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/lit/ - Literature

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17554541 No.17554541 [Reply] [Original]

How would you describe his writing style?

>> No.17554583

>>17554541
UHHHHHHHHHHHH WHAT WAS HIS CATS NAME??!!?

>> No.17554594

>>17554541
Superfluous

>> No.17554605

>>17554541
Its a weird mix of high Victorian english, Edgar Allen Poe, and the modern english prose of all the other stories alongside his in the Weird Tales magazines

still writes better than most genre fiction authors today though

>> No.17554627

>>17554541
confessional, ornate, alternating between clinical and dramatic. somewhat affected and quite formulaic

>> No.17554661

>>17554541
Bad, but it fits the pretentious academics reporting on the space nonsense.

>> No.17554676

>>17554541
>unfathomable darkness
>ungraspable evil
>unspeakable horror

>> No.17554741

At times encyclopedia, at other times ornate, at other times dramatic, At other times dreamy-delirious. other times overly descriptive, at other times a weird mix of emotion/concept with material creating a kind of mush, at other times utilitarians. All in all he writes in the decadent style. Same gothic genetics; same love of excess, developed in the weird fiction vein with all of the other scifi loving types.

I enjoy him, he’s basically just putting Poe and Dunsany and machen and Blackwood and so forth in a blender and making fanfics in the style of his time. I think his influences are superior to him but he’s still fun. A good comparison is if you ever watch those crime investigation shows on TV, like the first 48, where they try to sound clinical but still dramatic, add some more encyclopedic and weird/dreamy elements and you basically have something that approximates his aesthetic.

>> No.17554745
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17554745

Lovecraftian *pushes glasses up nose

>> No.17554756

Here’s his short story azathoth, I think it shows my point well.

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder.
There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold; vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men’s calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.

>> No.17555011

>>17554541
Mediocre

>> No.17555015

>>17554756
This is niggerman Sr at his most lyrical though, not a typical offering

>> No.17555084

>>17554541
I would describe it as a dinosaur with 1000 teeth

>> No.17555404

>>17554541
Odd, uncomfortable and paranoid.

>> No.17555627

>>17555015
Fair enough, but I think it shows what his dreamy ornate delirium is like when he’s really doing what he can do.

I fundamentally think lovecraft is a good, and if we consider his myth making capacity, a great writer. Even though it’s a meme to say that, he’s definitely worth the read. I’ll say this though, his verse is only worthwhile if you’re interested in his prose and doesn’t stand up on his own by majority from my own experience.

>> No.17555630

>>17554541
Clinical.

>> No.17555677

>>17554745
Joined thread just to say this

>> No.17556981

>>17554541
Based

>> No.17557081

Quite apt and fitting for the effect he was trying to achieve

>> No.17557088

Lovecraftian.

>> No.17557300 [DELETED] 

>>17554541
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJTmPf7-sQI

>> No.17557338

>>17554541
Not that great. But it'll do.

>> No.17557356

>>17554541
So horrifying I dare not describe it.

>> No.17557363

Is there any consensus on what he was writing about? What the terrible evil and horrors were? Was it vagina?

>> No.17557497

Lovecraftian

>> No.17557636

>>17557363
wasnt it xenophobia and racemixing

>> No.17557653

>>17557636
Don't forget the good old new england incest

>> No.17557731

>>17557363
Neither neither. I’ve studied him quite a bit. History of mental illness and death and poverty in the family, yes to some degree xenophobia and racism, but his mothers mental illness and the cracks in his own psyche, not to mention he freely admits he gets the cosmic horror idea and aesthetic from his reading of “the willows” by Blackwood, also his antiquarian aesthetic comes from MR James. Conjoin these with the actual high amount of nightmares and dreams the guy actually Had, that from childhood he studied mythology to the point where as a child he built an altar in dedication to Pan where he would worship, to the point he hallucinated seeing a satyr going between the woods (but actually) and combine this that he studied a small amount of theosophy and occultism, a bit more than people credit him for surely, now conjoin the heavy aesthetic influence he got from Dunsany (to the point where he even took wholesale entire characters and just changed the colors, example azathoth is just mana yood sushai)

You get my point, it’s really not that hard to get where he got his ideas from. Dude was well studied and had problems.

