Having already exposed Chuck Palahniuk as a (gasp!) hack, Laura Miller, Salon‘s guardian of the literary citadel, now aims to dethrone H.P. Lovecraft (and neither Cthulhu nor a number of readers are pleased). C’mon now…is that really necessary? It’s not as if Lovecraft is some endlessly promoted sacred cow of the literati — he’s just an early 20th-century spinner of pulp yarns with some cachet among the fanboy nation, one with some very Cronenberg-like hang-ups and a better flair than most at evoking unfathomable dread. What with all the goofy adjectives and leaps of hyperbole, Lovecraft is obviously an easy caricature — so why bother? Miller seems to be something of a Tolkienite and generally sympathetic to fantasy writing, so her hit here is all the more surprising. Frankly, I’d find her criticism more scintillating if she didn’t resort to shooting fish in a barrel.
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Amen! There’s been a lot of revisionist criticism of the old masters of genre fiction in the air lately – if you haven’t already, check out Cory Doctorow’s damnation by faint praise of Isaac Asimov in July 2004’s Wired Magazine. Or David Brin’s weird deconstruction of Tolkien in Salon last year.
There seems to be a tendency for genre writers to instinctively slag their peers and deny all significant influence from past authors. I guess that’s how you move the merchandise, but Laura Miller should have dug a little deeper than cherry-picking slams on Lovecraft out of previous interviews and looked at the horror writing subculture of which good ol’ H.P. was a part, or try to figure out why all of the modern writers instinctively reject him in such a vehement fashion.
The worst part of the article, however, is its core criticism: that Lovecraft’s oeuvre is not “scary”. Scary works a lot like funny in literature – it tends to be very period-specific and doesn’t translate well over time. Just as Aristophanes needs a big-ass commentary to explain the jokes and the comedies of Shakespeare are less popular than his tragedies, so too is horror fiction damned to date itself upon publication.