Does anyone else here think Lovecraft genuinely transcended the "good / bad" dichotomy?

Does anyone else here think Lovecraft genuinely transcended the "good / bad" dichotomy?

His writing is totally unique. It's amazing.

I haven't gone to barnes and nobles lately, i'm trying to read other authors, sorry about that.

His prose style is like Poe on bath salts. I think it is fair to call it 'bad'.

He's good. In tailoring his own genre, he became its primary example and his oft-criticized writing style is crucial to the genre's weird atmosphere. You cannot call him a bad writer, for what he predominately wrote. He struggled with dialogue, but he knew that and rarely ever attempted it. Nevertheless, his influence during his lifetime and beyond it was and is vast. What more can be said of the man?

bad meme

This.
Also I found his very specific type of racism somehow added to his universe and was probably the main reason he had the themes he did. That and him living in Providence.

He perfected a very core foundation of horror, namely an existential one. You have to give him that at least, even if you simply don't enjoy him.

>I do tho desu

No. You're just a genrepleb.

Thanks for the laugh user. It's funny because it's true.

t. M'atthew Neckbeardington

The people he ripped off wrote way better than him. Also Clark Ashton Smith was better.

Lovecraft is pure aesthetics. If you don't like him you don't like literature.

Who's "better" than him isn't the question at hand though.

Is Lovecraft difficult to get into? I haven't read anything since like High School other than skimming through college textbooks. And I wasn't even all that big of a reader in HS. Trying to get more into it recently.

Nah he's easy, and he writes entertaining stories. Good a place to start as any

Yes he is in a way. For one his writing style is his own. You know it's Lovecraft you're reading so that can be jarring at first. Also he uses a lot of adjectives and obscure words which a normal person wouldn't. But he is worth reading!

>I found his very specific type of racism somehow added to his universe and was probably the main reason he had the themes he did
Yes, this is extremely accurate. And it does make for an interesting mythos too. If he wasn't racist his stories wouldn't be nearly as alienating to humanity I think.

>transcended the "good / bad" dichotomy
Good/bad is always relative.

He mostly wrote short stories.
You can pick up his life works for a buck or so as ebook. But most of it is online anyway.

Give his wiki a gander after three stories or so and check out his themes.

>Yes, this is extremely accurate. And it does make for an interesting mythos too. If he wasn't racist his stories wouldn't be nearly as alienating to humanity I think.
Yeah. Then again he seemed to know at least a little about occultism, which seemed to add to it all. Perhaps that was even what formed his racism the way it was. Which is odd, since he believed none of it. It seems he really did just appreciate the stories and aesthetics of it all.

He is a pretensious pleb filter.

he was a genre pulp writer who sold stories to magazines with THE TALE OF THE AMAZING BEARDED WOMAN on the covers. you'll be fine.

He's easy to get into. I would start with "At The Mountains of Madness" as I began with that, liked it and then moved on to the rest of his stories.

No, because his writing is legitimately bad, and only people who don't actually read think it is good. Lovecraft is only notable for his influence on the horror genre and his hatred for negros.

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Lovecraft was an awful writer. He exploited alien ideas at the time, but they exploited very human fears. The key to horror is humanity, and Lovecraft made the distinction. Later through time, enough for it to cause awful tropes and cliches within horror literature that's caused it to become the genre fiction bastard child tied to film, out of what was once loved and respected work. The Yellow Wallpaper will always be more effective horror than The Dunwich Horror, or whatever pulpy nonsense.

I ultimately find Lovecraft and his effects on literature more negative than positive.

Lovecraftian horror is the best. Has the Unknown, the Forbidden, the anti-Anthropocentric, the Misanthropic, the Hopeless, and the Alone/Lonely.

The fault of his style of writing was 'telling' instead of 'showing', as they say - hence, in part I think, the perception of 'pulpiness'. But, the ambition of his genre of horror might've made that inevitable. This is why I'd like to see more Lovecraftian horror movies.

I would not read your blog.

>The key to horror is humanity
His horror threatened humanity in a very existential way.
I feel like you think all he did was write about spoopy aliens.

You're part of the problem in nu-Veeky Forums if you actually enjoy Lovecraft's prose.

I said in the beginning he took a specific type of horror, and brought it to public light. That very fear you're talking about, but since it was something nobody had ever seen before, that it was so fresh; it stuck to horror.

Most of Lovecraft's fame and influence over time comes from that freshness of what he was writing. But the problem is the effects he had on horror, for a variety of reasons, that stuck more than other types. Steven King is the poster child of this problem in horror literature.

I find it hard to judge a writer based on their 'influence' on other writers for the simple reason that then I would be judging not the writer's writing itself: I would be judging them in terms of difficult-to-ascertain associations between their writing and the writing of others. 'Influence' is a weird concept in judging any art.

You're not supposed to enjoy it. The prose is intentionally picked the way it is to create the effects he was going for. Which are not enjoyable, but weird.
He and his friends set a new horror genre. Granted, it spawned some shit authors. But that is true of every author who brought something new to the table.

Also I think a large part of his fame was because he (and his friends) created a larger mythos. So there obviously is also a strong "fantasy" following.