>> No.17557765

>>17557636
I don't think the 'unspeakable ancient horror that drives men mad' was referring to Hungarians, no.

>> No.17557780

>>17557731
Didn't he not have sex? And didn't his dad go mad and die from syphilis? If so I would conjecture he developed a sex phobia which would account for his trope of 'young man drawn to a primitive and ancient thing which turns to horror and leads to destruction and madness.'

>> No.17557805

>>17557780
He fucked the shit out of his wife.

>> No.17557834

>>17557780
Nah, he had a wife. Yes his father went mad but it’s not so much the dude feared sex as it just wasn’t a primary force in his life. It’s also not libidinal force he was against so much as lack of control, ignorance, the horror of knowing and the weakness we all share, how man is genuinely primitive. But also as much as I enjoy the guy, you need to understand that Weird fiction gets its genetics from decadent lit, from gothic literature and heavy romanticism. They’re taking romantic extremes and fusing it with a kind of schlocky extremism for the whole art for Art’s sake thing. Once you read lovecraft’s non fiction you’ll realize how much he admits his work is just pastiche and him making fanfics of everything that was popular at the time or a slightly a bit older.

If you want to talk about fear of other humans, it’s much more likely that it’s founded on that racism but also disgust at degenerates in poverty. When he lived in Brooklyn for example (I’ve looked into it because I used to enjoy reading his stories while near his home) he had people break into his home and steal all of his suits. Such occurrences were very common. But even then, this is really ignoring the influences and major events in his life which he plainly admits influenced him.

>> No.17557836
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17557836

>>17554605
there is a cool mix of themes from the occult and theoretical physics. modern theoretical physics looks weirdly like occult shit so i could believe it's some kind of racket.

>> No.17558777

>>17554541
Overuse of the word "blasphemous".

>> No.17558788

>>17554541
Cyclopean

>> No.17558806
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17558806

>>17554541
prettygoooood :)

>> No.17559250

>>17554583

N

>> No.17559269

Gibbous antediluvian cyclopean unfathomable eldritch squamous antiquarian foetid

>> No.17559280

>>17554541
sumptuous yet destitute, like a big new England mansion inhabited by subhuman southern Italian squatters due to the obsession with social justice our benighted society inherited from the false religion of the Shepherd of souls.

>> No.17559286

>>17557836
it's because it is

>> No.17559496

>>17554541
A great horror writer who is attacked because he was afraid of vaginas (rightfully so, the power they hold over men is truly terrifying), and had some harmless racist tendencies like naming his cat a funny name and fearing the Welsh.

>> No.17559511

>>17554741
what's your opinion of Clark Ashton Smith?

>> No.17559552

>>17554741
Lovecraft was far more "out there" than Blackwood, Poe, or Dunsany could've ever dreamed of. Criticize his writing all you want, the man's concepts revolutionized horror of the 20th century and beyond, creating an entire genre unto itself that lacks the more traditional "religious" and "human" themes of most other horror works, making Lovecraft's writing's truly alien, possibly the first true science fiction writer.

>> No.17559574

>>17554541
Niggardly with flourish.

>> No.17559596

>>17554676
>unreadable schlock

>> No.17560958

>>17554541
As if a wannabe intellectual wrote it.

>> No.17561016

>>17559552
Oh I’m not critiquing him, I actually really like him. But I don’t think it’s fair to say he’s more out there than Dunsany or that he has a strangeness more strange than someone like machen or poe. And personally other than mountains of madness, I find those works where he leans deeper into the dreamy and fantastical kind of myth-crafting to be superior to the scifi. How much Dunsany have ya read? Same to the rest? Have you read lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature? He explains his literary genetics pretty clearly in it.