Does any of this mean that his stories weren’t enjoyable? No. Personally, I love his stories and the rather unique feel that they have. How Lovecraft wrote works as whole. He conveys exactly the impression he wants to convey, but he does so by doing a lot of no-no’s in creative writing. From a purely technical standpoint, his writing is flawed, even if he does so deliberately. Although some critics have labeled him an amateur, I personally think he demonstrates a solid understanding of technique – he deliberately breaks the rules to achieve the effect he seeks.
Most important things first, at this point you're blatantly contradicting yourself. On the one hand you say Lovecraft's stories "have a unique feel", that he "conveys exactly the impression he wants to convey", and that he writes the way he does "deliberately", i.e. knowing what he's doing after having thought about it. You know what, that actually sounds like a quite useful definition of what it means to have a good writing technique. On the other hand you say he "does no-nos in creative writing".
Are you implying there are specific things one must not do in order to have a good writing technique? Well, congratulations, in that case you just said Lovecraft went and did them and still wrote enjoyable stories, something that seems nearly impossible if one's writing technique really is as "horrible" as you said earlier.
Actually I studied Lovecraft’s writing a bit although it was years ago, and I’ve read quite a lot of it. You’re either missing my point or deliberately ignoring it. Lovecraft is often guilty of reporting the action rather than describing it. At times, parts of his stories read like newspaper articles. He’s also very fond of describing things in abstract terms rather than concretely. He throws around a lot of meaningless adjectives like ‘horrible’ and ‘eldritch’ and ‘cthonic’. His prose tends towards the verbose and feels overwritten at times. His characters are largely two dimensional. As a whole, his writing tends to feel amateurish. I would even argue that his pacing is uneven at times.
The only point you made was that Lovecrafts writing technique was "horrible", there's not much to miss or ignore there. From this paragraph I get the impression that you are stuck with a list of dos and don'ts in writing that you regard as dogma, and fail to consider that the better approach might be the one you seem to reserve for justifying your guilty pleasures. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But do consider asking yourself what effect the author might want to achieve, and whether and how it is achieved. If you do, every point of criticism you mentioned in this paragraph turns out to be the technically correct thing to do.
Firstly, that his stories often read like reports. That's not a big surprise, since many of hist stories
are fictional reports,
At the Mountains of Madness and
The Call of Cthulhu to name two of his better-known ones. Of course they read like reports, they wouldn't work if they didn't. This is especially true for
Cthulhu where all the information is second-hand at best, and hearsay at worst. Imagine that one with the action "described rather than reported", as you term it, possibly with multiple narrators, the entire structure would break down and any effect it has on the reader would be lost. Isn't it part of having a good writing technique to know which style to employ for your purpose?
Secondly, that Lovecraft describes things abstractly rather than concretely. This is merely the logical outgrowth of the topic Lovecraft wrote about, his stories of horror are nearly always about horror of the unknown, of the unknowable even. You simply cannot go and describe the unknown in concrete terms, that would defeat its purpose. When a character in a Lovecraftian story encounters horror they don't even know what they are seeing, much less how to describe it. The only ways for an author to handle the situation are either to use what you call "meaningless adjectives" (which, I would like to add, make up a considerable part of the rhythm of the texts I mentioned earlier) or by having the characters desperately fumble for comparisons that in the end are as unenlightening as "meaningless adjectives". Lovecraft uses both methods. Wouldn't you say it's part of a good writing technique to know when not to describe something, instead of turning it into something mundane?
Thirdly, about the two-dimensionality of the characters. Well, what do you expect from a story that may be as short as 5 or 6 pages and even in the case of the longer ones
is not character-driven? This ties back to the point I made about the stories being fictional reports, character development necessarily takes a back seat with any such mode of writing. Lovecraft never had the intention of making the reader sympathize with a character and then make them feel horrible when the character is killed by a vampire or whatever. No, the point is to make humanity as a whole seem insignificant. Developing the emotional life, wishes, hopes and worries of a dozen characters in a 1000 pages long epic tale of love, war and the destruction of mankind when it's unwittingly stepped on by something it cannot even begin to comprehend wouldn't only be unnecessary, it would completely derail the story and ruin the point. I do not care whether Randolph Carter is a bachelor, loves his wife, or has an affair and wants a divorce. It simply does not matter, including it would be a waste of lines. So, lastly, isn't it a sign of having a good writing technique not to overload a story with unnecessary details?
I’m making essentially the same argument for Lovecraft as for Tolkien. The works of both authors had their flaws, deliberate or otherwise, which is something that fanboys are often all too quick to dismiss. I enjoy the work of both authors, but that doesn’t mean that I think they’re perfect or that I won't look at them from a critical point of view.
And I am disagreeing with your categorization. You say that some of the things, possibly even the main things, that define a Lovecraftian story are flaws. At the same time you praise the author for the effect his stories have and say they are enjoyable. I really cannot see how those two points of view go together.
Um, go to hell?
There's really no need for you to resort to personal remarks like that, as you may note I have refrained from using them, and did in fact not use any in my first post on this topic either. I really wish you'll mend your ways and that we can keep this civil.
