[FONT="]Just to pop in to say that it’s very annoying how Lovecraft’s dense baroque prose with no direct dialogues keeps getting mentioned as bad. It’s not bad. All the sentences are functional, as are the paragraphs. The characters are vivid, the atmosphere very real, and the plots have great structure.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Although the fantasy of having a serious conversation with whoever started this cannot be fulfilled, for reasons of time and mortality, I would urge everyone in hearing range to stop using other people’s quality measurement scales and trust their intuition and develop their own. You’d be doing the whole world a favor. [/FONT]
[FONT="]It’s fashionable enough to admit that Hammett and Chandler on one hand, and Eric Ambler and Graham Green on the other, were giants, but Ian Fleming is ignored, although he has absolutely fantastic bursts. The only real writer and critic I know who agrees with me is Kingsley Amis, R.I.P. Everyone else is pretending that Fleming is not an extension of Hammett and Chandler and Ambler and [FONT="]G[/FONT]reene. [/FONT]
[FONT="]Likewise with Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith—the three provincial poet geniuses. Their prose is dense but not clunky. Their prose is magnificent. [/FONT]
[FONT="]I simply can’t understand why so many people appear to be one-style fetishists. Only style X is great, therefore styles Z, Y, and B are bad writing. How hard can it be to enjoy all those styles on their own terms, without equating personal taste with objective quality?[/FONT] Listen, anonymous reader of rant, it may seem in the short term to help maintain a coherent persona by embracing one style only and despising the rest, but in the long term this will make you a severely limited, warped, annoying person. It's not win-win, it's lose-lose. It should be a quickly passing phase to possibly help deal with some nasty patch of real life, not a permanent condition...
[FONT="]It’s like so many people hypnotize themselves into accepting external quality definitions and then invest time and effort into defending those imported definitions, instead of investing that same time and effort to develop their own. Especially when they are beginner writers, high on binge-reading of various half-digested ‘writing rules’. [/FONT]
[FONT="]Some of these people actually prefer to then say that books like Dune and The Godfather were successful in spite of being bad (as in not by the ‘writing rules’ of twitter diva editor John Smith), then to actually admit that maybe these quality measurement scales are mostly B.S. intensely dependent on passing fashion.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Rant over, thank you for the attention.
[FONT="][FONT="]P.S. I also have a hard time finishing anything by the late Laymon, but this goes for universally praised highly literary horror writers like Ramsey [FONT="]Campbell and Charles L Grant too--somet[FONT="]imes t[FONT="]he vibe just doesn't click. Layman [FONT="]was a [FONT="]very competent writer[FONT="] as far as I can tell.[/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
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