Who Else at Halloween, but Lovecraft, H.P. that is....

As many of you know, I was at Genrecon a few weeks ago, and I had the pleasure of being on a panel about H.P. Lovecraft.  For those of you who don't know who or what Lovecraft is about, shame on you, go to bed without your dinner.  Lovecraft, much like Poe, was a pioneer in horror, and like Poe, no one has really written like Lovecraft, nor has anyone ever been able to write an entire story that will scare the shit out of you like Lovecraft.  Yes King does in The Shining a bit, you have to read the book people, even though the movie with Jack Nicholson kicked fucking ass.  But the book was much better.
In analyzing Lovecraft, I have noticed that he writes in a particular style and often pulls a lot of real science into his writing, whether a novel or a short story (honestly I found his short stories to be far more amazing because he could build that suspense in so few words if needed).  One of these days, I mean to put some of his writing into analyzer, something I do with my own to see at what grade the reading level and comprehension is at.  I suspect it is quite high.  The style of writing is quite interesting in that the language used is neither Victorian, nor modern or even representative of any kind of style in the early 20th century; rather it seems to be more of a transition between old and new.  And that is part of the whole thing with Lovecraft, that lets him scare the shit out of you.
Lovecraft not only uses language, but uses your own imagination to scare the wits out of you, for most of us that is the scariest thing of all.  In his one novel, At the Mountains of Madness, you see the results of what has happened, you see the first person (in the stuff I read, he has only ever written in first person), and it is the anticipation of what is going to happen that gets you all scared.  There is this huge buildup in the book and I shit you not, that as a teenager, because of this build up, I put the book down and never looked at it again because I was too scared to read it, but have since finished it (earlier today, actually).  And the buildup can be really fast, as in some of his short stories, or really slow as in his longer ones.  But either way, when you reach the climax to see the terror that he is writing about, you often only see hints, and as such, you automatically use your own imagination to fill in the gaps.
Couple the buildup with the gaps in not seeing the actual terrors, with some real science, Lovecraft can almost make you feel like this shit is real and out there waiting for you.  That is the part that scared me the most.  One of the panelists from Genrecon remembers reading At the Mountains of Madness by candle light, in a power outage, in her bath tub.  Big regrets there for her she said.
So for Halloween, instead of putting on that shitty horror flick, turn out the lights get a flashlight and read some H.P. Lovecraft with your significant other and/or friends. It will prove to me a far more interesting evening for sure.

A Wicked Place Indeed