Word: lovecraft
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...About Lovecraft's life, surprisingly little has yet been recorded. He was the only son of a traveling salesman who died when Howard was but eight, leaving the boy in the cloying clutches of a genteel but overbearing mother. Sickly, precocious, reclusive, Howard began writing eerie fiction early, nuzzling in imagination up to decay, decomposition and other horrors softer and stickier than a mother's kisses. After a hiatus, he resumed writing in his late 20s, finding a ready market in the cheap magazines of the day-mainly Weird Tales -and becoming the center of a small cadre...
...ears came a faint, loathsome piping, like the whining, thin mockery of a single feeble flute that was to start an unwholesome elfin celebration. Just before I awoke, feverish and gasping, I noticed a cowled figure Who beckoned slowly to me, and with a gaunt finger pointed into Lovecraft's open sepulcher...
...effect was such that I hastened to read some of Lovecraft's stories. I admit I disliked his stylistic mannerisms. He tells his tales through a troubled, dim, first-person narrator, and he saves the grisly denouement for the last sentence and then prints it in italics, as though that gives it greater shock value. Also repellent at first is the man's habit of stuffing his leisurely, Latinate sentences to repletion with adjectives and adverbs to modify, often tautologically, a stark noun or gruesome verb...
...Lovecraft had real talent too. After a while his reverberant prose seems mesmeric. Well did he know that true terror lies in the tension between our scientific age's rationalism and our primordial sense of individual powerlessness-of being enmeshed in something vast, inexplicable and appallingly evil. For this reason, he eschewed the stock devices of werewolves and vampires for a more intimate horror. In stories like Arthur Jermyn and Rats in the Walls, he exploited the rich theme of contaminated blood as it percolates implacably through successive generations. In The Lurking Fear, an entire upstate New York clan...
Mindless Azagoth. University specialists in strange languages could not place-much less decipher-the grim words I had heard so distinctly. I had no recourse, therefore, but to revert to Lovecraft's own works, where I discovered that the sentence means, "In his house at R' lyeh dread Cthulu waits dreaming." It seems Lovecraft created a whole mythology, complete with guttural Asiatic incantations, to support his twelve best stories. The basic notion was that countless eons ago, Earth had been taken over by an extraterrestrial race which, in the practice of black magic, had lost its hegemony...