Why is he so well-regarded as a horror author?

Why is he so well-regarded as a horror author?
I have read some of his work. Stuffs like The Color out of Space was decent but even so it was not that scary. Most of his stories are interesting but I don't find them terrific at all.
Maybe I just read them in the wrong way.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=UlFHzQ7pq0Y
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>The Color out of Space was decent but even so it was not that scary

Okay, I gotta ask: What lit do you consider scary? Because colour out of Space is scary.

Books like Silence of the Lamb gave me chill.
I don't read much horror to be honest.
I tried to read Lovecraft's stuffs because I was curious.

It's alright, you are just an unimaginative pleb

have you ever been actually scared by a book of fiction?

I can feel unsettling at points and chilled, but I don't think I have ever been truly scared.

how bout dagon? that one spooked me

Anyone have that awful uncanny-valley deathbed pic of him?

I'm reading Dunwich Horror right now. I will get to Dagon next.

gl m8. i was pleased to find that this thread wasn't just that lovecraft hate thread that gets posted every week.

Stephen King said that he stopped thinking Lovecraft was a literary genius about the time he started growing pubic hair.

Damn I didn't know Steve had such inhumanly low T levels.

Lovecraft isn't a genius. He has good prose in places, but his stories are extremely repetitive and fail to inspire any emotions at all.

To be legitimately scared by horror in text since the advent of cinema you'd have to be pretty mentally ill

Video games are scarier than film, film is scarier than literature.

This is a good way to tell how naturally absorbing and immersive a medium is.

King was probably just jelly that people actually consider Lovecraft a genius.

yeah i agree with this. amnesia the dark descent was so scary i couldnt play more than 15-20 minutes. hoping to get SOMA over winter break though. that one looked good.

I think when immersion is easier to achieve this opens the gates for low-hanging fruit, cheap scares, lazy writing and much less effort in developing a truly great narrative

Written word really has to stand on it's own, being it's greatest asset and weakness all at once

Written word cannot stand on its own. It leaves a lot up to the reader, far more than films or video games.

>implying a medium's ease of generating a reaction in an audience indicates merit

Wew lad

don't feel like this was ever implied but i get your point

It wasn't implied.

That would've been a good time to stop considering himself as a literary anything too.

I didn't really like H.P. Lovecraft until I realized that everything he wrote was non-fiction.

Because he wrote weird fiction, not horror.

>and fail to inspire any emotions at all

false

I would guess that he is well regarded today because the sub-genre of horror he specialised in (cosmic horror) is one of the few that can still be effective in text. In my experience most other kinds of horror have become ineffective because we have become used to the much more immediate and primal horror of film and other visual media.
Simply put horror often doesn't age well and Lovecraft's, due to no skill or flaw in his own writing but how society changed after he died, has aged well.

You're right, he's pretty boring, good to read before going to sleep.

I'm away from home a lot, and my GF wants me to record an audiobook that she can fall asleep to while I'm gone, so I figure it can't be too emotional or action packed.

Would Lovecraft be a good choice

Not really desu, he writes about creepy and depressing stuff a lot. Go with some poetry.

bump for this

But I don't like poetry and neither does she. She's always really been into horror ever since she was a kid. She finds it comforting and fun rather than horrifying

Ohh, ok, my advice was for "generic GF", congrats on finding someone interesting. HPL should be fine, he concentrates more on atmosphere than anything else and has a lovely bespoke vocabulary. You might also try Ligotti.

>Stephen King thinks he has the right to shit-talk anyone

hope this is a troll post

His particular brand of "2 spoopy 4 me" horror aesthetic was light years ahead of its time, and even though he was a bad write the influence he's had on the genre is undeniable.

youtube.com/watch?v=UlFHzQ7pq0Y

Here's a good analysis on At The Mountains of Madness by lovecraft.

Wow, is it that easy to get Veeky Forums riled up?

I kind of agree. I feel like the Lovecraft fan fiction that people have been writing for the past 50 years is better than anything he ever wrote.

