I read an article over on Tor yesterday that went for all the standard plays; start with a beloved author, trash gently before casting aspersions at Tolkien before trying to put the stake, once again into their self created vampire, Lovecraft. Attack his racist views, and yes, I’m sure he was racist, and thereby dismiss everything he ever wrote.
Lazy, lazy writing.
Lovecraft had that rare ability to write prose that stayed with you long after you’d put the book down. Of course if you manage to get people to stop people from reading said prose in the first place …. One of his stories that comes under regular artillery fire is The Horror at Red Hook. Is it one of his best? Nope, not at all, probably not even in his top 20 and yet within it is the following gem of a passage:
Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and Ægypans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man’s fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.
Lovecraft, H.P..
Yeah, most writers never get to put something this lyrical into print during their whole careers, let alone into their ‘worst’ short story.
Oaken Heart 