Never have I read anything like his writing. It's all over the place, insane, horrifying, painfully detailed, drawn out and awesome all at once. The adjectives he uses build a deep sense of dread and impending doom. Some of my favorite phrases are "sentient blackness" "mad grotesqueness" "subtly menacing" "purposeful malignity" and "sinister suggestiveness." You get the picture.
One significant plot device he uses frequently in his stories is what I would call extreme foreshadowing, meaning the reader often comes to a horrifying conclusion about what it going on far before the main character does. You would think this might be a problem. I hate it when I can predict what will happen in a story, but his writing is different. You know the awful truth, but the character is oblivious or living in denial and there is nothing you can do to make them come to their senses before the author wishes it. We know we are reading a horror story, but the characters are frustratingly level-headed about everything until it's too late.
I experienced a sychronistic event with the works of Mr. Lovecraft. In The Mountains of Madness, the overgrown penguins and some other creatures say "teke-lili!," which apparently is a phrase born of elder creatures who once lived on our planet, some of which were frozen in the antarctic, found by an expedition and thawed out with dire consequences. For some reason that phrase seemed to stick with me. Later, I read a story by Edgar Allen Poe; an awful tale of a stowaway on a ship who, after horrifying hardships at sea, sailed south until the water turned warm, ash fell from the sky and natives called out "teke-lili!" in fear. I was intrigued enough to look up the phrase online, and found little other than references to the two authors. More recently, I read Nevermore, a book by Kelly Creagh (it was interesting, but still went on my "meh" bookshelf on Goodreads) and the demons in the dream world again use the phrase. Looking back, it all makes sense. I didn't know at the time, but Lovecraft was a fan and greatly influenced by Poe's work. And of course, Nevermore was about Poe.
I think anyone who aspires to be an author should read some of Lovecraft's work. It's so very different, and will change the way you think about writing.
Mind: blown, dude.
J. L. Dodd
“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
"Never explain anything."
― H.P. Lovecraft
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
One significant plot device he uses frequently in his stories is what I would call extreme foreshadowing, meaning the reader often comes to a horrifying conclusion about what it going on far before the main character does. You would think this might be a problem. I hate it when I can predict what will happen in a story, but his writing is different. You know the awful truth, but the character is oblivious or living in denial and there is nothing you can do to make them come to their senses before the author wishes it. We know we are reading a horror story, but the characters are frustratingly level-headed about everything until it's too late.
I experienced a sychronistic event with the works of Mr. Lovecraft. In The Mountains of Madness, the overgrown penguins and some other creatures say "teke-lili!," which apparently is a phrase born of elder creatures who once lived on our planet, some of which were frozen in the antarctic, found by an expedition and thawed out with dire consequences. For some reason that phrase seemed to stick with me. Later, I read a story by Edgar Allen Poe; an awful tale of a stowaway on a ship who, after horrifying hardships at sea, sailed south until the water turned warm, ash fell from the sky and natives called out "teke-lili!" in fear. I was intrigued enough to look up the phrase online, and found little other than references to the two authors. More recently, I read Nevermore, a book by Kelly Creagh (it was interesting, but still went on my "meh" bookshelf on Goodreads) and the demons in the dream world again use the phrase. Looking back, it all makes sense. I didn't know at the time, but Lovecraft was a fan and greatly influenced by Poe's work. And of course, Nevermore was about Poe.
I think anyone who aspires to be an author should read some of Lovecraft's work. It's so very different, and will change the way you think about writing.
Mind: blown, dude.
J. L. Dodd
“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
"Never explain anything."
― H.P. Lovecraft
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
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