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It's not a fashionable opinio, but I think Lovecraft was a brilliant writer. Nothing that anyone else wrote in the Cthulhu Mythos comes close to the original stuff for mood, originality, or effect. Try 'Call of Cthulhu' (OK, obvious, I know), or 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Colour out of Space'.
Sometimes he repeats adjectives, I know, but remember that a lot of these tales were unfinished drafts which were never even submitted for publication. The rhythm he sets up in his prose is fantastic - in the best examples it's completely controlled, and builds to a fantastic climax. The post-modernist building up of facts and sources - some real, some fiction - almost literally hypnotises, lulls you, and pulls you along to the denoument. And if you keep reading the other stories, the effect multiplies, as the background to the mythos builds.
It's interesting to see that a lot of you have chosen early stuff as your favourites, when his later stuff is the shit. The system he builds up is as complex, piecemeal and contradictory as Crowley or caballah or any other system, which only adds to its convincing, unsettling effect.
The sense of place, of location, really affects me in a way that other horror writers can't. The opening of the 'Dunwich Horror', as the reader is literally taken there, is a brilliantly evocative piece of travel writing in itself - so when the UNSPEAKABLE HORROR is revealed, it works. |
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