A Series of Unfortunate Remarks

A few years back, “Lemony Snicket” was asked to review the Modern Library’s Selected Tales of H. P. Lovecraft. The results were blasphemous. After a bad beginning, which argued that one cannot read Lovecraft without a fit of giggles, Snicket careens down the slippery slope of stylistic critique. But it’s a cliché that Lovecraft’s prose is pompous and ponderous, not something that needs to be proved with extensive quotation—four full paragraphs (of fourteen) and many sentences besides. And Lovecraft’s humour is often deliberate.

Nor do we need more derision for Lovecraft’s biologically challenged monstrosities. This has already been expressed, canonically, by the critic Edmund Wilson, whose 1945 New Yorker piece, “Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous” moans that “the only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.”

I used to be a Lovecraft junkie, and I sometimes still admit the fact. I would not defend my thirteen-year-old taste—let slone Lovecra…