narrator is to fainting from the blood-curdling terror of the thing.
Or how about his near-inability to write a twist ending, though not for the lack of trying. I lose count of the amount of Lovecraft where something bizarre and unexplainable happens to the narrator in the first act. The narrator promptly consults the Necronomicon, or some rambling village drunk or other plot device that perfectly explains what just happened. Nevertheless, the narrator will invariably dismiss it as a flight of foolishness, and then wander idiotically into the invariable twist ending where it turns out the horror was real all along! Judging by the way the narrator goes into shrill purple prose apoplexy in these climaxes we're supposed to be shocked by the revelation, even though you've basically seen it coming for over half the story.
Then there's his simple violation of many basic narrative rules, such as his inability to control his own focalisation. I can't decide if he just tries to cheat the reader for cheap thrills or if he doesn't have control of his own writing. A classic example occurs at the climax of The Shadow Over Innsmouth where the narrator witnesses the true form of his pursuers. The entire paragraph is laden with negative modality as the narrator doubts what he saw:
| quote: | | Nothing that I could have imagined - nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way - would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw - or believe I saw. |
I won't spoil the ending, just in case you don't see it coming from a mile off, but suffice to say that by the end of the story there is no doubt that what he saw was real, and so this negative modal shading is artificial and contrived. It shatters any immersion you might have had because you're suddenly and acutely aware that you aren't reading a character, you're reading a horror author and his self-contradictory technique has been laid bare. His rambling faux-correspondence prose style is based around the oral recounting of these tales - in several stories, such as Pickman's Model, this discourse level is dramatised - which completely undermines this kind of suspense-building technique he was so fond of.
And this is without going into the bread and butter tiness of his prose style of the many unsavoury racist and homophobic subtexts that several critics have noted in his work. I really want to enjoy Lovecraft, but the man's extensive failings mean I can't. Lovecraftian horror is best when the ideas are adapted or taken on by later, better writers. |
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