Give me real critical reasons why H.P. LOVECRAFT isn't a 10/10 author.
You can't. It's genius how he weaves stories.
His crutchey, "unspeakable" prose.
lovecraft's so reddit it hurts
CTHULHU F'LAGHN XD
>>7357831
>a certain author is only liked by users of a specific site
>reddit bogeyman
Kill yourself, my friend
>>7357831
DFW is literally reddit: the writer
>>7357756
His prose isn't very good.
>>7357907
What if that's the point. How can you structure that which has none and comes from nothing
>>7357756
His prose is horrendous. Not even memeing opinions I read online; I read ATMoM a few years ago and was surprised at how poorly written it was
>people thinking his prose is bad
Maybe if you have brain damage and the vocabulary of an african. At the very worst, it's still more interesting than dried-up shit like Tolkien.
He is a good writer on the basis of a single story, like A Colour out of Space.
But if you read more of him he quickly becomes stale and repetitive. He has the same catch, the same vocabulary, the same feeling is evoked, the same story is told.
When I read say Wolfe or Tolkien or even Leiber I'll find new ideas, experiments, style, stories. But with Lovecraft you have absolutely no reason to read more than 3-4 stories since they are all the same.
>>7358523
>Lovecraft's prose is good
>His vocabulary is good
I don't quite know where to tell you to fuck off back to, but I'm going to go with reddit
>>7358142
>m-maybe he writes bad on purpose
No, he's just not a good writer. Read more.
>>7357756
YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!
He has ways of ruining his own stories. Sometimes he does a god job though, like with Dagon.
>>7358531
Hello Reddit!
>>7358530
>He has the same catch, the same vocabulary, the same feeling is evoked, the same story is told.
I feel this way about most anti-fanboy lovecraft posts I see on 4chan
like rather than reading lovecraft, they've only read 4channers whining about lovecraft
>>7358530
>But with Lovecraft you have absolutely no reason to read more than 3-4 stories since they are all the same.
Explain how A Colour Out of Space and Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath are the same story.
>>7357756
he was a racist piece of shit, there, you're welcome.
so who's pose do you all like?
I very much like Lovecraft, I have been reading him before bed lately.
But no his bad prose it isn't a meme it is as true as true can be. Let's ignore the formulaic approach he has (I suspect out of any recent author his would be the easiest to counterfeit(Derelth, There Are More Things)) He has some awfully cumbersome and clunky sentences, whole paragraphs even, whole stories in his earlier work. In the semi autobiographical 'He' he makes at least a couple mentions of wanting to be a poet and derides the other poets in it saying
>and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art
Which is funny as he is an incredibly tone deaf writer.
>Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall
You can see what he is trying to do with the repetition and alliterative quality ( maybe even an attempt at a pun?)
>Un, Un, Un, flopped rhythmically
This might describe the whole of his writing. You may defend his repetition of the unknown for effect but it's more likely he can't describe a thing for when we do get something solid it's just
>an inert mass of mangled flesh
Or whatever five words he can summon best.
What's up with these recent Lovecraft shitposts lately? I saw one describe Borges as 'Lovecraft on peyote' and then deride the former for his of dropping literary references while pretending Lovecraft isn't rife with them (sometimes misapplied) or so clumsy it is also another example of his failing prose. See for example the Polyphemus simile in his most famous story, it so just jammed in awkwardly because he cannot escape his hard-on for Grecian literary references
I would also like to have an example of his 10/10 prose. I figure the rabid Lovecraft fanboys don't know what constitutes good prose, and mistake his intrigues as such. The bulk of his stories aside from a few choice ones and a novellas aren't meant to be high literature nor were they even trying to be it was pulp fiction which has it's merits but it isn't notable for prose. I mean this is very obvious in Herbert West with it's needed re-introductions that when not read in it's serial publication are tiresome (I'm not faulting him entirely on this)
So let's ignore that, well half of his stories are anticlimactic predictable messes that end with
>YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD
>for you see I died that time eighteen years ago
Or with the story of Dagon this need for a quick spook ruins all atmosphere built to the point.
>>7358717
Nabokov's
>>7358717
whose*
>>7358688
His Novellas are the only time he ever really applied himself. If you read Dreamquest with the other Dream Cycle stories like Celephais, Outsider it's the same tropes. If you read the Cthulhu mythos it's the same tropes. I would say that his earliest material in which he was still trying to find his voice and was still a Machen and Blackwood imitator was where you'll find his most varied use of cliches.
>>7358726
>Nabokov
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
>>7358717
I personally like Melville, Wolfe, Proust amd Tolkien specifically for use of language.
>>7358716
You don't remember it because the two stories aren't at all similar.
>>7358742
I don't remember it because it's unremarkable and in the 5 years since I've read it have forgotten it, remembering only the few which specifically peeked my interest.
>>7358744
>any story that disproves my claims must not be worth reading :))))
Nice critique.
>>7358744
>peeked my interest.
>>7358753
Like I've stated before, I've read his Necronomicon collection.
You Lovecraft fans are fucking redditors.
>>7358717
Frank Herbert
>>7357756
Now see here, there are a few things about him that make him incredible.
>He created the cosmic horror genre
>He and Poe and practically responsible for all of American Horror and Stephen King originally wrote Cthulhu Mythos.
>Kolchak the Night Stalker was a response to Lovecraft and X-Files was a response to Kolchak. Darren McGavin was even supposed to be the creator of the X-files.
>He had some incredible ideas that no one at the time or since has thought of.
However, Lovecraft's prose was lacking.
