I wrote this on Saturday (on time) and it turns out I forgot to actually post it...
Having developed an appetite from It, I've started working my way through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, compiled for the world's behorrification by the Cthulhu Chick. (For free, by the way. Certain contemptible schmucks have taken this same ebook and attempted to sell it for a profit, but it started out free.) Besides being something I just felt like, it seemed like a needful step in my writerly education.
Like most people of a certain age and disposition, I felt pretty familiar with Lovecraft's work through derivative media. My first conscious encounter with the "Lovecraftian" was the video game Eternal Darkness, which scared the bejeezus out of me and my college roommates back in the day. I played Call of Cthulhu and had great fun, in spite of the terrible mechanics of the tabletop edition we had at the time. By the time I read Robert Howard's Conan stories, I could see the Lovecraftian influence without having ever read any actual Lovecraft.
I did not intend to read the entire collection, but each story has been at least imaginative enough to entice me to try the next. Lovecraft's writing surpasses his stereotypes but also embodies them shamelessly. More than once (most egregiously so far in "The Transition of Juan Romero") he does indeed resort to flatly refusing to describe the action. What he had in mind may be too terrible for the human mind to bear its description, but it's easier to think sometimes that he didn't have anything in mind at all.
There's also the racism. Lovecraft's attitudes as they appear in the story are more than dated; as the accounts run, he was intensely racist for his time. Actually, I'm inclined to say he was more pathologically xenophobic than racist in the mundane sense. At least the racism as such in the stories (so far) is not as appalling to the modern mind as some of what comes up in Robert Howard's works. Either way, it's something the modern reader just needs to get past, and it's worth the getting past.
That said, I am also repeatedly surprised by Lovecraft's imagination. It's not all academics coming slowly unhinged in the face of tentacled monstrosities. He has a broader range of subjects than his reputation, and commands a variety of terrors. I would give examples, but I worry that that would go to far toward spoiling whatever story I named.
Addendum: I am glad I hedged about the racism I found so far in my reading, because almost immediately after posting this the first time I encountered stories which might be referred to as the "meat" of the racism-based Lovecraft objection. What I will forgive, for the sake of my own reading enjoyment, is the oblique racism of "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and stories like it. At his best, Lovecraft plays far enough afield of the recognizable world that it's not worth worrying about the possible origins of his terrors. (Is it really fair to say that he wrote about interbreeding between humans and monsters because he objected to miscegenation, or is it more likely that miscegenation disturbed him because it reminded him of much more terrible couplings which he could imagine?) What is probably too poisoned to be read for its own sake, however, is "The Street," which, it should be pointed out, is only slightly fantastic. Here we are treated to the quaint racism of a hundred-years-bygone America, when the eastern bounds of Europe were sufficiently alien to frighten a sheltered Anglo-Saxon. "The Street" was an interesting read in its own way, but not in the ways that Lovecraft must have intended it.
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