Is Lovecraft actually good and why is he good?

Haven't read At the Mountains of Madness yet but I did find this aspect sort of interesting in his stories at first, I suppose the allure kind of wore off for me when that sense of intrigue was recreated and diluted over the next four or five stories and the story beats were more or less repeated. And the prose was never good enough to compensate. It's conceptually interesting more than anything else which doesn't do much for me.

The atmosphere, the structure of the stories, the language used, the themes, the interplay between stories, the way he leaves things to the imagination.

There are hidden depths to all of it.

For example, I love how in Rats in the Walls the protagonist discovers more and more about his ancestry as he digs ever downwards. Both senses of his 'house' coincide in a delightful way.

As if you don't know.

Without alienation, there is no Lovecraft.
People need to stop trying to hide or banish this aspect of his person and writings.

>He also just seemed like a hilariously terrible asshole in real life and I'm glad he died impoverished and unappreciated.

To be honest this is what interests me most about him. I don't get anything out of his fiction but I do think he's an interesting figure, and reading his essays and letters to get a sense of what makes such a hateable person tick is fascinating.

>the prose was never good enough to compensate

Say what you will, but I love how the words seem to surge forth in moments of horror. His use of the adjective is unrivaled.

>that sense of intrigue was recreated and diluted over the next four or five stories
Take your time. Savour it. Read a story a week.
Let it breathe.

>dude bro it was so HIDEOUS i can't even explain it!
next story
>dude omfg it was SO INDESCRIBABLY GROTESQUE i cannot even begin to say!
next
>wow it was like LIGHTS and stuff from ANOTHER DIMENSION OMG!
another
>THE NON EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY WAS INDESCRIBABLE!
this has to get good sometime right?
>the guys were like from the middle east and like they had secret meetings and it scared me so much!!!!!!
okayyyyy uhh so you are stupid and ignorant?
>omg it was such an old place and it was scary and i bet people were like killed there OMFG!!! indescribable the horrors i felt!
...hmm
>it was like an old church and like there were people there who i didn't know and like OMFG it was dark and OMG the horror! the indescribable horror! the profoundly horrible things i thought about! i can't even talk about it!!!!!!!! that's why i wrote dozens of stories about it!
okay i'm done

>Lovecraft leaves much to the imagination
>Modern man has an atrophied imagination
>Complaints abound about 'lack of detail'

>he died [...] unappreciated.

This isn't true though is it? As far as I'm aware he had a strong cult following during his own life and inspired an entire new generation of horror writers who highly revered him and constantly seeked his instruction

Thats a hell of a lot more recognition than most canonical writers have ever got alive or dead.

>if i misrepresent him, i win

t. Alt-Leftfag

He had a small but dedicated following.
Fame and wide acclaim came much later.

>Lovecraft had the lone amateurish edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth in print at his death. Lovecraft died thinking of himself as a failure.

I feel as if Lovecraft was the sort of person who would feel like he was a failure no matter what happened. If he achieved success he'd have probably called himself a vulgar sell out and a clown

No matter how many times you tell them Lovecraft is bad, they will keep saying they like him.
No Matter how many times they tell you they like him, you will keep shitposting about why he is bad.
At the very least, Lovecraft's contribution to literature was the future manifestation of these threads.
Pic relate : Trash, yet still better than the work that inspired it.

>people were smart enough to realize he was bad back then
good ole' days

>hated the jews with a passion
>married the first woman who gave him attention despite her being a jew
He was as weak-willed as the average /pol/ack

He didn't hate the Jews exactly. He thought of them as being a sort of alien people who shouldn't be allowed to control European socities. He thought the same of other races that he clearly admired, like the Chinese

The people he was really racist against were sub-saharans and Australians because he thought they were incapable of civilization

Rats in the Walls is the only story of his that I genuinely really liked and found legitimately unsettling. What other Lovecraft is on that level?

What's this from?

The Lurking Fear

This pretty much. I kept waiting for it to click and it never did.

He was so absurdly racist that it wen't beyond offensive and became funny.

>On the Creation of Niggers

>When, long ago, the gods created Earth
>In Jove's fair image Man was shaped at birth.
>The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
>Yet were they too remote from humankind.
>To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
>Th'Olympian host conceiv'd a clever plan.
>A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
>Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

>When your legacy is boiled down to a lone playful poem

>contrarian opinion
>doesn't back up claim
nice one

Without resorting to bullshit /pol/ tactics can anyone actually defend his rampant xenophobia and weird fetishization of the landed gentry?

And did he ever have a sense of humour?

>a lone playful poem
lol ok

>Peace is the ideal of a dying nation; a broken race. Isaacson belongs to a stock wholly broken & emasculated by two thousand years of cringing at the feet of Aryan masters. But I, thank the Gods, am an Aryan, & can rejoice in the glorious victory of T. Flavius Vespasianus, under whose legions the Jewish race & their capital were trodden out of national existence! I am an anti-Semitic by nature, but thought I had concealed my prejudice in my remarks concerning Isaacson. I showed him every consideration in my article, carefully saying that I attacked not the man, but the ideas. However, if Jerusalem wishes to start trouble, he will find in me a new Titus, eager to inscribe on my eagles the triumphant legend IVDAEA CAPTA! I might here remark that my anti-Semitism is not entirely due to blind prejudice. The Jews are fundamentally Orientals, whilst the rising civilization of the world is Western—Teutonic—Anglo-Saxon. The struggle between the East & the West dates back to Marathon & Salamis, & it is the West which has ever represented progress & superior culture. The Jew is an adverse influence, since he insidiously degrades or Orientalizes our robust Aryan civilization. The intellect of the race is indisputably great, but its nature is not such that it may be safely employed in forming Western political & social ideas. Oppressive as it seems, the Jew must be muzzled.

