One thing that surprised me was that the author of the piece, Jason Heller, avoided talking about the man's writing style. If you want to know why Lovecraft's work is daunting, just try reading a paragraph – any paragraph – from his oeuvre. Heller described “At The Mountains Of Madness” as having "rich prose". One man's rich prose is another man's dense, impenetrable prose.
Lovecraft wrote in a very flowery, byzantine style that would draw lots of red marks if used for a term paper today. I think that people would love to know what lays beyond the wall of sleep but have problems getting past lines like this one:
One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin--a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself.
Before you can learn about mad Arabs and the fate of the Starkweather-Moore expedition, you've got to wade through the passive voice, objects appearing in sentences where we're not accustomed to seeing them, eldritch adjectives, and all manner of things unfamiliar to contemporary readers.
For those wanting to ease into Lovecraft, let me make a couple suggestions.
First is Graphic Classics: H.P. Lovecraft. This features some of Lovecraft's stories lovingly ported to the graphic novel medium. And for my fellow Madisonians, it's locally-sourced too as the publisher is in Mt. Horeb.
Another route to go is to listen to some adaptations of Lovecraft's work by the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company. The best part is that you don't even have to sink any money into this venture because their podcast allows you to hear some stories for free. So far, they've given away "The Colour Out of Space", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and the first of two parts of "The Call of Cthulhu".
No comments:
Post a Comment