Today I checked out the brand-new Library of America collection of HP Lovecraft's short stories. I read Lovecraft ten years ago and found him boring and overwrought--a pulpy Poe imitator. I am just now beginning to understand his genius. Consider the following passages:
1. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.
2. The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of misamal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror.
3. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in that hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon.
4. Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and the grotesquely unbeliveable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied.
5. I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.
6. I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory.
7. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka, in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile.
8. And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
And this is all in the first 20 pages!
2 comments:
I would not have made it even five pages through that "soul-annihilating" prose. So bravo, Sleepy-E! I have very little patience for such writing. But I love "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your adverbs here." Middlebrow checked out the "School House Rock" DVD and I watched some of it with Son. I learned all my grammar on TV.
My favorite School House Rock was "Will E. Survive," about the kid who comes home from school and can't get in his house. "Will E. Survive? Will E. Survive? Will-E.....Sur....Vive..."
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