Review: The Whisperer in the Dark and Other Tales by H.P. Lovecraft

Reading Lovecraft reminded me of forcing myself to swallow the short stories of Poe, only to find myself choking on the bone and spitting everything out. Poe’s collection of short stories to this day is one of the few books that I couldn’t finish. It’s no surprises even before I knew it, to find that Lovecraft was heavily influenced by Poe.

The style is long-winded, pompous with detail — pages and pages of writing can describe an event happening in the space of five minutes. At times, reading Lovecraft is a struggle with slumber, right before bed. It’s best to read Lovecraft when you’re fresh.

I find the stories following a similar pattern. His descriptions of these unnatural creations of his minds are repetitive: “beyond words” or “beyond imagination”. Suffice to say his style annoyed the crap out of me.

But I cannot deny that his stories are interesting. The creatures borne out of his mind is an exercise for your imagination, and at his best, Lovecraft manage to make your skin crawl some. I appreciate the parallels in different stories, almost as if these stories are interconnected by some out of this world experience- Chtulu fhtagn. The payoff of these stories almost made most of Lovecraft’s cumbersome writing worthwhile.

Still, he is a reflection of his times (and then some). His writing isn’t something that I can respect. Lovecraft was a bigot, and the creatures he created for the fear of his reader’s imagination seem to originate from this hate. In this regard, Lovecraft’s fiction makes for fascinating reading, but to read Lovecraft one must take equal precaution as reading Mein Kampf.