/lit/ - Literature

Say to yourself, "Lovecraft was a pretty terrible writer but he had great ideas and was a very creative guy."

There.

>>4407672
b-but that degrades him

>>4407672
>>4407648
why was he a bad writer?

>>4407682
Smart people find his prose unnecessarily overwrought, stupid people find it hard, and everyone wants to pretend to be in the former category, so any time anyone says "Lovecraft" the memetic impulse explodes across the psychic gestalt and everyone has to go HWWHWHAHAOA SHIT PROSE PURPLE PROSE "PURPLE" IS THE CORRECT TERM FOR THAT PROSE MACHIAVELLI WAS SATIRE AYN RAND IS BAD

I like him and he's a decent writer. Some legitimately scary stories.

>>4407715

'Cyclopean arabesque squididlean flumbuxors'

Holy shit that's good

I feel like he had some great ideas but often didn't know what to do with them

"unspeakable cosmic horror" is probably the best horror trope of the 20th century. The mythology behind his work is beautiful, but the stories themselves are disappointing.

I mean you can't write a Cthulhu story where the world DOESN'T end because of some dudes on a boat. It really lessens the impact of the character and the sense of overwhelming despair and human insignificance that Lovecraft tried so hard to convey.

and then other stuff like Mountains of Madness - it gets a lot of praise but is essentially just filling in gaps in the lore. Two dudes walking around some ruins reading about ancient alien civilizations, then they sorta maybe see a shoggoth and get the fuck out of there. Come on. The lore itself is very interesting, but the story is crap.

>>4407682
His prose is excessive and overly-ornate. His descriptions are so wordy and overly-detailed, they often times get to the point where they feel cold and clinical, like it's a medical report rather than a work of fiction. He seems incapable of writing a single noun without preceding it with at least four fucking adjectives that all mean the same thing. And that's another thing, his prose is very repetitive.

His stories have interesting and creative lore behind them on the larger scale, but within the confines of the individual tales they all follow very basic plot structures that he constantly repeats. "This guy investigated this strange happening that seems trivial on the surface, but he inadvertently stumbles upon an eldritch knowledge of unspeakable horrors on a much grander scale as a result." It gets old.

>>4407828
His prose being bloated is intentional, he was payed by the page for his stories and trying to get as many words down as possible. I'm not trying to excuse it as poor writing though.

>>4407828
thanks for taking the time to answer me. I've never read anything of him. Are his book easy-reads? I don't read much. Trying to start reading more.

>>4407906
pic unrelated

>>4407906
They're fairly easy, will probably be difficult if English isn't your mother tongue, but they all do successfully create that 2spooky atmosphere. Recommend The Shadow Over Innsmouth

I like his work, but I just wish there was.. better, of it.

The whole thing with "Unspeakable horror" is cool when you hear about it, and you get interested in actually reading it, but it never seems to come off as cool. The "Horrors" written of simply fall to being plant/animal stalk monsters, fish people, and octopuses with too many eyes when actually described, making the whole term of something so horrid it drives you to insanity just by looking at it seem ridiculous.

I think part of this is just reading it in this time, with Video Games and movies and CGI and all that, you get really desensitized to "AND IT WAS REALLY SPOOKY TAKE MY WORD FOR IT".

I particularly enjoyed the lore in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Started listening to the audiobook late one night while drawing and got instantly hooked. The lore revolving around the cats was rather interesting.

>>4407906
Yes, he's easy and fun to read. Read some of his short stories first.

I love how he and his friends used to kill each other in their stories. It was like a competition.

>>4408255

I had the same reaction when I read a bit of HP. I like him and all, but yeah, I also think that it has to do with all the technology we have access to that removes much of the shock factor (I guess that's the term I'm looking for) that would have hit someone back in those times.

Kind of a shame really. I wish I could put my mind in that old thinking where there were no computers or anything. I think it'd be a lot more disturbing in that case.