I saw something really scary!

do you think he ever had sex?

Thanks

This is a meme, most of his stuff includes very precise and detailed descriptions of the weird alien horrors.

He is not, he is just to dense for this generation's low attention span

He was married.

N O
I M A G I N A T I O N

He did describe things in a round about way.

E.G., take the colour out of space. Sure, he says it's "Indescribable" but then gives a fucking metaphor as to what it's *like*.

That's the point you tard. You can't directly perceive it so you have to resort to experience. He does still describe it in that sense though.

Shadow over Innsmouth is the fucking best, my favourite is (from what I've so far read) that one.

this generation is all that likes him, because muh cathulu

his stories drag on with trivial and drab details and there's no payoff, not in characters, not in plot, nothing. he writes like an intelligent person, conveying his ideas clearly. its just there's no life to them. he lacks creativity. he seems like a robot that didn't know how people think and didn't care but pushed ahead with a literary career.

sounds like you haven't watched/read a lot of horror

Isn't this because he wrote most of his stuff for pulp magazines to pay the bills? So he had to write pretty short formulaic pieces?

I bet his idea of horror is Saw

>this generation is all that likes him, because muh cathulu
i hate that this generation sees him as the guy who wrotte cthulhu, because i diminishes his work.
he stood the test of time, and as inspered horror writers and movie makers since (from king to carpenter)
>his stories drag on with trivial and drab details and there's no payoff,

the best things are the payoff's, did you even read it?
lovecraft spends every sentence of his best stories ramping up the tension, to then bring it to one of two culminating points, one mid way through the story, and the end reveal. (the shadow over innsmouth, whisper in the darkness, at the mountains of madness, the shadow out of time, etc...)

and you're only looking at the cthulhu mythos. look at his other stories, or his dream cycle, and you'll see plenty of good story telling (some bad, but no one's perfect)

> its just there's no life to them. he lacks creativity.
the most influential horror writer in the 20th century (king's words, not mine) lacks creativity, even though he kicked his genre into the light of the public?

>he seems like a robot that didn't know how people think
clearly you're better qualified at knowing how people think :)

one might still try to describe something indescribable, he'll just fail to make it justice...

the outsider is underrated.

some existential horror of sorts. i loce it.

>It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.

this is a paragraph of one of his worse stories.

There are three approaches to lovecraft that I've discovered by now.
1- Pop culture. After the CoC RPG and the nonstop references from the media you get into Lovecraft because he is really popular in the underground. You read his most famous stories, probably most of them cosmic horror ones which are difficult to completly understand af.
2- Deeper understanding of his work. You start reading his non cosmic horror and start understanding the way he transmits tension and fear to you with his prose. The music of Erich Zann, The Outsider, From Beyond are just but a bunch of examples of not really cosmic heavy horror stories where you feel the tension by his narrating.
3- True understanding of cosmic horror. After Understanding the way he drives fear into you you reread the more heavy stories like The Call of Cthulhu, Cephalaïs, The unnamed city, The dream quest to unknown Kadath and baffle yourself with how little you got of those stories at first. You see the amazing expansive world that this one man created, even bigger and more original than Tolkien's. Then you understand what true cosmic horror is. Lovecraft, as a writer, managed to pass his fear of the unknown, his understanding of what he thought wouldn't be understood. He transmits to you knowledge of unexplainable things and understandment of never thought possibilities with fear, and he does so by diminishing the role of the main character in the world, by surrounding him with things that he, and you as a reader, can't understand but have to face still.

There may be more phases to udnerstanding Lovecraft's work, but this is what I've gathered thus far. Maybe reading his letters would help getting a better grip of his work.

All in all he was a brilliant mind that strived in complete loneliness and despair and he doesn't deserve to be memed like this.

don't forget his poetry.

as a lovecraft lover myself, you're pretty much right.

You know, this is a damn fine paragraph. I've read—I can't tell you how many—paragraphs in my life, and this is one of the best.

ikr. Lovecraft's prose with it's high adjectivation and the clear images makes it some of the best.

>I NEED JUMP SCARES LIKE IN MOOBIES

Pleb as fuck.

desu lovecraft was the first to do not only jump scares, but anti-climatic jump scares

>that albino penguin in "at the mountains of madness"
>the scream from the grave at "the statement of randolph carter"

So there was a river in the garden, then?

