And Then There's John Bellairs

So, while I think Lovecraft is interesting as a mythmaker but not a v. good writer, and Clark Ashton Smith brilliant but admittedly an acquired taste,* I think the late John Bellairs, at his best (i.e., THE FACE IN THE FROST) can best even C.A.S.  Bellairs' vocabulary is much simpler, but he was a master of using detail to evoke a sense of nightmares. And I mean that literally: I've had nightmares after reading Bellairs, which has never been the case with HPL or even CAS. Here's a particularly good example of how he draws on common experience to build sinister effect:


It did not look haunted, especially at noon,this crowded, textured, interwoven wood. [He] saw every shade of green, from light,bleached, papery, yellow-green to a dark, wet, inky green that was almost black. Willows,poplars, maples, oaks, and stubby kinkedmulberry trees. As he crossed the little clearing,he noticed that the wood -- at least the part ofit that he saw -- was surrounded by a loosefence of closely planted wooden polestipped with spear blades and linked by threetiers of reddish iron chains. Nothing that a manmight not break down in a few minutes, but it might keep something in . . . 
Once he was actually inside the forest and the oiled gate was shut behind him, [he]knew what was wrong. There are times when you feel you hear doors slamming in the distance, voices calling your name;you see blurred things, far away or very close up, that look like people until you focus on them. That was the trouble. Thewhole place seemed slightly out of focus,very slightly off. It was as if you were halfasleep. There was a buzzing in [his] ears,and he had to stare at a tree for several secondsbefore it looked like a tree and not a leaningfurry shadow. . . A glass bell was ringingsomewhere deep, deep in the forest. An icygreen glass bell ridged with frost, tremblingon a green willow branch.
--John Bellairs, THE FACE IN THE FROST (1969), Chapter Five [The Empty Forest].
currently reading: THE WALKER IN THE WASTE [Pagan P. CoC campaign], AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND (the only Geo. MacDonald fantasy I've not read)
current audiobook: DREAMS OF TERROR AND DEATH: THE DREAM CYCLE OF H. P. LOVECRAFT [2013]



*anyone who cd write a play called THE DEAD WILL CUCKOLD YOU is definitely not for everyone