Total crap. The quality of writing, the pacing and plot structure, the endless abstruse abuse of adjectives, all complete bollocks.

Lovecraft is at his best in quotes or short passages, and so his longest story is also his worst. Almost unbearable.

Add in the repeated casual racism and misogyny... I think I'm done with this guy. Difficult to reconcile how much I used to like his stories, and how I bought into the myth.

Lovecraft might not have liked it but the first half of this novel, with its "self-conscious antiquarianism", is terrific. The setting is so densely realised, the narrative so well-controlled, the supernatural elements so nicely understated that when the story surfaces in the present day and the usual overindulgence in loathsome unnameable horrors the reader can't help but wish for a quick and painless ending (to the book).

Some reviewers have noted that Lovecraft tells rather than shows. It's a lazy criticism. The problem - not always but here, certainly - isn't that he tells but that he tells when he doesn't need to. The history of Joseph Curwen, which reads like the back story to Bellairs' Isaac Izard or J.K. Borkman, is nicely reserved. It would have been a better book if he'd been able to sustain that degree of restraint. I favour inference, suggestion, a hint of the unseen. If we know we needn't be told and if we can imagine we don't have to be shown.

But there's a more significant problem. If the effectiveness of a work, no matter how well or badly written, depends on the reader's ability to be moved by nameless indescribable horrors (which, in Lovecraft, are too often described and named), what happens to it in a world where nothing is unnameable, unmentionable, unseen, or incapable of being digitally created?

Boo -- scary.

La magia di Lovecraft, il motivo per cui l'orrore da lui evocato persiste nella mente come una luce eccessiva sulla retina dietro le palpebre chiuse, è che nulla è descritto, ma tutto è evocato, e fa riusonare gli archetipi che ciascuno di noi si porta dentro.
Qui non siamo ancora alla perfezione, ma l'orrore puro è vicinissimo.

Perhaps His best?

Should I give it 5 stars? If i will read it more than once I usually do.