I read this book in two chunks a year and a half apart, so my recollection of it varies a bit. I ordered it shortly after the birth of my son—read into that what you will—and made it through half before taking a break. I came back to it last month and finished the rest.
Though a writer principally of short stories and novellas—only the Case of Charles Dexter Ward is commonly classified as a novel, and even that has a novella-like feel—there is nevertheless in Lovecraft’s work sufficient through-line, both in plot and theme, that make much of his oeuvre feel like a single extended work. There actually is some tonal variety, especially in his earlier pieces, including some surprising satiric turns that I wouldn’t have expected, but as his Mythos grows so too does its hold on his fiction, until just about every story could be seen as a new facet of some multi-sided nightmare gem.
Characters in Lovecraft stories inevitably glimpse beyond the gossamer curtain of supposed reality and pay heavily for the act, either in their sanity or with their lives, and yet there is something in his writing that keeps this fairly repetitive approach from feeling formulaic or stale. I suspect this is the sheer richness of his imagination, for while the outcome may be familiar, the varied and troubling methods in which it does never cease to interest me. I also appreciate the secondary theme, less ocnstant but still recurrent, of tainted bloodlines, which I can’t help but feel says something about Lovecraft’s view of his own lineage. Perhaps that’s cheap psychoanalysing, but considering his well-documented racism and obsession with the past, there seems to be in him some lurking fear of a darkness folded in the backmost crannies of his genes.
Lovecraft is sometimes mocked for his prose, which can get a little overwrought at times, but for the most part I think his style suits the story, and lends a grandeur to the Mythos that simpler prose couldn’t match, His characters, for sure, are cardboard, but this feels less like a flaw than simple disinterest. Its the events themselves that form the focus of his story, not the person they are happening to. Though he may be an acquired taste, his impact on horror and science fiction can’t be denied, and his works remain among my favourites in the genre.