Monday, October 14, 2024

What I got out of the Tour de Lovecraft

 I ended up reading the first edition of Kenneth Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales in order to figure out if I wanted to get the second edition. In the first edition, Hite examines fifty-one of Lovecraft’s stories. 


It skips his juvenilia, his poetry, and almost all of his ghost writing. In other words, Hite covers the Lovecraft that most of us actually care about.

I have to admit that I found the work initially pretentious but, as I kept reading, I found I had to caveat that impression. First of all, while I have read a lot of Lovecraft, Hite has clearly read a lot more and a lot more academic criticism of Lovecraft as well. Second, I think it can be hard to write literary criticism without having some level of arrogance. You need it if you are putting your opinion out there.

Hite also gained my respect by saying that Lovecraft only wrote seventeen great stories. He realistically tempers his appreciation of Lovecraft and, let’s be honest, Lovecraft did write some stinkers. I think Hite is too harsh on The Outsider and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath but that’s my pretentious opinion.

And Hite helped me realize how much of an influence Edgar Alan Poe was on Lovecraft. I was aware of Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen being an influence on Lovecraft but I also discovered those two due to Lovecraft. I was already familiar with Poe by the time I started reading Lovecraft.

To be fair, Edgar Allen Poe’s influence is so big that it’s almost invisible. Poe casts a big shadow. Like the dreams of sleeping Cthulhu, Poe is all around us.

At the same time as reading Tour de Lovecraft, I also read Hite’s Lovecraft 101. Despite being touted as an intro to the Mythos, it was really more like a collection of in jokes for us fanboys. Amusing but Tour was better all around.

I got more out of the first edition of Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales than I expected. I still haven’t decided if I want to buy the second edition or the Destinations because what I’ve already read is what I wanted to read the most.

No comments:

Post a Comment