/lit/ - Literature

He doesn't have a great ear for dialog, but there's something about his writing that's addictingly readable that almost can't be approximated.

>>13311650

Great writer. Horrible human being. Even by the standards of the era he grew up in.

Best horror writer since Poe, even if he inadvertently inspired "Lovecraftian" as an adjective.

>>13311756

cuck

>>13311756
he was just racist, it's not like he killed children

>>13311756
You mean he wasn't racist enough?

>>13311756
He was a decent human being. He encouraged other genre authors and supported feminist causes. Just because he disliked nigs doesn't mean he was a horrible human being.

Currently trying to blend him and Chandler

>>13311777
>Just because he disliked nigs doesn't mean he was a horrible human being.
What in the fuckity fuck am I reading?

>>13311767
He was a technophobe too.

>>13311795
OMG, the horror. /s

>>13311793
Disliking people doesn't make you a horrible human being. He didn't kill any of them.

>>13311781
Tell me more of Chandler. I really enjoy Lovecraft.

Essential to modern horror
Created his own genre
Absolute meme of a person though.

>>13311756
Tbh, I find his racism more pathetic and humorous than offensive - it's too over-the-top and detached from reality. Like, he seems to have seriously considered the possibility black people hatch from eggs, I can't be mad at that.

>>13311849
black "people" hatched from eggs, though.

>>13311849
Well, it is true if you believe white people come from mars, asians venus, and black people mercury.

>>13311863
Mercury is too good a planet for blacks, how about Uranus? More fitting.

>>13311874
Sure, I only said it because of the distance from the sun.

>>13311887
>>13311874
Actually Mercury's pretty since the smallest planet in the solar system now that Pluto is gone, similar to how nigs have the smallest brains across all races.

>>13311957
pretty appropriate*

>>13311650
The only real horror in most of his fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art. Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of the many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays real attention to writing. I have never yet found in Lovecraft a single sentence that Poe could have written, though there are some—not at all the same thing—that have evidently been influenced by Poe. One of Lovecraft's worst faults is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories with such adjectives as "horrible," "terrible," "frightful," "awesome," "eerie," "weird," "forbidden," "unhallowed," "unholy," "blasphemous," "hellish" and "infernal." Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words—especially if you are going, at the end, to produce an invisible whistling octopus.

>>13311843
Raymond Chandler

>>13312210
Lovecraft should only be well regarded because of his mythos and not because of his prose.

>>13312210
He wrote for pulps, not literary magazines. Also I find him much more readable than Edgar, Allan, Poe; the writer.

>>13312210
I love his work, it does a great job of capturing the horror of watching something that should be familiar twist into something alien faster than you can properly process.

>>13311650
Racist antisemite. No wonder everyone loves him on these incel-populated forums.

He's entertaining but his reputation is far higher than his talent should allow

>>13312210
That's fair, but I still credit him for being evocative, if in a shameful and fanfiction-y way.

>>13311756
No one likes niggers, dude. He was just honest.

>>13312798
your mother does

>>13311650
He's comfy in a way that is very hard to define. His stories aren't "scary", but they're always a fun read. Gilmore girls for cosmic horror, that's what it is!

>>13312798
You do realise like over 95% of black people are decent law-abiding hardworking people like everyone else? True they have a higher crime rate as do all disaffected communities (see Italians and Irish and Jews in the 1910-70s; newspapers used to run headlines saying, "Is the Italian more prone to crime?") but criminals make up a small minority of the black population

>>13312234
I mean Poe was definitely more clever and diverse in his writing, but how many Poe stories do we end up reading (I only really enjoyed his poetry)? I've read all of Lovecraft's stories. They're that contemptible slice of life "it's not challenging" stuff normies like so much, but for horrorfags.

I used to think pretty poorly of his prose and agree with all the general common complaints that he was too verbose, spent ages hyping up some indescribably horror before just describing it, and sometimes being unfocused, but I more recently saw what Alan Moore has said about him; he was a closet modernist and way more skilled than people give him credit for.

And I think that, despite so many book nerds shitting on him, his ability as a writer is evident in the fact he remains relevant and widely read. He was a nobody, unsuccessful pulp writer from the 20s who managed to redefine horror and even have a big influence on philosophy to the point that multi-million dolor films and tv shows now reference him regularly. Robert Chambers was WAY more successful than him in their lifetime, yet these days people don't remember anything else Chambers wrote bar The King in Yellow, and that's only because Lovecraft referenced it once or twice in his own stories.

A trick he uses in his writing that works really well despite what people say is how he often starts stories as incredibly dry, forensically detailed reports filled with dates, times, coordinates and factual references to real life events, before later injecting something otherworldly and fantastical that's so alien that descriptions barely do it justice. He breaks the reality of his own stories that he meticulously sets up, often to the point of changing writing styles entirely. Mountain of Madness is a great example; starts off as a news report or travelogue style adventure story, has a bit of mystery with the alien bodies, then completely shifts into a Theosophist style history of deep time when they get inside the alien city. By that point it well and truly abandons the more "solid" world it built.

Same for how he uses glossolalia, beings/things that are never directly described or described as something that shouldn't be able to function the way it does, shifting perspectives and writing styles in single stories, etc. And his big recurring use of dreams, and how dreams can infiltrate the waking world despite being impossibly to fully describe.

All that has kept him highly enjoyable despite criticism of his writing style or personal politics.

