Style of a Horror Story: Was Howard Philips Lovecraft really the writer who deserved praising even after his death?

Christian David Bauza Gomes

A01375193

English IB 4th Semester

Group 60

Style of a Horror Story: Was Howard Philips Lovecraft really the writer deserved praising even after his death?

Born in the year 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft is considered amongst many literature fanatics as a figure of classic and creative horror writing with short stories like “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Tomb” and “Dagon”. His writing style is seemingly described as powerful and popular due from the influence of British Literature with authors like Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, as well as the way he combined several literary figures like anaphora, alliteration and mainly symbolism to create it. This combination of literary figures for storytelling even sparked a whole new genre of literature involving terror and fright: Lovecraftian Horror. This genre is distinguished for the use of supernatural, pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements while also involving themes of helplessness and hopelessness as well as unanswered questions that neither the reader or the character itself could figure out after all the plot developed throughout the course of the story.

Although his influence on the world of literature has earned its place on a legacy of books to be read and discovered by future generations to give them knowledge about fear and how it works on a particular individual, there are some that criticize the acclaim he’s gotten by many scholars about his works and instead of analyzing every aspect of his writing, they deem it as bleak and execrable, with his views on controversial themes, particularly on the theme of racism, having some influence on them. One example of many of these criticisms is from writer Jess Nevins on her article about classic horror stories, where she states the fact that many others at the time had better styles of writing than Lovecraft and some even had better stories involving themes of horror. To answer the question of why he has survived the probability of a terrible fate after his demise, not like most unrecognized authors, she recurs to the introduction of English writer and professor, Roger Luckhurst, on “The Classic Horror Stories”. Apart from things like the mixed writing style and deployment of vocabulary, Luckhurst puts him in the “Weird” genre of literature rather than horror or even science fiction due to the unsettling but open-source fictional universe created by him in many of his literary works. Example of this being the fact that the origin of the mythos of the beast Cthulhu, from Lovecraft's novel "The Call of Cthulhu", has had great influence in today's society with the creation of minor groups who follow this fictional monster.

Furthermore, another thing to add about Lovecraft is the fact that his works even though have been translated into several languages, the Polish versions are often up to revisions and are changed extremely from his original writing, making his works across that country lacking of accuracy and without the readers knowing his original intent with each sentence.

So, was H.P. Lovecraft deemed of so much attention and praise after his death? In my opinion, there has been a lot of acclaim after an artist’s death. For example: David Bowie and Prince were recognized as great musicians when they were alive, but after their recent deaths in January and April of this year, people now consider them legends. Lovecraft also suffered this phenomenon after his demise and goes on strong because of the mythos he created of a legendary beast that comes to wipe all of mankind, even though he has other works that are considered classics in the horror genre like "The Shadow Out of Time" and "At the Mountains of Madness". I consider his work, including his writing style and stories, as great and original even to this day. He is a great horror writer like Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, but people shouldn't only consider him for reading if the main interest is the beast Cthulhu, but rather the whole wide, rich, and wonderful literary works he left for future generations.