I cannot think of another writer who has used the word ‘degenerate’ as often. Historically, he is in his way interesting and a necessary participant in the history of the weird, but he is too a man of his times and by our lights frequently racist and anti-semitic, snobbish and, to judge by his fiction, obsessed with purity and terrified of anything vaguely monstrous. It wasn’t the language, I think, as I loved the flood of words, but I think I recognised instinctively that while he could describe things he could not make you see them, and he wasn’t much of a story-teller. I was not, when younger, a huge fan of Lovecraft. Except, as we have already seen, he is now but one among many, and the name people reach for when they talk about weird fiction.
Lovecraft, the grandfather of the pulp weird story, perhaps. Back to my project of Blogging the Weird, I reach ‘The Dunwich Horror’ by H.P.
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