Look no further than the first paragraph of Herbert West: Reanimator.
The narrator describes Herbert West as his best friend, but most of the paragraph is just explaining how utterly terrified the narrator is of his best friend. In fact, in that first paragraph, he ends one sentence with terror and begins the next with terror. Its just clunky and reads kind of funny.
>>7357756
He spent less time working on some actually original stories, and instead just resorted to reusing the same stuff over and over again. Like another anon has pointed out, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Colour Out of Space, these are two of Lovecraft's better stories. Lovecraft stories really have two ways they go: great or awful, and there is far more awful than there is great.
He's a great horror-writer at best, and at worst he just resorts to a bunch of hardly-pronounceable, italics-riddled crap that makes you wonder what the fuck he was doing at the time of writing. But his best stuff puts him at a solid 8-9/10. People try to emulate Lovecraft, but for some reason the majority emulate either the wrong stuff, or they insist on doing a poor job of it.
I hate the made up places he constantly drops on the reader. No context, no relevance, just difficult to pronounce places he sees as world building
>>7357756
To all those who judge him on things like herbert west , stop that. He had to write quite a lot of short stories for a pulp magazine, so it's normal some of them suck.
When you judge a writer, look for his best works:
-The Colour out of Space
-At the Mountains of Madness
-The Shadow over Innsmouth
-The dream-quest of unknown Kadath (but this one is a bit special, you hate it or love it)
Then you can criticize him.
I reckon he has a cumbersome prose, but as >>7359664
put it, he created many new concepts and became an inspiration for other authors.
When some say his endings are predictable, of course they are, as so many people drew inspiration from him, some of his endings now are a cliché, but that's the price of success.
So he's a great author. Maybe not 10/10, but at least 9/10.
Thomas Ligotti is better in every conceivable way, and is a damn fine writer as well. Lovecraft is good for a child first experiencing cosmic horror literature. Ligotti is fitting for an adult with a much more complex worldview.
Pic Related.
Kitsch crap.
>>7359856
Yes, but Ligotti writes LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR.
So when you have a whole genre named after you, you can't be too bad
>>7359863
Splendid input. Fucking namefags
>>7359875
I must have missed where I said Lovecraft was bad. Clunky prose, but still enjoyable.
>>7359856
Ligotti suffers from Lovecraft's overly purple prose. Iove both authors but I dont kid myself about their abilities as writers. they cant into subtlety for shit.
>>7358740
nice reference
>>7357831
Until they read his nigger poem.
>>7358604
shoula expanded more, forgot the audience I was talking to. I didn't mean that he purposely wrote prose badly. that was his world, he didn't live in the world of adhering to whoever wouldn't like his writing anyways or some sort of strict norm of good. focusing on the structure of a piece is simple. immersing yourself empathetically into the world of the author and experiencing the world as they do, even if it's in just a fraction, that's the fucking point. there's no good or bad and you're sure as shit not anybody special to be handing down judgement. Read better. and chill
>>7358740
You are all admitting that the bulk of his writing is shit to mediocre but because he managed to strike gold so to speak only a handful of times he is 8/10 or above? I guess 7/10 is your average? I am not saying he is overrated (he generally is) but that you are yourself overrating him and probably overrate in general. This is a bad habit.
9/10 for being an
>Ideas man
Which if you guys were so immersed in cliché you'd know how ridiculous this is.
For that alone would make King a 9/10 and every author of 'my diary, desu' as well just for ideas. This would also make King a 9/10 if we only count influence on other writers. You can be an influential average writer it isn't unheard of nor rare.
Or that the claim the literary American horror tradition is just him and Poe and then he came out of nowhere with his 'unprecedented' ideas. This I am sure would annoy Lovecraft himself (which makes me think there aren't many deep readers of him here) considering he wrote on these things a lot and even a few of his contemporaries had similar ideas and themes at the time. Not that surprising considering they all were close friends and this doesn't happen in a vacuum.
And it gets more ridiculous when you have people like
>>7359852
Who confuses two wildly different criticisms of Herbert West as one in the same. The one I mentioned was a result of serialization but the other is not the result of format or necessity but just a flat out contradictory narrative within the first two or so paragraphs.
+
Thinks Lovecraft invented common and ancient fireside horror clichés.
>he was the ghost all along
This isn't to say he didn't bring some of his own to the table but even they get predictable within his own work and not because of a familiarity with them as a result of being absorbed into the mainstream. If you pickup any collection of his stories and examine them you'll find him relying on his limited bag of tricks time and time again. This is true now and was obviously true then as the texts haven't changed.
>>7360782
His precursors who he aped hard in his early material, and even a select few contemporaries (he wasn't the only Weird Tales contributor y'know?) were writing to the same horror or pulp audience and didn't suffer from this.
>>7360782
Except he often fancies himself a good writer amongst phillistines you fig.
That you think prose is exactly synonymous with structure (which he is good at) and good prose being a 'strict norm of good' (there are so many non normative prose stylists) tells me a lot. Why do you feel the need get so defensive/insecure for Lovecraft? You don't need to have a Michilen Star to see that shit is on your plate. Which is even more ridiculous when you consider Lovecraft was a discerning elitist reader himself. Read better. and chill.
He has his peaks and some are maybe 8/10 works. However as a writer, with all of his work considered he ends up only above average.
>>7357756
I won't, it's strange how hard it is for me to any writers work. But when it comes down to it, this man terrifies me and I eat up every word.
A Shadow Out of Time
That's the one story that haunts me to this day.
