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Dear Bob,
Reading HPL for the first time was a
disappointment. Not to say that I wasn't quite revved up enough for the
experience. I read various articles, digested HPL's essay "Supernatural
Horror in Literature" and studied your magazine quite well. To no avail!
The first taste was bitter compared with the sweet enchantment you held out to
me on a silver spoon. No, I don't mean that I prefer to be spoon fed, and I'm
certainly not blaming HPL's literary inadequacies on his personal cosmic
philosophy. It's just that HPL is much less a writer than, say, Edgar Allan Poe.
HPL is a gross horror stylist; he lacks subtle adjectives. All his plot
lines, as far as his major tales go ("The Colour Out of Space",
"At the Mountains of Madness", "The Dunwich Horror",
"The Shadow Out of Time", etc.) are rather monotonous, guessable
"lead-up-to's" --- boy meets thing, Peter Pan-demon-ium from
Nether-Nether-Land, etc.
EAP could twist my heart strings round his
pinky: high notes, low notes, excitement, despair, terror, madness, tension,
ecstasy, etc. But HPL just seems to write stories that slowly chug uphill at a
grinding pace, like the little engine that could, slowly increasing the ratio of
grotesque adjectives to nongrotesque ones, a page at a time, until the last page
is reached. And then the full apprehension, the high watermark of each tale
bursts, or pops off like the cork on a stale bottle of champagne.
Your blasphemous, cyclopean,
putridescent octopus-arachnid
eyed, literary critic from un-fathomed
abysses of time and space,
Ed Babinski
[Well, now! This ought to prove that Crypt
of Cthulhu isn't just one more of those obsequious zines that is so
slavishly devoted to Lovecraft that any word of criticism is regarded as
near-blasphemy! Never mind the fact that Babinski may soon find himself
nervously looking over his shoulder and hearing floorboards ominously creaking
behind him. But anyway, we think he's scored some pretty legitimate points
against HPL (forgive us, Grandpa!) that needed to be shared. Incidentally,
believe it or not, an upcoming issue of Crypt (on "Lovecraft and the
Inklings") will feature an article by Ed --- provided he can evade the Deep
Ones long enough to write it, that is! --- Editor]
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