LogFAQs > #968748794

MarcyWarcy posted...

I adored love craft when I was younger but Ive soured on him as I got older. Ironically not for the obvious reason most people cite (unremitting racism even in his writing itself) but mainly because as I got older I realized how frustratingly written and kitschy his writing is.

A lot of people think lovecraft (and Clark Ashton Smith for that matter) is dense and wordy because of its age, but people didnt generally write like that in that time period. Lovecrafts prose is very very purple in an antiquated sense. Hes also absolutely terrible at writing characters and the vast majority of his stories are almost entirely interchangeable nameless academics who are more or less self inserts.

He was very good at coming up with cool concepts but not that great at putting them to paper. Some of his work does hold up though; From Beyond is very good, as is Call of Cthulhu. The Colour Out of Space is also pretty good. But there is also a lot of dreck, especially among his earlier published stuff

I also think it comes across as lazy if you read him in larger doses that he describes so many things as being indescribable or beyond our comprehension.