I actually really like what the moon brings. It's tension in gorgeous prose and desolation make it such a pleasant read.

>trying this hard
sounds like HP plucked this from a poetry share thread

>blaming authors for trying hard

just because you have low expectations, doesn't mean everyone else does

Your probably right. But if I need to read (and probably retread) his complete works to appreciate any of it, don't count me among the ranks of the initiated. I picked up a slim collection of his tales for cheap and couldn't make it through. So yeah full pleb, I guess.

I'm just saying trying to jam imagery into every possible space makes for bad writing. Visit a creative writing club at a nearby university or library for examples.

Precisely like it is said in this thread one of the many problems in Lovecraft's image is its massification in pop culture today. While I agree that he is redundant in many cases, I would also argue that his narrations are pretty formidable in tension, something quite well managed with the stylization in prose. I believe that, while being quite popular, he is actually not widely read by the people who claim to like his works (again, because of the pop culture phenomena with the use of his Cthulhu mythos). However his horror feels to me more like a treatise on our ideology of supremacy as humans, I find his characters devoid of voice, face, or like you said; personallity because its the most concise way to describe smallness. In a sense, I would say that the "pay off" to read him is to study style of prose as a conveyance of meaning.

J.P. Hovercraft is better desu

>jam imagery into every possible space makes for bad writing
not in horror

Just as shit as Poes short stories 2bh lad.

"Muh unspeakable horror"
"Le terrifying countenance"
"A bloo abloo abloo muh premature burials"

Fucking hack

>trying to jam imagery into every possible space makes for bad writing
I'm going to guess that you aren't a fan of Proust.

Haven't heard of him.

Keep it that way if you want to stay sane. But I wouldn't recommend you teaching anybody else about literary practice.

Definetly, his poetry is very enjoyable but I don't think it's as relevant as his narrative.

Ofc, as stated, you need to give it time and actually focus on it. I guess this can be applied to every author, Just don't get memed by the "OMG, so scary it's unspeakable! LEL"

the Dunwich horror.

>the albino penguin
>a jump scare

get real.

i've had some similar issues when reading lovecraft.
>The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, The Temple and Re-Animator managed to scare me.

>Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness and Dagon entertained me.

>I stopped reading A Whisper in the Darkness and wasn't impressed by From Beyond.

I get drawn in by his descriptive writing and feel immersed in the story, but most of the time I feel underwhelmed. Like it spooked me a bit, but didn't stick with me. Re-Animator only scared me when the dead body screamed from the basement, and to be fair A whisper in the Darkness did make me scared to go outside at night once while I was reading it. I feel dumb for asking, but am I doing something wrong?

Robert Howard managed to really spook me with "The God in the Bowl" **despite it just being a snake with a man's head** and it felt like he was writing in a way very similar to lovecraft

He was married. Now get BTFO

you didn't answer the question

Clark Ashton Smith is a lot better

I prefer Stephen King for horror, IT was great, and some of his shorter works as well

His relationship with his wife as far as letters and other documentation show wasn't strained so it's very likely he did fuck her at some point

great answer

I'm not super into object-oriented ontology but this book offers interesting views on Lovecraft.

>No other writer is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.

The "I can't say what it is!" isn't really a flaw, you see.

Have you checked out Ligotti? If you kinda like Lovecraft, try Ligotti's The Last Feast of Harlequin at least (short story). That story is a homage to Lovecraft and honestly, as far as scariness goes, its Lovecraft done better than Lovecraft.

He did have sex with his wife. She said he was "perfectly adequate".

Try reading some of the other stuff he wrote, like Medusa's Coil, the Curse of Yig, and The Horror in the Museum are decent enough.

it was an anti-climatic, but it definitly spooped me.

he isn't even horror. although i do appreciate clark, they're different genres.

Houellebecq's essay on Lovecraft is pretty good, one of the first stuff he ever published.

I don't think it's in English sadly, you French fuck

According to wikipédia it is

Recomend me some good cosmicism shit pls

good digits for good post

Saw is pretty scary dude.

Finally, someone who understands the importance of Lovecraft as a writer. This is one of the best aswers to OP's baity criticism.

This. I hate the "existential horror drives you insane lol" meme

She was more like her step mom to him.

:DD :D:D:D:D:DDD

Doesnt he give a detailed description of the aliens and the slave race that destroys them in At The Mountains of Madness?