I've been reading with interest the letters to Salon which followed Laura Miller's quasi-review of the new Library of America edition of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories (a one-volume selection, mind you, not the complete set). It's really a review of Lovecraft's reputation, and Miller doesn't exactly do a hatchet job, but her mixed verdict prompts some thoughts of my own -- some in support of her view, and some dissenting slightly. (I know, that's not a very compelling hook to get you to keep reading along, but you're already here, so why not see it through?)

No one who wrote in is apparently happy with Miller's essay, perhaps because only Lovecraft fans are writing in -- and Lovecraft has a current readership that I would say is divided into those who found his style off-putting and clunky and dismissable in the first place, and those who've taken him almost wholly to heart, warts and all. Miller, who seems to belong to the first camp, hooks her essay precisely on that whompingly heavy style, a syrup of adjectives further sweetened with the invariable additive of exotic names and references to a set of supposed arcane texts and legendary cultures. He is, she proclaims, a "bad writer," meaning that his repetetive and fevered prose style, his commitment to tell rather than show, and his endlessly telegraphed punches make him an author any intelligent reader must treat as an object of campy, rather than straightforward, appreciation.

There's something to this -- Lovecraft's prose is often more obstacle than enabler of readerly pleasure and emotional engagement. Her notion that Lovecraft is still read in an exclusively campy vein is entirely wrong-headed, but understandable in that (as with Tolkein), Lovecraft's excesses and excellences are woven together so tightly that serious admirers of the latter can still laugh at the former.

Miller goes on, more convincingly, to note that what *is* seriously disturbing in Lovecraft certainly looks to most of us like a relatively direct expression of a tightly wound character: " The kernel of Lovecraft's neurosis is a hopeless tangle of sex, race and bodily decay, fed by the tragedies and frustrations of his private life." Often sublimated into images of disgust, ooze, and lunatic disorder, sex can be hard to find in Lovecraft (although see "The Dunwich Horror" for an example of a shockingly straightforward use of a sexual abomination), but the element of race -- and Lovecraft's overwhelming xenophobia -- is everywhere.

The author's race-hatred is arguably the only really embarassing thing for many Lovecraft fans -- it's what makes you hesitate to offer up his work to a Stephen King reader who's never dipped into "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Purple prose is nothing compared to the relentless stereotyping of nonwhites as primitive and even demonic. And it doesn't sit any easier when you come to realize that in a mythos based on the terror of radical Otherness, it's not an incidental fact that he renders with loathing pretty much every ethinic subgroup from back-country Vermonters to former slaves in the Deep South, to, well...as Miller notes, it's only those of Anglo-Saxon upper-class descent that don't already come questionable in a Lovecraft tale.

Miller does hint at -- but never delves too deeply into -- the primary reason why Lovecraft still has readers despite problems like the above: the sense of coherent power -- what a critic like Harold Bloom might call a visionary power -- in the mythos which knit together almost all of his most powerful tales. Perhaps it's true that the close of a Lovecraft story often doesn't seem to carry an overpowering sting to the modern reader (though the long story "The Whisperer in the Darkness" and the short "Pickman's Model" both end with a good bang). But I'd argue that for many of us the pleasure is in the long, "dull" buildup. The uncovering of the actual crisis is stretched and stretched in many Lovecraft tales, until the atmosphere is supersaturated, not so much with dread as with a kind of fascination -- in what form will it manifest itself this time? Lovecraft's horror always seems to be at a short remove from the pure pleasures of fantasy. Each story is a version, another shadow, another window into his intriguingly haunted world. The pleasure in the reading is rarely about the what's-behind-the-door suspense -- and it only reveals itself fully, I'd argue, after you've read enough of the stories to take pleasure in spotting the connections that the characters within them aren't, necessarily, aware of.

And while the mythos might be fed by the wellsprings of an uncomfortably obvious sexual (self-?) disgust and a shameful fear of the nonwhite Other, Lovecraft successfully transforms these nasty personal discontents into something closer to the universal -- the dread of discovery that our carefully constructed narrative of personal order and meaning is just that -- a narrative woven to hide an unthinkable reality. In the case of the horror tale, that reality is one of implacably hostile cosmic forces, but isn't the blind indifference of the universe to our singular and collective fates no less arresting? The confrontation with that moment is what fuels a lot of what the 20th century called great art. I won't make the case that Lovecraft is great art, but -- no camp intended -- he's still, for some of us, great reading.

(By the way, if you like this sort of thing and haven't seen Neil Gaiman's ingenious Lovecraft/Conan Doyle pastiche, hie yourself here for "A Study in Emerald.")