Lovecraft and Friends (if any)

[Plotinus]

I don't agree, though Poe is likely one of the very few (if not the only - maybe Pushkin counts too) authors who are considered as great both in prose and poetry.

Maybe Hardy? I agree though, it's hard to think of anyone!

 

[Kyriakos]

I am not familiar with Byron - though for obvious reasons I should have been. Byron was one of Poe's idols anyway

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I don't agree, though Poe is likely one of the very few (if not the only - maybe Pushkin counts too) authors who are considered as great both in prose and poetry. Though I am not at all a Pushkin-scholar.
I like many of his short stories. Poe tends to do the same thing over and over, but that is typical for writers; the main character usually is insane but unaware of their insanity.

Picking up this thread from not-so-long-ago

What I should have clarified is that I was thinking mostly in terms of language, and Poe's writing voice in his stories takes on a very mechanical and precise affectation (especially in his science-fiction type tales) (this style was enthusiastically adopted by Lovecraft in his horror stories, and as I said in my review of In the Mountains of Madness, the contrast between the very scientific and 'sane' narrative voice and the slow descent into insanity is what makes it very powerful) – while Poe's poems have a wild, fantastically lyrical quality to them.

In Philip Pullman's introduction to my copy of The Raven and Other Poems, he tells us that he first read Poe's short stories, and loved their weird, eerie atmosphere, but he wasn't prepared for the sheer musicality of Poe's poems. It was the opposite for me. I started with Poe's poetry, I was very young at that time, the only other poems I remember reading up till that point were the children's poems by Jack Prelustky, I thought the Conqueror Worm was just an oversized earthworm, I had no idea what balm or Gilead was, or why was it so important for the narrator to know why there was balm in Gilead, but the music of the poems, the Raven, El Dorado, Annabel Lee and others simply spellbound me. This copy of The Raven and Other Poems I used to always keep by my side, and I would find a quiet place all to myself so I could softly read aloud the verses (Poe's poems are the only ones I read aloud).

So I was disappointed when I finally started his prose and found that musical element absent.

 

[Evie]

Considering that fear of the unknown, the things we do not (and cannot) know is such a huge factor in Lovecraft's work, it's rather in-theme that many of the horror are not described and instead remain brief glimpses. That's application of the old principle that the thing you cannot see is scarier than the thing you can see.

Ultimately, there are many branches of horror, and it seems the Lovecraftian cosmic is not up your alley. Fair enough. No branch of any genre is universal.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Maybe. I'm just disappointed Lovecraft doesn't seem to be deliver on the one thing he should be doing well. Some of his stories are really good, but the overwhelming majority are just so-so, academically interesting, but not much else besides.

Maybe there's some other writer that does Lovecraft's shtick better than him?

 

[Evie]

I'm not sure what you mean by the one thing he should be doing well. The core of everything he does is the idea that there are things we're not capable of seeing ; it's all about the horror of things we cannot give shape or name beyond vague impressions to. Even Cthulhu is very poorly described at best, and those descriptions are very indirect (ie, descriptions of carvings and statutes that mimic cthulhu, not the eldritch horror itself).

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I mean, making it sound actually horrifying and interesting.

I've been thinking of which other books do cosmic/existential horror: The King in Yellow, the first story at least, is possibly the finest I've read. The idea of an alternative dimension of horrifying creatures ruled over by an awful and mysterious monarch who can bind mortals from our dimension to his will, and the uncertainty of just how much of this crazy story has bearing in "reality" (or what passes for reality when your entire world view is shaken to the core) and how much of it exists in the fevered imaginations of the King's genuinely insane devotees,

that sort of thing

 

[Evie]

I dunno, to me Lovecraft's work is properly chilling precisely because of how much we don't know about those creatures. They're the thing at the edge of our visions we can never quite make out ; the vague impressions and helpless feelings more than any actual describable force. They're terrifying and interesting precisely because we can never know more of them than these impressions.

Question marks are far scarier than certainty to me.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Has anyone here read Thomas Ligotti?

 

[Kyriakos]

Maybe. I'm just disappointed Lovecraft doesn't seem to be deliver on the one thing he should be doing well. Some of his stories are really good, but the overwhelming majority are just so-so, academically interesting, but not much else besides.

Maybe there's some other writer that does Lovecraft's shtick better than him?

Maybe you could try (again, if you hadn't read more of him in the meantime) Arthur Machen? He is a arguably a better writer than Lovecraft (and was one of Lovecraft's heroes), but the scope of horror is certainly more confined in his stories than in Lovecraft's.

As for Ligotti, I had read a couple of his short stories, years ago. I wouldn't put him in any list of greats, but there's no harm in having a look. The Teatro Grottesco started ok, but iirc I lost interest by the end.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

I've read Machen, but only The Terror, which is about an outbreak of spooky and murderous incidents in rural England during the Second World War, the revelation while arguably paranormal, is much less spooky than what we've been lead to imagine (a mass psychosis among the animal kingdom, presumably caused by the violent incidents of the war, causes them to attack humans)

The Great God Pan is on my to-read list