"Lovecraft was not a good writer."

It’s a commonplace criticism of H.P. Lovecraft that his writing is overwrought and I can certainly understand why one might say so. His style is undeniably dense with adjectives, studded with archaisms, and includes unusual words like "eldritch" and "cyclopean" to cite just two obvious examples. These are old indictments. In a 1945 essay appearing in The New Yorker, the American literary critic, Edmund Wilson stated plainly 

"Lovecraft was not a good writer. The fact that his verbose and undistinguished style has been compared to Poe's is only one of many sad signs that almost nobody any more pays real attention to writing."

Many modern readers, including some who otherwise enjoy horror fiction, more or less agree with Wilson's judgment. On some level, there's more than a little truth to it, but I also think Wilson missed something essential about what Lovecraft was trying to do.

Certainly, Lovecraft’s prose is not plain. He does not describe a crumbling house or the whisper of wind through dead trees with, say, Hemingway’s economy. Instead, he piles on adjectives like charms against something too large and too old to be named. This is not accidental. Lovecraft was not a bad stylist. He was a purposeful one, even if he was not always a successful one. Any faults of his prose are, I believe, the byproduct of its ambition.

One of Lovecraft’s core preoccupations was with the limits of human understanding. His protagonists, whether scholars, scientists, or dreamers are nearly always brought to a precipice – of history, of knowledge, of space or time – beyond which lies something that cannot be fully grasped by the human mind. The horror in Lovecraft's stories is not simply monstrous; it is ontological. His stories revolve around experiences that are, by definition, indescribable. Despite this, they must be described, for the very simple reason that fiction requires language.

Faced with this paradox, Lovecraft responded in a way that makes perfect sense: he embraced inadequacy. His style is not polished to clarity but instead embraces excess. His adjectives are cumulative, not precise. His use of antiquated words is not an attempt at faux-scholarly authority, but a deliberate effort to suggest a register of experience outside the ordinary. The result is not always readable in the conventional sense, but it is evocative and that is the point.

In this way, Lovecraft’s prose functions almost like glossolalia or automatic writing. It does not persuade or explain. It reaches instead for effect. Its baroque qualities are not the product of ignorance or even bad taste, but of desperation. They're an attempt to use every available tool to conjure a feeling of cosmic awe or creeping dread. The occasional absurdity of his style, like the much-mocked “indescribable” things described at length, should not obscure the sincerity and power of his attempt.

One might say that Lovecraft was not writing about the weird so much as trying to write weirdly, if you can see the distinction. His stories are often most effective when read not for their literal content but for their cumulative mood, the way one might listen to a dissonant piece of music not to understand something, but to feel something. That he sometimes failed in this attempt is obvious. That he failed interestingly – and at times succeeded brilliantly – is equally so.

This does not mean that all criticisms of his prose are misplaced. Even Lovecraft himself was aware of his stylistic excesses and, in his letters, often laments them. However, to dismiss his writing as “bad” in some generic sense is to misunderstand both what he was trying to do and how radical it really was. His style was not an obstacle to his cosmicism. Rather, it was cosmicism writ large, trembling with adjectives and echoing with the voices of unnamable things.