SOURCE: Cox, Arthur Jean. “Some Thoughts on Lovecraft.” InDiscovering H. P. Lovecraft, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 58–64. San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Cox discusses the frequent criticism of Lovecraft's literary craftsmanship.

1.

“Lovecraft was not a good writer.” This blunt judgement by Edmund Wilson in his New Yorker essay, “Tales of the Marvelous and the Ridiculous,” has lodged itself, like an inextricable and uncomfortable foreign object, in the body of Lovecraftian discussion. “One of Lovecraft's worst faults,” says Wilson, “is his incessant effort to work up the expectations of the reader by sprinkling his stories” with certain adjectives, of which he gives a long-enough list but to which we might nevertheless add two more, “eldritch” and “unutterable,” He goes on to say, “Surely one of the primary rules for writing an effective tale of horror is never to use any of these words...