#especially Flannery O’Connor and southern gothic in general and writing in that genre!

[saintbuffy]

desperately want to talk to someone about books/the stuff I’m reading

[antiquery]

some Thoughts after finishing lovecraft’s collected works:

sweet jesus christ, he influenced everything. like, i’m looking at a ton of the weird fiction i read/watched as a kid, and i can pick out a solid 70% of it that was definitively influenced by lovecraft. the whole mythology of the x files is probably the most egregious example, but even up to stuff i’ve gotten into more recently! there are a ton of nods to the mythos in george r.r. martin’s worldbuilding (from minor place names to the whole greyjoy-apocalypse deal), and the duffer brothers recently mentioned that the mind flayer in stranger things was specifically inspired by lovecraftian horror (i’d be willing to put money on “shadow out of time” specifically). it’s really awesome going back and noticing that all lovecraft’s work was so formative in so much of the horror/sci-fi/fantasy triad, stuff that i’ve loved since i was a kid— it’s fascinating to look at the origins of that.

speaking of origins: i’ve talked before about how big of an influence i think the great war was on lovecraft’s work (specifically the dreamlands stories), but it bears repeating. i do reception studies, so when i read a text my first instinct is to put it in its historical and literary context, try and pick out what events/other texts shaped it and why. from that perspective, lovecraft is really fun to read, especially ‘cause my research right now focuses on nativism and literary reception in ‘20s america. it’s so cool to see the conclusions i’ve already come to and written on being reinforced in work i’ve never seen before.

aaaaand speaking of historical context, let’s talk about the problem that faces every critical reader of lovecraft: bigotry. no matter how interesting his ideas or well-written his stories are, there’s always that nasty undercurrent, which is omnipresent even in his best work because so much of how lovecraft characterizes his worldbuilding comes from a place of deep-rooted xenophobia. there’s always the juxtaposition of wonder at the strange and foreign and unknown, and a desire to understand it, with this usually-unexamined fear of the Other— whether that other is actual aliens, or just people who don’t speak, look, or talk like your average anglo-saxon upper-class new englander. and that’s not even getting into the misogynistic element of his work, which admittedly is less prominent than the racism/classism/general xenophobia, and manifests itself more as “let’s not write about women ever” than anything else (”the thing on the doorstep” made me glad that this was generally the case).

i don’t honestly think that i’ve ever read anyone who manages to put purple prose to better use. lovecraft’s best stories take the inherent surreality that comes with superfluous language like that and actually use it to complement the (usually surreal, often melodramatic and camp) nature of the narrative. it’s a stark contrast to conventional wisdom, but in a weird, counterintuitive way, it works really well. in certain settings, that is— that kind of language might be fine for stories set in the dreamlands or an ancient antarctic civilization or in a necromancer’s underground new england lair, because all those places have an inherent strangeness that dovetails really well with crazy prose; but it falls apart when you’re trying to, i don’t know, write southern gothic. (there’s a reason flannery o’connor, whose style is very simple and clear and matter-of-fact, is considered one of the great masters of that genre.)

also language related: lovecraft should be restrained, forcibly if necessary, from writing dialect. i was cringing through a good fourth of “the shadow over innsmouth”

the whole concept of cosmic horror, in all its myriads of aspects and implications, is one that really resonates with me— especially the whole “things man was not meant to know” deal. i’m fascinated by the inherent tension between humankind’s desire for knowledge and the fact that there are in the world certain things that you would really, really be better off not knowing (just ask danforth, or peaslee, or crawford tillinghast, or dr willett— or, like, any other protagonist of any lovecraft story, ever). i love that, i think that’s so cool. 

also, i adore the creepy-old-book trope. sue me. 

finally, as many issues as lovecraft has, there is an awesome receptional tradition around his work, full of people taking the best aspects of his stories, pulling them apart, and putting them back together— sometimes to examine their inherent biases, sometimes to center people whose stories lovecraft never would have dreamed of telling, sometimes to examine glossed-over (but still fascinating or problematic or both) aspects of the original work. now that i’ve finished reading the source material, i’m really excited (as a student of literary reception, as someone who liked that source material a lot, and just as someone who loves a good horror story) to get into that.