lurking fears (part 2)

Part 2 - A Passer in the Storm

Undeterred by the mysterious vanishing of his friends at the end of Part 1, our (still unnamed) narrator makes a second attempt at locating this 'lurking fear', and this time he has a plucky reporter in tow.

The end of Part 1 saw HPL indulging in what's been dubbed his 'adjectivitis'. Part 2 features more (much more) of the same, as well as what we might call his 'noun-and-adverb-itis'. Typical of these tendencies is the second paragraph:

As I shivered and brooded [..] I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors - one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the faintest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity.

HPL's first critics outside of the Weird Tales fan world were pretty scathing of this tendency. It was one of the factors in his not really achieving a literary reputation until after his death. Yet this peculiarly, almost needlessly over-elaborate use of language, its frantic pace and the overblown effect it creates, is surely one of the major ingredients in the unique HPL 'recipe'. Perhaps even the most important.

Why do we re-read HPL? Fans and scholars are certainly onto something when they pinpoint his 'cosmicism' - the idea that humanity is but a very tiny part of the cosmic vastness. Yet there is a sense of fun - even of humour - that is communicated to the reader in a great many of these stories. HPL can creep us out - and can make it weirdly funny at the same time. The over-elaborateness of language, his over-muchness, is one of the main sources of that humorous effect. Just try reading passages aloud....!

Consider the tingle of joy one gets from reading the climactic sentences. The narrator discovers that his friend, who has been leaning out of the window to inspect the source of these new lightning flashes, has somehow had his face shorn clean off!! A lesser writer would have tried to express his narrator's shock in any number of ways - "I screamed" or "I jerked back in horror" or some other conventional phrase.

But this is how HPL does it:

[..]as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.


Well that sure beats "I shrieked with fright" into a cocked hat.


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