H. P Lovecraft Analysis

H.P. Lovecraft Style Analysis Essay H.P. Lovecraft once said “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”; a belief he capitalized on through his writing. He uses a monstrous, yet poetic diction, a rambling syntax, and a terrified tone-- inspired by his lonely childhood and experience with mental illness-- in order to create petrifying and enthralling horror stories. Lovecraft was an intelligent child, apparently reciting poetry at two, reading at three, and writing between the ages of 6 and 7, with his fiction acting as a shield between him and the more unfortunate aspects of his life (S.T. Joshi). Three years after he was born, his father was admitted to the Butler

Lovecraft preferred to use long sentences with many commas, adjectives, and metaphors, creating a rambling syntax. In “The Hound,” the man describes the room where he found the cursed amulet as a “secret room, far, far underground, where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths, weird green and orange light and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.” Later, the protagonist goes to return the amulet, standing “in that unwholesome churchyard where the pale winter moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas.” The overabundance of adjectives and information packed into one sentence is obvious; no noun is without an adjective and the sentence is dragged on and on. In “The Lurking Fear,” Lovecraft’s winding syntax returns when he describes the monsters as “shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of fulgurous sky.” The full sentence goes on for another 6 lines, ridden with ellipses and descriptive language. Not long after, he writes of the setting as filled with “baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness [leering]

“The Hound” describes an encounter with the animal when the protagonist sees “on the dim-litten moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound.” The words “nebulous,” “dim-litten,” and “sweeping” are poetic, but invoke a feeling of dread in the reader, as if the hound can leap out of the page at any moment. He “[sinks] into the nethermost abysses of despair,” rather than “feels upset.” Mirroring “The Hound,” “The Lurking Fear” continues with this flowery, evil language. A swarm of the beasts are described as “a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity,” and “seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpent’s slime” out of their hidden tunnels. Lovecraft’s most unique trait is his darkly poetic diction-- however, a trait found in each and every one of his stories, is the horrified tone. When the main character of “The Hound” truly realizes the terrible fate befalling him, he goes to “gibber out insane please and apologies…” and then flees the scene with his “screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.” The protagonist in “The Lurking Fear” has a distinctly similar experience; after a fall into one of the aforementioned tunnels, he “clawed and floundered helplessly,” and describes himself as “a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing,