Lovecraft Openers

[krinndnz]

I was rereading, and I found a thing to admire. Despite his failings as a prose stylist, H.P. Lovecraft could put together one heck of a first line sometimes. That's a specific trick of the writing craft that I struggle with - I like to think I'm getting better, bit by bit. Behold:When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
Beautiful! That sentence is pretty much a tiny story in itself, and pretty much the entire plot and action of the story is foretold there, and it tells us about the protagonist and what matters to him. I aspire to regularly write first sentences that good. Flipping through a compilation at hand here, I found a few others that are good or admirable.

• Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge.
• It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.
• Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know.

A good first line is in its way a piece of micromarketing, its objective very clear and succinct; it must make you want to continue. The first page is also important, and there is never a point where solid writing is bad to include, but generally, your time will be well-spent if you pour it into making the beginning of the story something that snaps attention to itself, something that resonates with the rest of the story, something that provokes the "and what happened next?" response that keeps a person reading. These are commonplaces. I repeat them so that I will keep them in my own mind, and apply them better.

Also here are a few first lines from my current drafts, which I would of course be grateful for feedback about.The species differences between the four whist-players at the table in McAdam's Pub were less noticeable than that the lioness' clothes and fur were growing stiff from all the blood that had been drying for a few minutes; the rest were merely scruffy.
---It was principally the persons who had a great deal invested in the notion that the End of the World was with a terrible swift sword approaching who regarded the return of the Fae as a sign of impending LaHaye-esque Rapture; to everyone else, it was a tremendous inconvenience, an opportunity for great commerce and great swindles, and above all finally something new to talk about.
---Every town has a high school for fuck-ups; Ant Creek was ours, and the fact that I was teaching there shows that when I say "for fuck-ups," I don't just mean students.