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Tonight, I have been mostly dissing Lovecraft.
The thing is that I like Lovecraft but, how can I put it? He doesn't half beat around the bush.
I absorbed, much to the detriment of my enjoyment (I suspect) about 90% of Lovecraft's entire works over the period of two weeks' on-site contracting, an hour's commute from my house, a time I like to fill by reading.
This meant that, armed with a Palm Pilot and the results of downloading everything with "Lovecraft" and "ebook" as a keyword on all the file-share-programs at my disposal, I absolutely overloaded on the fucker.
And, reading several stories in a day (sometimes in the same train journey, as most Lovecraft is bitesized and I'm a fast reader), you start to pick up his stylistic nuances rather rapidly.
The focus of my criticism is part of what I see as his main skill, that is alluding to unspeakable, unimaginable horrors by absolutely skirting around the periphery of the subject with a few tiny morsels of descriptive prose to allow your mind to fill with, well, what he's not telling you.
Of course, this is why his stuff isn't just plain crap - he does give you enough to work with and his style is juuuuuust on the right side of faffing around the facts that your head fair wells up with unimaginable horror and peril, the like of which would turn a man's mind INSIDE OUT!
However, if you read about 130 stories in rapid succession, I don't know, you kind of sprain your imagination bone and realise that not only is he delegating to your imagination rather too often, but that you could rewrite many of his tales by gently assuming the best, rather than the worst of each story.
For each undescribed terror lurking just around the corner, emitting the wheezing sounds of a glistening sub-oceanic fiend peeling the skin from a newborn suckling, given that this crawling horror tends to be assessed from a distance, and largely via conjecture (to keep the mind twirling), it might (if we examined the scene more closely) just be Kev, the milkman, doing his rounds in a pair of aged and complaining Nike Airs.
The incestuous, web-footed lizard-child cultists behind the closed shutters of the abandoned church could simply be divorced Nigel and his twin daughters who may have hit the branches of the ugly tree as they fell, but aren't in fact minions of mighty Cthulu. The screams of "IA! IA!" were just little Suzi, who'd put her toe into a particularly hot bath that evening. As for the decor, it wasn't their fault the last tennants were goths.
There are moments in which Lovecraft taps certain race-memory level horrors of the psyche and there are entire fucking books in which he spends the whole time mincing about the terror from the Dog Star Sirius, so vile it would make a man's soul curdle, but doesn't actually let the character pop his head round the door to notice it was the washing machine playing up again.
Fucking Zanussi.
So, in the face of a mind-boggling (so many, they were as the teeming horded mass of satan's own testicular produce, lurching, half-born into my perfect, paralysed eyes) number of Lovecraft-appreciating friends, I feel the need, when drunk, to mock him viciously, and with a stolen accent.
And so, this evening has consisted, or at least ended, with my affecting the half-senile, rumbling croak of the man from the Fast Show, wondering how annoying it must have been to read a car insurance claim filled out by Lovecraft;
"As my conveyance burst forth into the searing darkness of the devil's own lane, my struggling retinas percieved a ghastly, weirding light so perverse that, let me tell you, well, I won't waste time, but take it for granted that the other driver was cornering so recklessly the human mind would fair be torn in twain as his toad-like dog-star other-worldly hell-car stole cancerously into my blindside, to the shrieking attest of metal rent asunder by a force from beyond the ken of even the most wayward fury of laudinum. Fog lights? Fog lights? Don't get me fucking started, mate..."
I reckon he had a "prevaricating" thesaurus; perhaps a "whimsically non-descriptive" dictionary of "not quite addressing supposedly indescribable horror at great length".
So, your potted Lovecraft classic:
* Take obscure town in deepest Hickvania.
* Urbane yet scholarly protagonist arrives.
* Extremely boring few chapters to make what happens next seem really shocking; perhaps describe obsession with toast.
* Painfully obvious references to "unusual or suspicious things".
* Protagonist wantonly chooses to: Explore mysterious cave/Visit eerie dockyard/Follow web-fingered shopkeeper/Fail to catch last train out of weirdsville despite abundant warnings
* Various evidences of Weird And Evil happenings abound, but reader is left with impression that protagonist might just be deliberately shitting himself up by sleeping in a fucking haunted toolshed
* HUGE TERROR!!!!!
* .. by way of vague description and assumption. Evil and or strange monstrosities resolutely fail to "turn a man's mind inside out" through being described obliquely and by simile so flowery it could open a gift shop
* Brain in a jar (thanks, Shelly!)
* Apparently incontravertible proof of Immense Evil while protagonist basically hides in a ditch, feverishly noting down the sounds of the supposed army of slimy toad-monsters happily a-baby-scoffing only a hair's breadth away
* Bad guys ostensibly fuck off home
* Protagonist finally legs it, posts story to impressionable family member, disappears suspiciously
Christ, imagine if he was trying to avoid paying his late fees at Block Buster...
"Late? LATE? Let me tell you a story, my young friend, of a video so turgidly heretical your very ARSE would turn into a doiley... For once, before man walked this earth, there was a home video so cold and alien, existing just beyond the perception of modern home entertainment technology that your very widescreen television would degauss itself were I to describe the full terror of its inner workings. Why, I remember the day I hired it from Innesbrook Video Knights..."
