HP Lovecraft
There comes that point in time in your life when you learn about HP Lovecraft. Someone makes a crack about Cthulhu and, when you ask the meaning of it, everyone in the room treats you like a complete idiot. "Whhhaaa?" they say, "You've never heard of the Cthulhu mythos? You've never heard of HP Lovecraft?" So you do your research, and discover elder gods from Pluto on Earth, complete with their own language and eldritch horror! Fantastic, you say!
And there's certainly no denying Lovecraft's fame. The problem is when you read multiple stories by him. The first few are interesting. Elder gods and other horrors from Pluto on Earth, as I said. Then you read more. Outer gods and other horrors from Pluto on Earth. And some more. Spectres and other horrors from Pluto on Earth. You read "Call of Cthulhu". You read "The Colour Out of Space". You read "The Shadow Out of Time". After a while, these stories all start to blend together. Part of the issue isn't so much that they're repetitive--I mean, they are, and there's only so many times you can read about approaching an "eldritch horror" before you begin to wonder why that's the only horror he seems to describe--it's that when all is said and done, he's not very particular in the details.
"Horror without description." Not to be a buzzkill by giving you the essential twist of every single story of his, but that's what is always found. It's horrible, and we know because the narrator tells us it's horrible, and horrifying, and scary, and appalling. What we don't get, practically ever, is any idea of what that horror is supposed to be, because it's always, or at least almost always, "without description", "beyond words", "outside of understanding", "beyond the capabilities of human imagination." Certainly there's a history of artists struggling with the confrontation of the numinous (Stanislaw Lem, anybody?), but at least they attempt to describe it. The whole "I cannot even express how outside of human experience this is and you wouldn't even understand it if I could" twist works the first couple of time. After a dozen or so stories (or all 86), it just becomes lazy writing.
Not to say that hiding the monster and leaving it to the imagination isn't a good way to go about it. Certainly there's quite the history behind that, as well. But there are usually subtle allusions, hints to what may or may not have been seen. In HP Lovecrafts world, the two most common of those type are 1) tentacles, and 2) chaos in realism. The first which, again, gives you some vague idea on how to build your imagination around the monster, the second of which is pure abstraction and without value.
We all know, now, what Cthulhu looks like. He looks like this:
Sorta. I mean, I read "Call of Cthulhu" through about three times. As best as I can tell, the image above is sort of a reader's sum-total agreement of what the shape in the water like an island with wings and tentacles and claws may possibly have looked like. The mythos itself has extended beyond the writer's own imagination itself, mostly because the writer was pretty, in my humble opinion, unimaginative.
He did present the idea that there were aliens and unknown horrors among us on Earth in a fresh and original way, for his time. He even gave us another fake language, which is practically an automatic fanboy generator (see: Lord of the Rings; Star Trek) if the language is developed just enough to hint at cohesiveness. The man has his bloody die-hard followers. And I don't see it, precisely because I don't see it. He doesn't give me anything to work with, here.
Plus he's a bigot. Just as an aside.
Cthuhlu r'hyleh gernarf narf and stuff. I've better things to read.
--PolarisDiB