I've been reading Lovecraft recently, going through all

>>9479345
I don't think he's an extraordinary writer persay but I love some of his descriptions and his ability to come up with some crazy shit, just a really cool experience to read his stories

>>9479345
Holyshit get a fucking life. Who gives a shit

>>9479359
Apperently you do, seeing as how you decided to reply instead of scrolling away from it like a normal human being. But we're both here on 4chan so I know that neither of us have much a life.

>>9479355
Me too, I really love the stuff he was able to come up with. Awesome imagery and an interesting trip into the horrific.

Personally I always felt that his whole "and the horrors I witnessed were too maddening, too appalling for me to describe them here!" shtick was a lazy cop-out, and people conflate his laziness with willful ambiguity.

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>>9479345
>The one creature playing two flues
Cute

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>>9479345

This is how I know you're a horrible pleb who has read nothing outside his comfort zone. Older books just use semicolons more often, and this is amplified by Lovecraft's deliberate archaism. It's just a stylistic choice for writers to avoid them today.

>>9480473
I think a hyphen achieves what a semi-colon does but with more punch -- there's a kind of innate pause built into the vertical structure of it. Semi-colons are only really good for long list descriptions, Pynchon will use them sometimes well.

Having said that, there's something pretty about semi-colons ; I don't know, they remind me a surprised man, or a tadpole beneath a stream.

>>9480564
Also, is anyone getting a connection error if they use speech marks in a post now?

>>9480473
I'm not denying that. I'm just starting to get more into literature, especially the classics. I just wanted to hear some opinions about it; thank you for yours, as well as your included facts

This kind of autistic devotion to schoolhouse grammar rules is killing Fiction as an exploratory narrative form.

New a kid in highschool who told me Grendel was shit because the dialogue wasn't formatted the way his Creative Writing teacher told him it should be. Goddamn, if that's what you base your opinion of a work on, give up reading.

Im not concerned about him being a "good" writer.

I only care that I enjoy the mythos he created and I enjoy his prose style, a style I would probably not enjoy on other authors.

>>9479345
Semi-colons are a nice touch when used correctly.

Lovecraft's style is largely informed by his early obsession with Georgian poetry, and his horror tales show the archaism of his main influences Poe and Dunsany. I, for one, like the effect. Archaism elevates, and in Lovecraft it also obscures the horror and builds tension to nice effect. His descriptions of setting, overindulgent though they are, are spectacular in situating his stories.

>>9479345
>Do you think Lovecraft is a good writer? Or are his ideas the only compelling thing?
I don't get this thing of calling someone a good/bad writer. It's subjective to me. For me personally I think he is a good writer because a) I enjoy reading his works, b) I have no problem imagining the things he describes, c) he had his own style which makes him more unique.

It should be noted that he states numerous times in letters and comments to friends that he writes for himself and nobody else. He wrote a lot of stuff before ever submitting it for publication in magazines and always demanded no changes whatsoever. So at least you have to admit that he did his own thing and it was good enough for him.

>>9480473
>Older books just use semicolons more often, and this is amplified by Lovecraft's deliberate archaism
This is also worth pointing out as a reason for his writing style.

>>9480955
This.

Maybe this is foolish to shill on /lit/ but I have a youtube channel I made about Lovecraft. Yeah, I guess I'm autistic yada yada but I have fun making videos about Lovecraft:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKqtEaT66RWNe8uj2rZZv9Q

>>9481666
Thanks for the insightful post! I'll go ahead and give your channel a look.

Btw I love his writings too --im actually rereading all his works in order as we speak-- I just wanted to hear everybody's opinions

>>9479345
Lovecraft was an inconsistent writer. He wrote a lot of amateurish and half-amateurish stuff, but he also wrote some really tight and polished stuff like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Colour out of Space, and The Shadow over Innsmouth. His best writing is quite good, but he often had trouble keeping it going over the length of an entire story. Even most of his best stuff is flawed in various ways. But his ideas are original and compelling enough to overcome this. His craft was improving over time. I think that had he lived longer, he would have produced even more polished stuff.

>>9479345
As for semicolons, I don't mind them. Use them if you feel like using them. There's certainly nothing wrong with it. I have to give Lovecraft credit for fueling my own development as a writer - getting interested in his stuff when I was a teenager did a lot to fuel my interest in the sort of sophisticated sentence structure that was common in 19th century English, before the great simplification of the written language's sentence structures which happened in the 20th century (and probably had something to do with people no longer studying Greek and Latin as kids).

>>9479345
Also, keep your narrator in mind. If your writing is supposedly a character's narration, whether semicolons are appropriate or not might depend on who this character is. If your writing is being narrated by a learned person, such as is often the case in Lovecraft stories, semicolons are certainly appropriate.