( A list of the Lovecraft eBooks I've read )
The thing is that I like Lovecraft but, how can I put it? He doesn't half beat around the bush.
I absorbed, much to the detriment of my enjoyment (I suspect) about 90% of Lovecraft's entire works over the period of two weeks' on-site contracting, an hour's commute from my house, a time I like to fill by reading.
This meant that, armed with a Palm Pilot and the results of downloading everything with "Lovecraft" and "ebook" as a keyword on all the file-share-programs at my disposal, I absolutely overloaded on the fucker.
And, reading several stories in a day (sometimes in the same train journey, as most Lovecraft is bitesized and I'm a fast reader), you start to pick up his stylistic nuances rather rapidly.
The focus of my criticism is part of what I see as his main skill, that is alluding to unspeakable, unimaginable horrors by absolutely skirting around the periphery of the subject with a few tiny morsels of descriptive prose to allow your mind to fill with, well, what he's not telling you.
Of course, this is why his stuff isn't just plain crap - he does give you enough to work with and his style is juuuuuust on the right side of faffing around the facts that your head fair wells up with unimaginable horror and peril, the like of which would turn a man's mind INSIDE OUT!
However, if you read about 130 stories in rapid succession, I don't know, you kind of sprain your imagination bone and realise that not only is he delegating to your imagination rather too often, but that you could rewrite many of his tales by gently assuming the best, rather than the worst of each story.
For each undescribed terror lurking just around the corner, emitting the wheezing sounds of a glistening sub-oceanic fiend peeling the skin from a newborn suckling, given that this crawling horror tends to be assessed from a distance, and largely via conjecture (to keep the mind twirling), it might (if we examined the scene more closely) just be Kev, the milkman, doing his rounds in a pair of aged and complaining Nike Airs.
The incestuous, web-footed lizard-child cultists behind the closed shutters of the abandoned church could simply be divorced Nigel and his twin daughters who may have hit the branches of the ugly tree as they fell, but aren't in fact minions of mighty Cthulu. The screams of "IA! IA!" were just little Suzi, who'd put her toe into a particularly hot bath that evening. As for the decor, it wasn't their fault the last tennants were goths.
There are moments in which Lovecraft taps certain race-memory level horrors of the psyche and there are entire fucking books in which he spends the whole time mincing about the terror from the Dog Star Sirius, so vile it would make a man's soul curdle, but doesn't actually let the character pop his head round the door to notice it was the washing machine playing up again.
Fucking Zanussi.
So, in the face of a mind-boggling (so many, they were as the teeming horded mass of satan's own testicular produce, lurching, half-born into my perfect, paralysed eyes) number of Lovecraft-appreciating friends, I feel the need, when drunk, to mock him viciously, and with a stolen accent.
And so, this evening has consisted, or at least ended, with my affecting the half-senile, rumbling croak of the man from the Fast Show, wondering how annoying it must have been to read a car insurance claim filled out by Lovecraft;
"As my conveyance burst forth into the searing darkness of the devil's own lane, my struggling retinas percieved a ghastly, weirding light so perverse that, let me tell you, well, I won't waste time, but take it for granted that the other driver was cornering so recklessly the human mind would fair be torn in twain as his toad-like dog-star other-worldly hell-car stole cancerously into my blindside, to the shrieking attest of metal rent asunder by a force from beyond the ken of even the most wayward fury of laudinum. Fog lights? Fog lights? Don't get me fucking started, mate..."
I reckon he had a "prevaricating" thesaurus; perhaps a "whimsically non-descriptive" dictionary of "not quite addressing supposedly indescribable horror at great length".
So, your potted Lovecraft classic:
* Take obscure town in deepest Hickvania.
* Urbane yet scholarly protagonist arrives.
* Extremely boring few chapters to make what happens next seem really shocking; perhaps describe obsession with toast.
* Painfully obvious references to "unusual or suspicious things".
* Protagonist wantonly chooses to: Explore mysterious cave/Visit eerie dockyard/Follow web-fingered shopkeeper/Fail to catch last train out of weirdsville despite abundant warnings
* Various evidences of Weird And Evil happenings abound, but reader is left with impression that protagonist might just be deliberately shitting himself up by sleeping in a fucking haunted toolshed
* HUGE TERROR!!!!!
* .. by way of vague description and assumption. Evil and or strange monstrosities resolutely fail to "turn a man's mind inside out" through being described obliquely and by simile so flowery it could open a gift shop
* Brain in a jar (thanks, Shelly!)
* Apparently incontravertible proof of Immense Evil while protagonist basically hides in a ditch, feverishly noting down the sounds of the supposed army of slimy toad-monsters happily a-baby-scoffing only a hair's breadth away
* Bad guys ostensibly fuck off home
* Protagonist finally legs it, posts story to impressionable family member, disappears suspiciously
Christ, imagine if he was trying to avoid paying his late fees at Block Buster...
"Late? LATE? Let me tell you a story, my young friend, of a video so turgidly heretical your very ARSE would turn into a doiley... For once, before man walked this earth, there was a home video so cold and alien, existing just beyond the perception of modern home entertainment technology that your very widescreen television would degauss itself were I to describe the full terror of its inner workings. Why, I remember the day I hired it from Innesbrook Video Knights..."
( A list of the Lovecraft eBooks I've read )
