right from the beginning, Lovecraft intuitively adopted many of the principles of short-story technique that (as he himself points out in “Supernatural Horror in Literature”) Poe virtually invented and exemplified in his work—“such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax.” This “paring down” applies both to word-choice and to overall structure, and we will find that all Lovecraft’s tales—even those that might be
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