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Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
I've just been re-reading Arthur Machen's "The White People", and I finally see why Lovecraft rated it as the second best weird tale ever written. The overall effect is similar to the one Bloch used in "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", only with the child as complicit in the evil going around outside it. His method anticipates Lovecraft's by twenty years, so anyone who likes HPL will enjoy it greatly. I had bad dreams about it last night, less because of any individual event in the narrative than because of its cumulative weight of disturbing impressions...
Originally posted by Amaurotereading horror tales in the summertime? ... shouldn't you be saving those for winter? ...
Arthur Machen, Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.
I've just been re-reading Arthur Machen's "The White People", and I finally see why Lovecraft rated it as the second best weird tale ever written. The overall effect is similar to the one Bloch used in "Notebook Found in a Deserted House", only with the child as complicit in the evil going aroun ...[text shortened]... event in the narrative than because of its cumulative weight of disturbing impressions...
arthur machen @ project gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/m#a214
Originally posted by CheckYouIt's a collection of fictional eyewitness accounts of a worldwide plague of zombies. It's imaginative, and considers the problem from many angles (what happens to zombies in freezing weather, what good are conventional arms against them, how likely is infection from a bite, can zombies survive underwater, etc.). the author, Max Brooks, also penned a spoof of one of those survival guides that deals with zombie attacks.
yea, its really good, and im not really a zombie fan.
It's worth a skim.
Originally posted by blakbuzzrdI think most people would strongly disagree with you there. Lovecraft's work on building narrative atmosphere is outstanding. His only deficiency was his use of dialogue, a deficiency of which he was well aware. That's why there's so little speech in any of his stories.
Does he write better than HPL?
Because Lovecraft was a crap writer. I like him, still, but I'm not under any illusions regarding his literary powers.
As for style, they're not really alike at all. Machen uses much more dialogue and his stories are more lyrical and less gloomy than Lovecraft's. He's more like Algernon Blackwood or William Hope Hodgson, and his best stories are very eerie but contain little gore or overt violence.
Originally posted by AmauroteHmm. Yeah, I do disagree. Lovecraft does a consistent job not of describing the indescribable, but of describing the indescribability of the indescribable. That isn't sublimity; it's banality.
Lovecraft's work on building narrative atmosphere is outstanding.
If you have to use the word "unspeakable," you ain't working hard enough at it. And HPL loves that word.
That, along with "weird," "eldritch," "cyclopean," and "hideous." All adjectives that tell you how you should feel, without actually making you feel that way.
He's all but saying "look, just get creeped out already, will ya? I have a deadline here, and no thesaurus."
I still like reading it every now and then.
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Originally posted by blakbuzzrdI think you're onto a loser with that argument: both before and since Lovecraft the banal approach was simply to describe. There are actually three direct techniques to describing in horror, as demonstrated by Stephen King in Danse Macabre: you leave the door closed (Shirley Jackson is an example of this), you open it wide (King himself is an example of that), or you half-open it. Lovecraft is an example of the last of these (so is Algernon Blackwood; he's arguably second only to Lovecraft in all-time stakes. The other two approaches are far more commonplace in point of fact; even MR James used to show the horror warts and all - he just didn't provide a full explanation. Neither is Lovecraft's descriptions are very clear and almost too complete at times - you just have to work a little harder at assembling it (a classic example of this is The Hound, where you know exactly what the thing pursuing the occulists looks like even though there are only a few lines of descrpition). Ashton Smith and Lovecraft are often describing entirely new worlds from the first person - the words you mention are entirely appropriate to the environs they're describing, and to the type of people who are narrating them.
Hmm. Yeah, I do disagree. Lovecraft does a consistent job not of describing the indescribable, but of describing the indescribability of the indescribable. That isn't sublimity; it's banality.
If you have to use the word "unspeakable," you ain't working hard enough at it. And HPL loves that word.
That, along with "weird," "eldritch," "cyclopean," a deadline here, and no thesaurus."
I still like reading it every now and then.
I don't think there's a single professional writer who would argue that Lovecraft's ability to create atmosphere wasn't his outstanding feature: I think you're possibly confusing this with his descriptive prose for the creatures themselves. In any event, the biggest proof of this is that his Mythos has a life of its own: an entire Lovecraftian subcaste still exists a full fifty years after his death to populate his world. Some of them are terrific writers in their own right - Ramsey Campbell's work is astonishingly good at times, and Brian Lumley is still going strong (can't stand much his work myself, but its endlessly popular with readers).
If you want an example of a really over-rated writer of weird tales, I'd go for Poe every time. The man wrote fewer great stories than MR James, and a good few of those were hackwork.