>>9479345
>It's my understanding that when writing fiction it's better to not include them, that they keep each sentence from standing on its own.
Huh??? Use a semicolon if you want to.

>>9479355
I think it's 'per se'.

>>9482245
it is. I once thought it was 'persay' too.

>>9482245
Oops my bad. It is, Thanks for pointing it out.

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>>9482245
You're right, but even when used correctly
>mfw someone writes "per se"

>>9479345

>No it's not...nor is it...

Don't ever try writing again. I feel like I'm about to be called "Dear reader" and told you enjoyed writing this post as much as I enjoyed reading it.

>>9483598
I hope you had as much fun reading it ad I did writing it! :D XDXDXD :3

>>9480564
You mean a dash, not a hyphen.

It's funny, but Lovecraft would probably agree with you. He considered himself more of a poet than a prose writer.

>>9483496
>don't use the worrrds!!!
cool it with your insecurities

>>9481666

Cool channel, Anon.

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>mfw trying to take in all The White Ship's dreamy fantastical imagery

>>9485060
I'm walkin on moonbeams, woah-oh

>>9479345
>It's my understanding that when writing fiction it's better to not include them, that they keep each sentence from standing on its own.
What the fuck am I reading

That's literally an argument against using any punctuation whatsoever; that is, it is a bad argument

>>9485792
It sounded kind of funky so that's why I wanted to address it. I had no idea there was any kind of backlash against semi-colons.

Apparently the backlash was only a perceived one on my part.

Can someone recommend me a good collection of the man's works? I have the one with the cover by Mike Mignola and it seems pretty scant. I want to understand the racism element to HP Lovecraft and I just don't see it from what I've read.

>>9485009
Thank you!

>>9481691
Thanks.

>>9486789
Regarding a collection my preferred one is the complete works from the Knickerbocker series.

>I want to understand the racism element to HP Lovecraft
The tl;dr summary is basically this: he hated the world and society in general but made exception for the best parts of society (in his opinion this was New England culture and also English in general, the upper crust mind you). Anything that posed a threat of tarnishing that culture he hated. This was most obviously seen in his opinions on blacks, Asians, etc. but he was also harsh against other white groups (Poles, Italians, Portuguese)

This is most obvious in The Horror Of Red Hook. But stories like the Facts Concerning Arthur Jermyn and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are based on the idea of genetic degeneracy. In both stories the protagonist is racially mixed with the monsters leading to a bad fate.

>>9487637
Wow, thanks for the concise summary, my friend!

>>9487637
To reply to this, it is all accurate, and he thought that people who integrated well were above the members of their race who did not.

For example, he married a Jew and thought she was alright because she was integrated.

Many of his thought on degeneracy were related to how the upper crust acted during the gilded age, and how he as someone who was still poor and an outcast while they were rich and accepted and partied and did drugs and had wild sex was something that epitomized the inevitable fall of humans/societies (seen often with many races/species in his works through the eons).

>>9481666
>https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKqtEaT66RWNe8uj2rZZv9Q
Have you ever watched Mind Horn?

You remind me of the stunt man.

>>9481666
Oh fuck I've watched your video on why lovecraft is popular. Not a bad channel at all anon.
But stop shilling fag and blah blah blah

Anyways imo Lovecraft was bad at prose in most cases but was good at conveying underlying themes or ideas. I read mostly for prose but with some authors I like their ideas more. Lovecraft is a wonderful mix of quite a few different authors ideas and it works well.

>>9480473
damn what the fuck happened to this board?

>>9491109
Thanks I try make it a good channel and not some booktube bullshit.

>>9490500
Yes thats true too. I read his biography and he thought of his wife and a friend of his (also a Jew) as being completely acceptable because they had adopted the right culture and were not running around saying oy vey.

>>9489202
Glad to help.

>>9491073
No dont know what that is.

>>9479359
Ikr what is this some sort of literature board? baka lmao

>>9492245
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA5njebTiZY
1:15

>>9479345
His verbosity and sentence structure is crucial to the atmosphere of cosmic horror for which he is known.

>>9480083
I would like for you to describe a horror like the ones Lovecraft was trying to create. Go ahead. They're defined by features we can't even define; The main characters can't even properly perceive most of these beings. Lovecraft was trying to pin down a specific feeling he got in his night terrors, which focuses on this unknowable evil. It can't be achieved with a descriptive passage on the creature, because it adds a sort of understanding, even if it's false understanding on the part of the reader. Just look at At the Mountains of Madness. Its not that scary. It elaborates on the Old Ones and partially defines their society, and in doing so, renders them mundane.