The man has no upper lip. None. You could land a 747 in that blankness. Scariest thing in this thread.

Also Zappa said Lou Reed as a hack.

Anyone else suspect that Lovecraft has gotten less effective over time because no one is scared of being tiny and insignificant anymore?

Fetal alcohol syndrome?

Lovecraft was a great progenitor of ideas and concepts.

When you read about life (probably) starting off as the odd clump of some fatty compound, sticking to rocks at the bottom of the ocean, it makes things like the... yugoths.. or whatever the fuck... not looking it up... more compelling and disturbing to think about.

He ain't scary, naw... but he can be pretty disturbing and compelling... he can provoke thought, still.

a few stories managed to spook me a good bit, but it is the harsh 'reality' that surrounds his mythos and his philosophy of cosmicism that make him an interesting read. Not necessarily scary, but interesting.

Weird, I feel the same about Stephen King

I don't think Lovecraft is very scary just because of how long ago his works were written. They'd be pretty goofy if it weren't for his elegant writing.

Glad to see stephey k still triggers Veeky Forums this much.

I just finished reading my first Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls. I found his writing style to be a little stiff and impersonal, but if anything that just added to the atmosphere of the story. I'm not sure if I would call it scary, but it was a deeply creepy and disturbing. What stories should I read next?

It's interesting just how alien Lovecraft's work is in comparison to his predecessors. Read stories from Blackwood, Machen, MR James, Bierce, LeFanu, and so on. They wrote many excellent stories and Lovecraft was greatly influenced by their work, but none of them seem to match him in all out "otherness". I could be missing some major person, but it seems like Lovecraft really jumped horror ahead into unknown territory.

Maybe Guy de Maupassant?

Poe was nearly a century before him and his stories are far more creepy.

The Haunter of the Dark is one of my favorites.

Stephen King is easily the most over rated author out there. And I'm not even a huge Lovecraft fan.

I find HPL to be funny in an almost absurd way. There's something hilarious about how melodramatic his characters are and how utterly, indescribably horrific everything they witness is. It's supposed to be so absurdly horrifying beyond all comprehension that it just cracks me up for some reason. While reading his work I often find myself smiling, even giggling at times, and not without a hint of mania. Dear god... could it be that the man is slowly driving me to madness without me even knowing? hehe

I read him as a satire of people who think dungeon and dragons style purple narratives are good or make them sound smart.

>I found his writing style to be a little stiff and impersonal, but if anything that just added to the atmosphere of the story.
Indeed that is intentional with Lovecraft. In The Mountains of Madness the narrator is a scientist.

>not that scary
To find Lovecraft scary you need to think. I'm not saying that to be insulting to you for not finding him scary. What I'm saying is that in a lot of horror books/films the horror is in your face. Take Conjuring or Dracula. The threat is obvious and in both of these worlds, the monsters are the exceptions, the violation of the norm.

Now take Dagon or The Shadow Over Innsmouth. There, in this world, humans are not necessarily the norm. It's all equal and in fact humans have not been around long, being mere creations by bored Elder Thing scientists. When you realize how fucked you are as a human in this world (even IF something that that point is not actually threatening you, like a vampire or ghost), it becomes extremely terrifying. There's no safe place for you. There's no god looking out for you.

Realize this, and ask yourself... which world would you rather live in... the world where vampires exist but you can stop them... or in Innsmouth or Arkham?

>Caring what some normie creepypasta writer said

Agreed.

Truth.

>somebody post the nigga poem kek!

This probably won't make any sense.
As a kid I would have long, recurring nightmares about objects or geometrical shapes and collisions or interactions so large I couldn't comprehend the full scope of them, endlessly recurring and all the time I would know that if the slightest thing were out of place in some indefinable or unquantifyable machine or system that something enormous would happen that I couldn't be sure of but that it caused me absolute terror. I'd wake up in a cold sweat after the dreams. I can't explain it at all, that's the same kind of feeling I had when reading lovecraft. It's like the phobia some people have of large stretches of deep water or submerged vessels and structures on a grand scale.

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.