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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7678867" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have two main issues with HPL.(1) He is pretty much the opposite of &quot;show don't tell&quot;. Sentence after sentence referring to &quot;mind numbing dread&quot; doesn't itself engender mind numbing dread in the reader!(2) I think his sense of &quot;cosmic horror&quot; has dated quite badly. He is writing in that period when the discovery of biological evolution, and of relativity, was still a source of both intellectual and cultural shock. Personally I just can't feel the shock.A third issue is probably more particular to me, in the sense that I wouldn't necessarily expect anyone else to feel it the same way: while I think the mythos entities themselves can be quite cool, and I use those tropes quite a bit in my fantasy RPGing, I think that inventing supernatural beings is a strange literary device for conveying the impersonal forces of the cosmos.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7678867, member: 42582"] I have two main issues with HPL. (1) He is pretty much the opposite of "show don't tell". Sentence after sentence referring to "mind numbing dread" doesn't itself engender mind numbing dread in the reader! (2) I think his sense of "cosmic horror" has dated quite badly. He is writing in that period when the discovery of biological evolution, and of relativity, was still a source of both intellectual and cultural shock. Personally I just can't feel the shock. A third issue is probably more particular to me, in the sense that I wouldn't necessarily expect anyone else to feel it the same way: while I think the mythos entities themselves can be quite cool, and I use those tropes quite a bit in my fantasy RPGing, I think that inventing supernatural beings is a strange literary device for conveying the impersonal forces of the cosmos. [/QUOTE]

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