🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov23.181409.29089@srg.srg.af.mil>, dpipes@spica.srg (Dave Pipes x4552) writes:
> Or what, really.  This a pretty short sentence for Lovecraft.  I recall one
> that went on for more than one page (in a paperback).  I think that it was
> from "The Strange Case of" someone with an old New England name.  Still, he
> is a good writer...or is he?
> 
> 	David Pipes

"Charles Dexter Ward," if memory serves.  (Obnoxiously enough, this was filmed
with Vincent Price as, approximately, "Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace.")

I've read a lot of Lovecraft.  He often wrote in a fake-archaic way; he usually
told, rather than showing (when he didn't claim it was too horrible even to
tell); his short stories were often of the annoying kind that end with a
sentence in italics, like "The face was the face of Minky the cat, but the
whiskers were those of Colonel Claude Combpyne;"* his characterization was
usually flat or nonexistent; and he used the word "non-Euclidean" without,
perhaps, a very clear idea of what it meant.  (Try drawing a picture of a
castle in which two points don't define a line.)

Nonetheless, he managed to write some pretty powerful stuff.  "The Outsider,"
"The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon" and "At the
Mountains of Madness" are intriguing and compelling, and he had some original
and bizarre ideas  (not like Tim Powers, maybe, but pretty striking).

I think Lovecraft has to be classed as a good writer who didn't write well.
(This is different from, say, Stephen King, who is a compelling storyteller who
writes with consistent competence, at least.)

-- Alan

* I don't know where I got this quote.  It's clearly not from a real story