What was it like for you to discover H. P. Lovecrafts work for the first time?

Matt Ruff I don’t recall when I first encountered Lovecraft’s work, but it would have been when I was fairly young. I was always a voracious reader and I loved horror, and of course Lovecraft was widely anthologized.

I do remember that as a kid, I preferred Lovecraft’s modern imitators to Lovecraft himself. Like a lot of first-time readers, I bounced off Lovecraft’s language – Cyclopean architecture? What the heck is that? – and the pacing of the stories seemed glacially slow. I was used to horror stories where the monsters showed up early on, whereas in Lovecraft they often didn’t appear until the last page (if then), leading impatient young me to wonder “When is something going to *happen*?” It wasn’t until I’d matured a bit as a reader that I understood that the slow-building anticipatory dread was the *point,* and that Lovecraft was actually quite good at it.

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