Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft

[Old Man Ollie 1962]

I've read both men were inferior word smiths. Atrocious one critic said; but these story tellers created classic worlds, characters, and mythologies that have stood the test of time. New writers have continued to keep the spirit of Howard and Lovecraft alive in contemporary novels and short story collections. Consider the films and comic book success of Howard's Conan and the Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Even Stephenie Meyer (creator of the Twilight series) was called a dreadful writer by Stephen King, but her books sell. And the film adaptation of the novels made a healthy profit. Perhaps they too will stand the test of time. Maybe some great ideas, like seeds, grow to fruition regardless of the laborer who plants them.

[Carabas]

Howard and Lovecraft may not have had the best literary craftsmanship, but their imagination has created characters and worlds that have endured, and will endure for a very long time.

Meyer threw some Ann Rice and teenage drama tropes together and called it a day.

[JBatmanFan05]

Lovecraft created like his own literary language, this idiosyncratic style so unique to him. He was genius when it came to atmosphere and world building.

[Judge Dredd]

Lovecraft as writer is great and tells some amazing stories. However he was a racist asshole and that seems to be ignored when talking about him most of the time.

[Carabas]

Lovecraft as writer is great and tells some amazing stories. However he was a racist asshole and that seems to be ignored when talking about him most of the time.

Are you sure? It really seems to be the only thing people talk about whenever Lovecraft gets brought up.

[Judge Dredd]

Are you sure? It really seems to be the only thing people talk about whenever Lovecraft gets brought up.

That is good I never see it come up, but if it is good it should be brought up when discussing him. Still one the best horror writers of all time and would have liked him to live longer and write more stories.

[AndrewCrossett]

Almost all white people were racist assholes in that time period... though Lovecraft seems to have been pretty bad even by the standards of the time, at least in his young adulthood. If I demanded 21st century wokeness from authors of the past, I wouldn't do very much reading though. Lovecraft is long dead and his stories are in the public domain, and nobody is harmed by my reading them.

Lovecraft and Howard and the other "pulp" writers of the time didn't write immortal think pieces... they wrote exciting stories and did so very effectively. Both of them were basically churning these stories out for a few tens of dollars apiece in order to keep a roof over their heads. But there are critically acclaimed writers out there who would kill to have their imagination and skill at world-building.

I would love to see an HBO or Netflix series of Conan following Howard's actual stories. A Lovecraft anthology series would be great too, but anthology shows are a very hard sell nowadays.

[Kirby101]

I read most of Howard's Conan books when I was young (late teens to 20s). He was a great storyteller and craftsman. He was as good or better than many more recent pop culture writers.

[JBatmanFan05]

A Lovecraft anthology series would be great too, but anthology shows are a very hard sell nowadays.

And a lot of Lovecraft fans would probably not like it. Lovecraft just didn't do stuff that is common/expected in TV/film media nowadays. I haven't seen an adaptation yet that (not even from the HPL Historical Society) that really put enough effort into less artistic license and more fidelity (while also really capturing the atmosphere). Lovecraft didn't do action, didn't much do women in his stories (his work is quite antisocial and asexual), didn't always do more dramatic endings, and really didn't do clear answers and explanations (or even describe entities with any clarity).


Guillermo Del Toro might be the only TV/film creator out there that might be willing to break with all current expectations and attempt to defy studios to really try to serve up a more accurate Lovecraft. No jump scares, just antisocial and atmosphere and vaguery.

[JBatmanFan05]

Yeah...no thanks. Blackwood, Poe, Lord Byron, Clark Ashton Smith, and Arther Machen were far better than Lovecraft.

It's fine if one thinks that. I think Lovecraft would say most or some of those are better than him (Lovecraft loved Poe and Machen), but many will read such posts as perhaps suggesting that Lovecraft sucks overall as a sheer writer because he wrote that particular poem and used some other language in certain stories, his racism and xenophobia.

[AndrewCrossett]

Yep, Lovecraft was a racist, film at eleven. And all of those people mentioned were undoubtedly better poets than he was, although one probably should not judge his life's output by a piece of nasty doggerel he wrote at age 21.

[Grim Ghost]

I bought a Lovecraft collection a few years ago and stumbled upon this charming little poem:



Yeah...no thanks. Blackwood, Poe, Lord Byron, Clark Ashton Smith, and Arther Machen were far better than Lovecraft. This single passage from Melville's Moby Dick eclipses Lovecraft's entire body of work:

I love Clark Ashton Smith and he can't touch Lovecraft's best work. Same goes for Machen. Everybody already knows Poe is King. I find your comparison to Melville and Byron to be strange. Because they all wrote poetry? Lovecraft's poetry has never been much loved. He was an idea man.

He certainly was a racist asshole but that was typical of many (maybe even most) people of his time. We would have to throw out a lot of good work if we judged everyone by the standards of today. Even Abraham Lincoln said a lot of terrible racist stuff you know? So this should be acknowledged of course when we talk about these people but it shouldn't make up the whole of any conversation about them. People in the future will find many of our attitudes today to be a problem as well.

[Carabas]

He certainly was a racist asshole but that was typical of many (maybe even most) people of his time. We would have to throw out a lot of good work if we judged everyone by the standards of today. Even Abraham Lincoln said a lot of terrible racist stuff you know? So this should be acknowledged of course when we talk about these people but it shouldn't make up the whole of any conversation about them. People in the future will find many of our attitudes today to be a problem as well.

Yeah, but Lovecraft was a really racist even by the standards of his time.
Howard on the other hand was fairly okay for an early 20th century white guy from Texas.

[AndrewCrossett]

Lovecraft started out as very racist and Howard as typically (for his time and place) racist. Both of them grew less racist as they grew older, but Lovecraft was essentially a hermit while Howard had a greater range of expriences and wider reading interests, so Howard's opinions evolved more. Both of them died young so it's impossible to guess where they might have ended up.

Clark Ashton Smith, on the other hand, was pretty racially progressive for his time. I remember one story of his where the white protagonist marries a black African queen.

[TomServofan]

Lovecraft and Howard i love growing up reading and enjoying some of the movies based on their works.