Have been making slow progress in the selection of H.P Lovecraft's short stories edited by S.T. Joshi in Penguin Classics. Joshi's notes are first rate and sort of helpfully slow the reader down as one is less inclined to race through the tales when their genesis is illuminated. I've always thought of Lovecraft as a painful case of over-writing in an ineptly ornate style. Now I'm not so sure. The prose is ridiculously rich to the point of over-ripeness, but given the nature of the work there's something appropriate about this. It's difficult to pick out a sentence where one might argue that the redundancies serve absolutely no purpose.
Lovecraft's deeply unpleasant racism raises other questions, however. There's a nastiness involved which is deeply disturbing and I don't like to think what it must be like to be a reader on the receiving end of this. But in a deeply unpleasant way, the very genre in which the writer is working serves to contextualise his vile obsessions in a way that makes them 'work' somehow.
(Truth is, I'm struggling with the degree to which it can be argued that somehow this becomes acceptable, even though I think it would be disastrous to try and side-line the work on the grounds that such racism is unacceptable in our day and age.)
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