Commentaires client les plus utiles
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5.0étoiles sur 5
Don't Settle for Cheap Imitations, Mai 3 2004
I've been at a loss for a couple of years to find something to read that really grabs me. In fact, I usually find myself bored beyond tears with the recent spate of pulp and sloppy nonsense that gets passed off as literature by most of our contemporary, popular authors. So lately, I've been going back and trying to catch up on the works of acclaimed authors from the 20th Century, focusing on those that I never had the time or opportunity to read before now. This week, I stumbled upon THE DUNWICH HORROR AND OTHERS by H.P. Lovecraft and was introduced to Lovecraft's whole weird and fascinating world of "the Cthulhu Mythos". I was familiar with some of Lovecraft's more popular short stories, mainly from their bad movie adaptations (THE DUNWICH HORROR and RE-ANIMATOR spring to mind), and I've read many times where others among my favorite authors have called him "their inspiration" or "a genius ranking with Poe, Hawthorne, and Conrad". I knew that his mythology provided a backdrop for most everything produced by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, and Neil Gaiman, to the entertaining EVIL DEAD movie trilogy, even to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and DARK SHADOWS of TV-dom. But I'd never had a chance to read Lovecraft's work for myself until now. I've always loved a good scare and a really creepy story. Trouble is, they're just so damned hard to find! And when you find one that starts out with great potential, it usually degenerates into formulaic banality and clichés by the end. However, I now understand why Lovecraft is so admired. While his writing style is clearly dated, his stories are downright frightening. It's awfully hard for anything, let alone a book, to make my hair stand on end or give me gooseflesh, but I usually get at least one good case of crawling flesh from each of Lovecraft's stories and, in many instances, they delivered so much more. Not since my first reading of Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE have I walked away from a book and had to shake it off physically before I could move on to something else. There are many Lovecraft imitators out there. But if you haven't tried a genuine Lovecraft, you haven't even begun to know horror.
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5.0étoiles sur 5
A Unique Vision, Nov. 3 2003
In spite of the smug dismissal of an ealier reviewer, there is absolutely no gainsaying the originality of Lovecraft. Yes, he is formulaic. So is Poe. Yes, his weltanschauung is morbid and overwrought. So is much of Hawthorne's and Melville's. He doesn't achieve the architectonic precision and interconnectedness of Tolkien, but that was never his ambition.What he does have in abundance is a marvelous descriptive felicity allied with a prose rhythm that is perfectly calibrated to elicit terror and awe in the reader. Yes, he overwrites. But he's never boring. "The Shadow out of Time" paved the way for my appreciation of Borges. And "To the Mountains of Madness" is one of the great visionary works of 20th century literature. Period. To compare Lovecraft unfavorably to the rodomontade of Sandburg or the dessicated exquisses of Djuna Barnes shows how far removed from a living pulse are the critical canons of the academic establishment.
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