Are his stories worth the read? I've heard they're full of massive descriptions but little action...

Are his stories worth the read? I've heard they're full of massive descriptions but little action, making them tedious to read.

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I've read a bunch of his short stories and they're extremely good in creating and containing mood but the endings in the stories tend to fall flat leaving me a bit dissapointed a bit too often.

They are, they just require patience and effort. He is not casual reading, and his long descriptions are some of the finest in setting tone and atmosphere in the genre.

>full of massive descriptions but little action, making them tedious to read
At face value, yes. But he makes up for this in atmosphere, existentialist terror, and general uniqueness.

The short stories are fine. I'd say avoid At the Mountains of Madness.

>Are his stories worth the read?
No.

>I've heard they're full of massive descriptions but little action, making them tedious to read.
That may be the least of Lovecraft's issues. His writing style is incredibly redundant and his grammar is insufferably retarded. The guy was an autist, and not the kind of autist who's actually good at something because he's an autist. I mean, he was completely disconnected from reality and any literary standards whatsoever.

Try the Temple, The Rats in the Walls, Pickmans Model, The Tomb, the statement of Randolph Carter, the Hound

try them and you'll like 'em

Most of his earlier works (Goth phase) are pretty "meh". I would suggest reading the classics: The shadow over Innsmouth, the music of Erich Zann, Color out of space and the Cthulhu Mythos in general. Those will give you a general idea of his writting style. If you like them you can try to read longer (Yeah, more tedious) works like the Dream Quest of Unknow Kadath.

In general, Lovecraft´s work is pretty simple and entertaining, even if he tends to overuse adjectives like "Abnormal, blasphemous and those things"

Okay, what's what the Lovecraft bashing, seriously? Is it a meme? An idpol/SJW thing? What authors do you prefer? Who embodies your literary standard of excellence?

He's god-tier at building suspense and creating an eerie atmosphere.

The Shadow over Innsmouth is good. Very against race mixing

>anti-semetic
>marries a jew
what did he mean by this?

Buttmad commie spotted. Go back to your Castro thread.

Is mocking Lovecraft the newest Veeky Forums maymay right now? I see people aren't mocking GRRM much anymore.

Mocking Lovecraft became a thing when SJWs decided that racists aren't allowed to be recognized for their talents and achievements.

Which is ironic because you can definitely read about every Lovecraft story as "3000 Words on How Racists Are Pathetic, Written by a Guy Who Doesn't Get It".

I find Lovecraft to be a quite pleasan reading, but the general nature of his stories is that they fall to be quite redundant, see

>Are his stories worth the read?

No. You're not actually supposed to read him. He's just a meme.

Isn't because his work is popular with reding beginners and media outside of literature? However, I think that his writings and the motif in them are quite more complex, and interesting, that most of his readers (and with this I mean beginning readers) appreciate

Lovecraft wasn't a very good writer by most measures - he did one thing well with his writing on Cosmic Horror, but other than that he's utterly forgettable.

>Avoid the best thing Howard ever wrote
Why sure, let us patricians of good taste keep our pedestal while you roll in the mud, pork.

Yes they are. If you want just a quick glance tho avoid the big stories or the ones that need introduction. Some anons have already told you. Read The shadow over Innsmouth and The colour of outer space and The Pickmans model. The last one is fucking brilliant.

he subscribed to an old-school antisemitism (cultural rather than racial) where jews can be accepted if they fully assimilate into the dominant culture. his wife recalled an incident where he was raving about "the mongrel hordes from the east" and she pointed out she was herself such a mongrel (ie. an eastern european jew immigrant) and he was like "not anymore! i turned you into a real person by marrying you!". she dumped his ass shortly after.

>Okay, what's what the Lovecraft bashing, seriously? Is it a meme? An idpol/SJW thing?

nah, him being a raving racist obsessed with his own "impurity" is pretty much the only interesting part of his work. other than that he's just a bad horror author that relies on the same devices over and over ("it was so scary i went insane! i'm in a mental hospital now, for real!") and goofy words from a thesaurus.

