What are everyone’s opinions on HP Lovecraft? I’m trying to read at the mountains of madness but I’ll read a few pages and realise I have no idea what I have just read and have to read it again. Really enjoyed The Tomb but cant seem to take in any of his other works!
I love some of his work but his writing style can be idiosyncratic at times. Some say that it is the point : Lovecraft takes language to its limit and shows its own failure against some traumatic real. Philosopher Graham Harman has this view on his book on Lovecraft. There’s also a pessimistic reading of him found in Thomas Ligotti. For me Lovecraft’s work is great as a mythos : as something that generates other ideas around it and is always a subject of debate. Ultimately, it’s about the ‘weirding out’ of reality itself. The difference between normal horror and Lovecraftian horror is that in Lovecraft the horror is not something that appears and then eliminated but something discovered as always there taking place in reality itself. Reality is always already horrific and language fails at the limit of that real. I do enjoy other “Lovecraftian” writers even more for their style and writing. I am currently reading Clark Ashton Smith and he is a much better writer imo. He was friends with Lovecraft and wrote in the same magazine