What are everyone’s opinions on HP Lovecraft? I’m trying to read at the mountains of madness but I’ll read a few pages and realise I have no idea what I have just read and have to read it again. Really enjoyed The Tomb but cant seem to take in any of his other works!
I did find the mountains of madness very boring. I also loved the tomb and thought Herbert West - Reanimator was also very good.
Some of his stuff is way better than others, so if you’re not vibing with one story, don’t feel bad about trying another!
Some other good reads are The Nameless City and The Picture in the House.
I have a big book with a bunch of his stories but I just cannot process what I’m reading. My brain just refuses to decipher the words into meaningful information.
I’m glad it’s not just me, I really want to enjoy them and the bits I understand I really like but it makes me feel like an idiot lol
I kinda feel the same. I’ve read mountains of madness before, and can remember some of the imagery of the horror he describes, but for the life of me I can’t remember the plot or characters. Lovecraft has interesting lore and vivid imagery of his eldritch horrors, but I haven’t been able to connect with any of the actual stories.
Lovecraft can be very… dense. At the Mountains of Madness is kind of jumping in the deep end of the pool too.
Try something like “The Statement of Randolph Carter” or “Cats of Ulthar” to get your feet wet.
I love some of his work but his writing style can be idiosyncratic at times. Some say that it is the point : Lovecraft takes language to its limit and shows its own failure against some traumatic real. Philosopher Graham Harman has this view on his book on Lovecraft. There’s also a pessimistic reading of him found in Thomas Ligotti. For me Lovecraft’s work is great as a mythos : as something that generates other ideas around it and is always a subject of debate. Ultimately, it’s about the ‘weirding out’ of reality itself. The difference between normal horror and Lovecraftian horror is that in Lovecraft the horror is not something that appears and then eliminated but something discovered as always there taking place in reality itself. Reality is always already horrific and language fails at the limit of that real. I do enjoy other “Lovecraftian” writers even more for their style and writing. I am currently reading Clark Ashton Smith and he is a much better writer imo. He was friends with Lovecraft and wrote in the same magazine
I didn’t get on with Thomas Ligotti either, it must be a style of writing that goes over my head haha I will check out Clark Ashton Smith though.
Mountains of Madness works better if you are already sort of “into” his mythos. Starting with shorter things and deciding if you like them is a good idea, and a lot of the themes in the longer works are easier to digest starting with shorter ones. That said, Lovecraft absolutely is not for everyone, so no reason at all to find that you’re more turned off by his work. If you don’t have the same sense of a vague fear of the unknown and unknowable, his “horror” will flop with you, and given how tremendously xenophobic he was, that might be a good sign for your personality.
I found a super cheap compendium of his works on amazon just scrolling through available titles with my Kindle a long time ago (I believe it’s The Definitive HP Lovecraft by Halcyon if you go looking), and it does a good job of starting out with some shorter “easier” reads like The Nameless City and easing you into the longer bits. I like his longer works better simply because they have more to say, but I wouldn’t start there.
I found Mountains of Madness picked up about half way through. That said I ended up looking up images online because I had trouble picturing things myself
I just put on an audiobook, almost sure it was this one. And it may have been hard to understand at first but I didn’t care, I was just talking a long walk and decided to leave it on, and by the end I was understanding everything and it was a pretty cool experience.
I have not tried to actually read his books. I actually just got started with reading Alan Moore’s “Providence”, graphic novel series. What I have is a collection of all of his graphic novels in that universe I think, it’s a huge, very heavy book. My copy is in Spanish (link), not sure if this exact collection exists in English but as an English author all his graphic novels are obviously available.
Anyway, I wish I had more time to try and read his works. I just found a download link for 13 of his books for free on Project Gutenberg.
Lovecraft wrote archaically even for his own time. He had some really interesting ideas, which is why his mythos has been used as a basis by so many other authors, but he wasn’t a very good writer in a technical sense. I really enjoyed his short stories as a teenager, but nowadays I prefer seeing what IMO more talented authors can do with the mythos.