>words from a thesaurus.
Lovecraft is a goof, but I can never take this criticism seriously. You may as well complain about him being a high falutin' city slicker.

Edmund Wilson criticized his work even back in the 40s. Here's what he wrote that unfortunately includes a butthurt intro.

files.meetup.com/18512651/Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous - Edmund Wilson.pdf

He is the epitome of tell, don't show. His aesthetics and (if you buy into it) the mood he creates are top notch (and that's way people milk his brand of horror to his day).

But make no mistake, he will spend more time saying something is scary than showing why you should thing it's scary.
Also, read it piece-meal, or you will get oversaurated, simple as that.

Yeah ok I didn't need to read 100 pages of ruin descriptions for them to finally see something.

Thinking that "it was so scary i went insane! i'm in a mental hospital now, for real!" is an overused phrase in Howards stories could only be caused by not having actually read any of them.

Ahh, lit, never getting off the couch, not even if only to take up a bloody book from a table.

>massive descriptions but little action, making them tedious to read.
fucking kek. Is there anything more tedious to read than a fight scene? It's literally a waste of space. Even Tolkien doesn't write fight scenes.

If you want to see him at his absolute best I recommend two short stories:
>Rats in the Walls
>The Colour Out of Space

Rats in the Walls is everything great about his more disturbing and disgusting sort of horror. It's gruesome in its imagery, and it feels like the logical conclusion of everything Gothic.

The Colour Out of Space is pretty much the inspiration for a massive amount of B-Movies, and that's understandable because it is legitimately upsetting to read, and the implications of so much of it makes my head hurt at times.

I've never found someone more accurately sum up the complete hilarity of Lovecraft's racism.

>if its not a description its a fight scene

What?

What? I'm quoting the OP. He says without action scenes, it's tedious to read. Which is totally backwards, because reading action sequences is tedious as fuck.

We had the same thing in France when SJWs wanted to have Céline's books banned from being studied in school and tried to pressure publishers into stopping reprints of his works because he was an antisemite. They failed here but unfortunately were successful on a less well-known writers you can only find at high prices on eBay now.

yup

He named his cat Nigger Man lmao

I thought we had been through this already.
His prose was shit but he came up with some really creative settings and lore and that's what's delightful about his literature.

>Lovecraft is a shitty prose writer
When will this meme die? Just because he doesn't write like a modernist doesn't mean it's "shitty." Someone once described Lovecraft as a "baroque writer" because you can tell he went over and over his awkward as fuck sentences until they were exactly how he wanted them. It's an affectation.

nah mate his prose was shit

>anyone who doesn't like the same things I like is a part of the leftist boogeyman continuum

You mean other anons aren't lined up to suck Lovecraft's proverbial dick? Color me surprised. Surely, it must be the SJW conspiracy trying to undermine all that's pure and decent in the world.

fucking kek how dose saying that to your wife work out in your mind

b-but he wrote it shitty on purpose

>He is the epitome of tell, don't show
You hit the nail on the head for me. I've read a couple of his short stories but could never get into them. It feels like the story is being relayed to you rather than unfolding in front of you.

Yes but an action scene doesn't necessarily mean a fight scene. It could be any sort of action. It helps progress the story while telling me the dimensions of the room doesn't help much at all.

i read the dreams in the witch house and i was pretty legitimately spooked for a good portion of it. if you like getting spooked youl like his stuff. everyone here who says they hates his prose just heard some critic say the same thing and they are spouting it. im not reading it for impressive prose, im reading it for the spooks.

however if you want both you could always look into Poe instead

>an action scene doesn't necessarily mean a fight scene.
Fair cop. In that case though Lovecraft DID write action scenes, like the rooftop chase in "Innsmouth" (I think?) and the police raid in "Call of Cthulhu"

>Poe
>good prose
EL OH EL

i loved it. i was high af on acid reading mountains of madness and Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

but mountains of madness was excellent. the actually shittiest story was charles dexter

it was /r9k/-tier