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I never really got into HP Lovecraft. I read his stuff when I was a kid (or maybe a teenager, I guess; kid-sized me was more into cartoons and building forts), and while an aware person probably would have balked at the misogyny and racism, young white me was mostly turned off by the endings. I suppose not ALL of his endings were bad, but I remember reading a non-zero number of stories where the behind-the-scenes big bad evil is built up as being really big and really bad and terribly evil, only for it to finally be described during the breathless climax as ‘indescribably evil’ or some other non-description like that. It was, as I’m sure you’ll understand, a bit of a letdown. The letdown was especially heightened because it was not telegraphed; as I recall, the rest of the stories’ descriptions were not spartan or similarly ‘indescribable’. The protagonist didn’t say the breakfast was indescribably oatmeal-y or the wallpaper was an indescribable color. It felt like a cop-out, honestly, to have an ending like that. One could say that Lovecraft might have been doing it on purpose; the protagonist was competent enough in everyday life but the bad guy was so incredible that the protagonist had no way of expressing what was being seen. That’s all well and good to say, but I the reader took it not as ‘protagonist is having his senses overpowered’ but as ‘Lovecraft had to get this story in the mail TODAY and the mailman was walking up the front step as this ending was being typed.’ As someone that is writing-adjacent, I have become somewhat aware of how writing works, especially endings. A clean story needs a clean ending or else it will cease to be a clean story. Publishing companies don’t like stories that are not clean, and will generally send along a ‘thanks but no thanks, keep trying!’ form letter to an author that submitted a story without a clean ending. Cop-outs in any part of the story make the challenge of getting the story published that much harder. Cop-out or not, though, the Lovecraft story still got published. | ||