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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5016696" data-attributes="member: 2205">I do like MoM, but it's not hard to imagine how someone would not.  It starts off creepily enough, evocative and atmospheric.  Then it turns into an extremely dry, lecturely discourse on the ancient history of starfish people, who are bizarrely humanized, completely diluting and in fact countering the very atmosphere and tone that made the earlier part of the story so successful.  Then, the end is confused mass of lack of description of any kind so you're not exactly sure what's going on, and it is incredibly cheesy to boot.  I mean, are we supposed to be frightened just because "TEKELE-LI!" is written in all caps and has exclamation points after it?To me, Mountains is a great example of a highly ambitious trainwreck that I can enjoy more for what it tries to do than for what it actually manages to accomplish.  But that's how I feel about Lovecraft in general; I have a fascination with him and his ideas, but I get that more from reading between the lines in his work than from reading what he really wrote.That does seem to be an open invitation to not take that seriously, doesn't it?What novels?  Neither Shakespeare nor Lovecraft wrote novels, so I'm not sure what you're referring to.Well, nobody concluded that except you, in order to knock it down as unreasonable.  So... nice job tilting at the strawman, I guess.I actually quite like archaic style.  In fact, I think that's one of Tolkien's main strengths; his ability to write in an archaic style and yet make it sound conversational.  Few authors have ever been able to pull that off.  In any case, if you're trying to imply that I don't like Lovecraft because of his archaic style, that's not what I've said at all (but I don't remember seeing anyone else say that either, so again... no idea where that came from.)  The problem with Lovecraft is that he isn't able to write in an archaic style, although he does occasionally try to, and he does a relatively poor job of it.  His command of the English language wasn't sufficiently strong to allow him to write in an archaic style, so he was stuck with just using a bunch of weird words and British spellings as a substitute for archaic style.And you'd be wrong there again, because at least in this case, I know you're directly referring to something that so far only I've said.  I understand and thoroughly approve of the idea that the imagination does a much better job than the written word at evoking terror and suspense, so you want to be very careful about when and how you reveal your horrors.  However, Lovecraft just flat out failed spectacularly at utilizing this technique.  He either never revealed anything at all by cheating and just failing to describe his monsters (which leads to a flat, anticlimactic end to his suspense, assuming he was able to generate it at all, which he was pretty hit and miss on anyway) or he describes his monsters and they're just silly rather than scary when he does.  Which also leads to flat and anti-climactic endings.I didn't miss the point at all, contrary to your assertion, and I'm not some  splatterpunk junkie that is looking for gratuitous gore or something.  But the whole point of that technique you describe is wasted if the reveal never happens, or if when it happens the reader just says, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" because it's so silly.</blockquote>

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