I'm not normally a great fan of Lovecraft – yes, many of the stories are well-written, and he has a lot of remarkable ideas; but the heavy reliance on "unspeakable", "unfathomable", "eldritch" and a handful of other words and ideas that seem to pop up at least once in every damned paragraph of his work is tiresome. Metaphorically, it makes my teeth ache.
I think Clark Ashton Smith was actually a more skilled writer, although he also overdid it in florid stylistics, and his ideas aren't quite as remarkable (though they range over more territory, with more different moods).
But lately I managed to get addicted to an electronic card game based on that ol' Cthulhu mythos. It's very entertaining – the game maker has had a good time designing something rather complicated and somewhat funny, complete with sanity points.
And that amusing game brought me back to Lovecraft and such... fortunately a nearby used book store, Black Flame, has a shelf or two of Lovecraft-related books, and I bought one. It's funny to get back to his work... and funnier to see how many people online are fascinated with Cthulhu in various guises: many of them seem to want to figure it out, to find out the 'facts'.
Of course the lovely joke is... it only works as a fictional technique when less information is given, rather than more. The style really started (after Ambrose Bierce, who did something slightly different) with Robert Chamber's The Yellow King; the four stories he wrote concerned with that nonexistent play were brilliant, and the maddening lacunae and inconsistencies merely made it better.
And I'll admit: it made me want to know everything I could about that unreal object, the play that drove people mad... it's not quite like the lacunae of, say, Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur, but not completely different from it.
Unspeakable!...
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