>>13312823
13/50

>>13311795
And passed from Conservative to Socialist at the precise moment when he lost his family fortune

>>13311756
Get a load of this prog cucc lmao

>>13311849
Pretty much this.

He was the 1920s version of a 4chan basement dweller racist

>>13311781
>Horror/Mythos detective work
Based. I love both authors very much so tell us if your project works out.

>>13311849
Well it's bantz at that point. You don't just point out that they steal or something, you write classically themed poetry about them being subhuman.

>>13311650
His mythos is a white guys crack at Aztec mythos. Pretty good.

>>13312823
I mean, blacks chimp out because other blacks tell them it's perfectly fine to chimp out. I am a U.S. born Mexican, and all my paternal cousins are filthy gangbanging savages while I refuse to chimp out. I am the least Spanish of them too. The irony.

>"The more prolonged is Lovecraft's enforced sojourn in New York, the more his repulsion and terror grows until it attains alarming proportions. As he wrote to Belknap Long, "one cannot speak calmly about the mongoloid problem of New York". Later on in the letter, he declares: "I hope the end will be warfare -- but not till such a time as our own minds are fully freed of humanitarian hindrances of the Syrian superstition imposed upon us by Constantinus. Then let us show our physical power as men and Aryans, and conduct a scientific wholesale deportation from which there will be neither flinching nor retreating."

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/141773539

>>13311756
The biggest flaw of leftists is that they equate thought with action. So thinking things they don't agree with becomes tantamount to committing atrocities. But in truth, racism is merely a character flaw like so many others.
There is also a strong tendency to apologize for similar flaws when they occur on the left, while monsterizing them when they occur on the right. Hating men is accepted, while resenting women is demonized. A minority hating whites or even other minorities is apologized for. Classism is ignored, censorship chalked up to 'their hearts are in the right place', dressing boys up like girls and letting them dance for money is yawned at, anti-science sentiments are covered up--or worse, the sciences are colonized and twisted so that theories on par with phrenology are accepted as fact.
Make no mistake, many current writers will be reviled, and unlike Lovecraft here, it will be for genuine tendency to persecute their 'others' and not just for talking shit.

>>13312823
>you do realize
fucking nigger

>>13311957
Pluto isnt "gone", we didn't blow it up. It's still there nigger

>>13311650
Pretty quack but okay, tho i can come up better quackery then his via DMT

>>13312210
>doesn't list "singular"
I can tell you didn't really read any Lovecraft

>>13311795
BASED

>>13311756
>"I might be a shitty writer ,but since I'm also a total conformist I can insult better writers by claiming that they were bad human beings, since being a good human being has nothing to do with being a good artist."

>>13311650
racism isn't scary, it's just dumb

>>13312823
>implying I like the micks, wops, kikes, and polacks either

>>13313516
it's as dumb as saying all races are equal.
Blacks have never invented anything (apart from Ghettos, Ebola, HIV and other wide-spread diseases, and high crime rates), never created a lasting civilisation or anything even close to that (inb4 WELL ACTUALLY THERE WAS THIS OBUNGA BUNGA EMPIRE THAT RULED OVER THE WESTERN COAST OF AFR- Never. Contributed. Anything.)

Asians have invented powder and a compass,
Whites have invented almost everything(cars, electricity -it was more of a discovery, but still-, airplanes, phones, radio, TV, the Internet, computers, robots, everything.)
Blacks have invented literally nothing.

>>13311739
Would you describe it as Lovecraftian?

His prose is brilliant. There's nothing wrong with purple prose if it suits the work. A minimalist Lovecraft would be interesting but it wouldn't really capture his aesthetic. His entire work is kind of like a throwback to the underbelly of the Victorian mindset. It makes sense that it would be Victorian on its surface but the actual ideas completely counter. In modern prose style he'd lose the antiquarian feeling. That old blood WASP thing was part of his identity. Of course he'd LARP as an Anglophile and write in an archaic style.

>>13312823
>this is what they teach in liberal colleges

Remember, boys and girls, say "NO" to going into debt just to get brainwashed.

IM GONNA SAY HIS CAT'S NAME

>>13314238
Say it cuck

>>13313120
It's gone from our solar system classification as a planet, nigger.

>>13312823
One in three black men end up in jail. And that's only the ones who are caught. You are delusional if you don't think this is a huge problem

>>13313658
Please swallow pills, you sub-human trash.

>>13314284
Black Tom

Ashton Smith better

>>13311650
I don't like his writings. I just don't. I tried reading them countless times but I just can't bring myself to get invested.

>>13314319
>you sub-human trash.
I'm not black, thank you.

>>13311849
>Like, he seems to have seriously considered the possibility black people hatch from eggs

well they do have an extra bone in their legs and grow hair on the roof of their mouth

>>13311849

>>13311650
Extremely creative and original, not a great writer. A man who didn't have the tools to actualize his own genius.

I'm going to say his cat's name.

>>13316393
Well... We're waiting.

>>13316433

Probably one of the most overrated authors of all time tbqh

>>13316393
don't do it

>>13316393
What's his cats name, anon sir?

>>13311756
Really? What did he do?

Overrated writer. A favorite between the ages of 15 and 20.

>>13316472
Based

>>13316855
>his entire mythos is pretty much Mesoamerican mythos
was he secretly we wuz Aztecs?

>>13312210
Forgot “Cyclopean”

>>13311793
Dance one of your igbo jigs and you'll feel better

>>13311650
One of the best writers and human beings to ever live.

>>13311756
Beta bitch