There's more too
greatmindsonrace.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/h-p-lovecraft/

His prose is uniquely well qualified to do what he was trying to do, which is describe turn of the century figures trying to describe indescribable things. The profusion of adjectives is not so much an attempt to describe as a failure of the equipment itself. You see more of this in the late stories like Shadow Out of Time.

It's often really bad, but in a handful of stories it actually hits the mark and becomes exquisitely suited. His work also presents a unified vision of the world that has interesting things to say contra-modernity.

I suggest this essay
amyhsturgis.com/?page_id=510
and also Houellebecq's book-length study of him.

He's not a major author because he wrote too much shit but imho A Color Out of Space is a genuine masterpiece and he has a book's worth of stories that are more interesting than the reams of MFA stories being printed now.

It is not at all a universalist type of logic, it is basically just 'society is an organism and needs to remain pure and robust'.

Again, he talks about how impressive the Chinese are, but emphasizes that any mixing apart from superficial exchange corrupts both societies.

>He also just seemed like a hilariously terrible asshole in real life and I'm glad he died impoverished and unappreciated.
Read his actual biography and personal letters, not what the internet tells you. Elephant in the room was his racism and general misanthrope, only tards would defend those outlooks, but you can be glad that this came back to bite him in the ass when he couldn't deal with the reception his writing was getting, easy to laugh out.

As he neared his death he became more open and relaxed with the world though, and his personal convictions melted away. If he didn't squander his inheritance for fear of the fame, he may have gone on to be a lot more influential beyond
>lmao this tentacle monster is soooo lovecraftian
it's a shame.

Other than Color Out of Space, which stories would you recommend?

Yes he was.

His outlook informs his stories. Is this adequate enough a defense?

Man's lineage is bounded by horror on both ends.
Bloodlines can be tainted by impurity and dilution, but they can also have unspeakably bad origins.

The love of landed gentry reflects a brief oasis from horrors past and present. It's a refuge for him.

>He was as weak-willed as the average /pol/ack
Upvoted and gilded

>He also just seemed like a hilariously terrible asshole in real life and I'm glad he died impoverished and unappreciated.
Huh fuck the right wing amrite?
Edit: thanks for the gold ;)
Edit 2: wow 2k upvotes, thanks guys haha

The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
The Shunned House
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time

Start with "The Color Out of Space."

If you get a taste for him it's worth picking up The Complete Stories and just reading it through. Those stories have what he's uniquely good at, but a lot of other stories have flashes of talent or are good examples of the pulpy weird/horror tale that aren't like, great, but are very enjoyable reads.

>the right wing
Give yourself a bit more credit.

I suppose it comes down to how compelling you find that outlook as it informs the stories. I think it just comes across as hopelessly unsophisticated and sad.

I'm reading The Thing on the Doorstep. Is it supposed to be this predictable? I know that she's posessing him but the story seems to be developing as if that's going to be a shocking revelation.

He's from the 20th century you stupid nigger. Plenty of people were like that back then.

> My eldest cat, “Nigger-Man”...

Yes, considering how at the very start he said "Yeah I shot my friend but I did not kill him." Dones't really take my imagination to find out what happened. There's a small twist at the very end you may or may not see coming, but it's not mind-blowing or anything.

That last comment was uncalled for

He signed all his letters with the year in the 1700s because he was that butthurt about the American Revolution
Guy was a turbo-reactionary even in his own time

>dude he lived in reclusion and wrote "nigger" in a book

Pretty sure he unironically endorsed gassing non-whites once

How terrible.

Not as many as you seem to think. Lovecraft's racism was considered too intense even at the time.

Well, yes?

No it wasn't. He just didn't pretend to not be racist.

You could say that about literally anyone at any point in time

Upvoted lmao nice

>t. Nigger

>okayyyyy uhh so you are stupid and ignorant?

There is such a thing as liking a man's writing despite being completely opposed to his politics, even if they seep in his works. I read some of the correspondence he kept with Howard: they were almost diametrically opposed ideologically but they kept it going because they enjoyed the challenge an educated mind and a sharp wit offers in dialogue, although I always got the feeling Howard was more empathic and felt the need to help his penfriend overcome some of his prejudices.

>There is such a thing as liking a man's writing despite being completely opposed to his politics,

>the wide-mouth soyboy pic
i miss those threads, please start making them again

Not on /poltv/ tho

He's not really remarkable but if you enjoy his prose then you can get something out of him. The problem is that you've been spoonfed the distilled, best parts of Lovecraft from decades of pop culture and maybe ehen you read him you expect it to be a bombardment of all of those things and more. It's not. Lovecraft is very plodding, whether you like that or not is up to you.

The Music of Erich Zann and Pickman's Model are two of his better (very) short stories.

In good time my man

>/poltv/

People are finally catching up that /tv/ is the new shitposting king

But throughout the whole story there are all these "oh you wouldn't believe me if I told you" bits to prolong the ultimate reveal. If it was intended to be predictable it feels like a lot of wasted effort building pointless intrigue. The end was fairly neat though.

t. niggerman