God that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.

I think part of it is that this comes near the end of the book and a lot of it is referring to stuff that had previously been established, and part of it is that the style of writing that was en vogue a century ago is kind of hard to read today. I mean, here's a bit from the beginning of the contemporary classic Ulysses:

> Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

It's pretty writing, but it is also pretty hard to read if you're used to the way people write nowadays.

Ulysses was never really considered “easy reading”, though ;)

It's no more difficult than Tolkien. Prose from that era was practically poetry.

Of course, I grew up reading a lot of books and short stories from that era, so maybe it's easier for my old brain, like riding a bicycle.

Like reading a bicycle.

That's what I should have responded when my fifth grade teacher always wrote "NEW SENTENCE!" in the margin, if you stacked that many sentence commas.

I should have said "it's practically poetry" :)

Basically everything they teach you in school is ignored by successful authors at times, but you've got to know the rules before you can know when to break them.

I think this particular quote is _considerably_ more over-the-top than Tolkien, certainly.

Though I do like "crushing the frantic penguins".

If you really truly got absolutely nothing from that, I suggest you perhaps read it again, more slowly, and try to evoke your mind's eye. Maybe try reading one of his books; it's difficult to get into the right mindset from just an excerpt like that.

I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft some 25 years ago, and I still have vivid imagined visual memories of the “unspeakable ancient horrors” described. Given this background, I find it strange that someone would get, or see, “absolutely nothing”.

I'd say H.P. Lovecraft is the literary equivalent of H.R. Giger. Different sub-genre of fiction, of course, but they've both contributed a similarly unique genre-defining take on things.

I think people back then spent more time over their reading. Nowadays we expect easily digestible text we can speed through or skim. When reading something like that it pays to slam on the brakes and take some time over it.

He was very er, gratuitous with his adjectives. Like. Blasphemous, amorphous adjectives that should not be spoken aloud.

After reading Thomas Ligotti it's much harder for me to appreciate Lovecraft.

Guy was thoroughly anti-linux- i got that at least.

If you would like a modern take on Lovecrafts ideas (with a whole bunch of IT geekery) try Charles Stross' Laundry Files

Honestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?

"Lovecraftian" is still used as a general term for an entire genre of fiction. He was a xenophobe, but that is not what he's best known for. Similarly, Aristotle was a misogynist, but it would not be accurate to say that Aristotle is best known as a navel-gazing misogynist.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Lovecraft is fundamentally about confronting modernism and the inevitable decay of humanity in the faces of forces beyond our control. Central to that is the decay of the Anglo-Saxon genetic stock.

Xenophobic isn't quite the right word. Racist is closer, but even that misses the mark. Every story he writes is terrified of black voodoo savages, or toothless white hill people, or inbred decadent Boston brahmin families, or fishermen that are half-white-half-Chinese-half-fish.

Aristotle, by contrast, isn't that concerned with gender. He is happy to treat it as a topic, but he has nowhere near the same level of preoccupation.

The story in question, At the Mountains of Madness, isn't about any of those things. It's about an Antarctic expedition that finds the ruins of an ancient civilization, which they gradually realize wasn't built by humans.

I do think you're right that Lovecraft's ability to write effective horror was largely because he himself was fascinated with terror at the world. But I don't think his weird xenophobia is what he ended up actually communicating to most readers or what he's famous for. He's more known for misshapen tentacle monsters and cosmic-scale horror. For example, Lauren Beukes' novel Broken Monsters is often considered Lovecraftian horror, and it has fairly modern sensibilities.

Ur-tribalist, perhaps.

Wow, I just learned that I despise the prefix "ur-" far more than is reasonable.

Seriously though, why not call it "tribalist"?

Not ultra- enough, in Lovecraft's case.

Lovecraft would've added at least three more adjectives.

He had an imaginative genius and a capability to create worlds but he was a bad writer plain and simple. He writes poorly but he has massive emotional and psychological force.

> xenophobe

More than the people of his time?

Yes extremely more. And I like his stories.

Someone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant in early 20th century. So while Lovecraft was vocal about it in his letters, I doubt his peers and folks of his time would have very, very different.

I make my argument from his work, not from history. And I am responding specifically to the word Xenophobe. I think Houellebecq's analysis[1] is correct - the force of his work derives from the very extreme nature of his Xenophobia, which is personal and psychological in nature rather than ideological. Certainly he garlanded it with all the ideological backup he could find, but I don't think that's where it came from.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urban...

Then you understood it perfectly. Froth, penguins. The rest was poetic repetition.

Downvoted by those who must have fantasized that I abhor poetic repetition and therefore don't like Lovecraft's writing. I adore poetry, and only the most admirable poetry can leverage and benefit from repetition. It's a terrific passage. However, perhaps it's understandable that Lovecraft fans would reflexively indulge in a fantasy about what I wrote and why, however...

I'm sure you, the guy who writes snarky tweets and codes web forms, have a lot more going for you in the annals of history than an internationally recognized titan of literature.

Lovecraft is sort of the B movies of literature: Fun as hell, inventive, wild, unexpected, crazy at times. But, not great literature.

Exactly, that's why Houellebecq was inspired to write a biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft%3A_Against_the...

Maybe not, but it was inspiring; people like Guillermo del Toro wouldn't have had their style or whatnot if it wasn't for Lovecraft. (speaking of, he still wants to do a Mountains of Madness movie)

I’m not th OP, but, still, doesn’t change the fact that his stuff is hard for me to digest.

I don’t care how many stars a chef has. If his food is hard for me to swallow, well, I don’t like his cooking. And that’s okay. I don’t have to eat his food. And I don’t have to read Lovecraft’s works. And I don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to have an opinion. And you don’t have to listen to my opinion.

> crushing the frantic penguins

There are no penguins in the Arctic (Antarctica only) so nothing to fear.

Oh, then we're probably safe - he was only worried about the Antarctic:

"I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic — with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap — and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left."

Whatever, drill away!

This was always one of my favorite lines of Lovecraft. It's the sense of hopelessness that he manages to get into his writing that really sets the atmosphere more than just about any other writer I know of, other than perhaps Clive Barker.

Penguin is also an old name for an auk or puffin; it didn't become a name for what are now called penguins until after Europeans got down there to see them, and didn't become exclusively the name for them until quite recently. So no reason, really, not to be afraid. Lovecraft would have preferred it that way.

Oh, the Arctic penguins were frozen under the ice too.

False, penguins now roam the Arctic as well after being introduced.

That's really not true.

Good catch! I hadn't read this myself but some college friends and I ran a Call of Cthulu campaign inspired by his works.