Learning to Unlove Lovecraft?

 A strange feeling overcame me as I read the stories of H.P. Lovecraft: "The Call of Cthulhu", "Pickman's Model", and "The Outsider". To use a contemporary idiom, I wasn't feeling them. I was disappointed in myself for not feeling them. and I wondered why I wasn't.

I'm not slighting Mr. Lovecraft's imagination. It's deep and vivid. I'm not slighting his writing. It's classic. 

But for the first time in my life, I didn't feel the style fit. It wasn't that I did not get scared at all or at the least disturbed by the ideas and images I was reading. I just wasn't awestruck and frightened out of my mind, and I couldn't figure out why at first. His subject material was frightening, although not so much in the case of "The Outsider", which read like his take on the Frankenstein monster. 

What I came up with is the RIG-Monsters class is to blame for my not feeling the way I thought I should as I read Lovecraft's classics. Specifically, I have adapted, at least in my mind and expectation, to the modern style of horror writing. I kind of shocked at that. Some of the stuff I've read, that we've read, has had that effect on me, principally Matheson and Malfi. Their styles are similar. They are gritty and gutsy. Their styles are more dynamic and feature more action. Lovecraft came across as plodding sometimes. I remember loving his style, or I should say styles like his, in days gone by, although even by those standards, he seems much more plodding than Poe, who is just an incredible exception to everything for me. 

There is nothing wrong with Lovecraft's style, and maybe if I was reading his stories in a leisurely fashion, I would be feeling differently. In the first two stories, he seems to employ an epistolary style where he tells you his experiences and actions but focuses greatly on his reactions to what happens. This is true even in "Pickman's Model", where Thurber appears to be engaged in conversation, but you never "hear" what Eliot is saying except by Thurber repeating it in his discourse. 

Again, there is nothing wrong with that, and on another day, I think I would just slip into the stories and immerse myself in them without a care and without minding the style. But for the first time, a style like Lovecraft's seemed dated and out of kilter. 

I'm kind of bothered by that, that I'm not loving it like I used to love it. But it also makes me thing that I am growing and adapting to what will work in the marketplace. So that is a good thing.

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