I honor Lovecraft for (so far as I'm aware without sitting down right now and rereading a bunch!) a generally high achievement as regards conscientious diction, as well as the related matter of good grammar and punctuation. But his writing developed. Is there, does anyone know, a good article out there about that?
There have been some good things written on this, yes. One is Steven J. Mariconda's "Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Consummate Prose Artist", included in his
On "The Emergence of Cthulhu" and Other Observations. Don Burleson has also devoted some time to this in his various studies of HPL, from
A Critical Study to
Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (a series of deconstructionist readings of various works which also, necessarily, devotes some time to this).
First: I tend to agree with several of your points, though I think HPL used this particular word both for those associations and nuances of meaning, and for the sonic effect of the word. His prose itself was very carefully crafted to have, as others have pointed out, an almost incantatory effect; something he admired in not only the best writers of weird work, but literature in general, for its abilities to evoke the feeling of a place, setting, etc., including lighting and the observer's mood.
On other parts of the discussion: a really good, thorough etymology -- beyond what most dictionaries supply -- can be of immense help here, as they demonstrate the evolution of that word and how it acquired various meanings and significances, nearly all of which can be traced back to the original. Hence, Lovecraft's care in this regard can be seen, for example, with his use of the word "curious", in which he manages to incorporate both its earlier definition ("made or prepared skillfully, done with painstaking accuracy", along with its elaboration of "marked by intricacy or subtlety") and "arousing or exciting speculation, interest, or attention throyugh being inexplicable or highly unusual, odd, strange". However, HPL also recognized that he was perhaps overly fond of certain words and phrases, and overused them; however, they were quite natural for him, and when he attempted to steer clear of them, he often found himself with "literary lockjaw", and felt the results to be even less desirable than when he simply went with his natural bent.
On Wilum's use of such words: Having read a fair amount of his work, I would say that, yes, he does follow HPL in combining the informative with the expressive, and even the sonic (even his most elaborate stories tend to have a fair amount of the prose-poetic to them when it comes to diction); but, as I argued in my introduction to his
Some Unknown Gulf of Night, his tendencies in this direction have long ceased to be imitation or pastiche, and have evolved into "
adaptation; a drawing together of disparate elements into a quite different and personal
other" -- much as HPL (despite his wailings on this aspect, at which time he was actually doing some of his best and most distinctly original work) did with
his influences.
On whether or not the word should ever be used -- it's a nonsensical question, really. Any word should be used where more appropriate than another, and where such a word comes naturally to the writer in question. One should seek to avoid overusing a word, yes; but to deliberately eschew using a perfectly good word because of some critics' prejudice against its use, is simply asinine.
) Not YOU specifically, of course, but anyone who likes to take a the occasional poke at "the most important and influential American writer of weird fiction since Poe." Dirda again.
