I was re-reading The Dunwich Horror this evening when something occurred to me about Lovecraft’s style. He writes in an almost completely narrative style; there is virtually no dialogue at all. It does give his stories an “otherwordly” tone but this type of style, it seems, would be death to any contemporary author. Can anyone think of any current successful author who writes with this same style?
It’s not a popular style today. You get it in some science fiction and fantasy, where ideas are sometimes more important than characters. It’s far more common in 18th- and 19th-century stuff. Gulliver’s Travels, for instance, has almost no direct dialogue, just Gulliver reporting. That’s probably part of it for Lovecraft. He was working with a lot of new ideas, but he had a real love of the past – history, geneologies, and old books.
Also, Lovecraft lead a very lonely life. Most of his friends he communicated with through letters. He had no children. A sense of loneliness comes across from the lack of dialogue, which I always thought was part of the effect, but which may be an echo of the author’s own life.
I get the same feelings as Hamish: Add a lot of dialogue and the stories aren’t effective. Lovecraft used the idea of the narrator’s observations of the horrors beyond our usual perceptions to underscore how alone we all are, and how goddamn big the Universe is. Narration from one voice and a dearth of dialogue conveys the sense of being alone and facing the unfaceable, faceless Universe. Lovecraft’s fiction represents a nightmare more effectively than anyone except Kafka.
And it isn’t used often in modern fiction, at least none I’ve read. Except for the science fiction, where it is well-used by Heinlein and Asimov and Bradbury. 
The current horror poster-boy, Steven King, has a lot of conversation in his stories, and I think some of them suffer for it. I think King’s best work was Misery, where the fact that the narrator is alone and bedridden most of the novel forces a certain introspective narrative style.
I find most novels that use Lovecraft’s narration-heavy style, mostly Romantic-era novels, much to dense to be read comfortably. For example, The Turn of the Screw, by James, I almost could not finish. The end kind of picks up the pace, but you have to slog through a lot to get there. His baroque grammar does not help things, either. Hemingway was a boon to the fiction world, since it’s not easy to keep a narration-heavy novel with topheavy grammar readable.
Ah, but I’ve gone off on a tangent. The Romantic period was pre-Civil War, and Lovecraft was active in the 1920s. Oh, well.
Grendel (don’t know why I can’t remember the author, he’s famous) also has little dialogue and the style seems to fit the loneliness of the story.
Oh yeah, by Garder, John?
Poe comes to mind, while there is some dialogue in such things as Cask of the Amtillado, it is all one-sided no actual “dia”. All “mono” throughout.
Also pretty true in the Fall of the House of Usher. A great deal of talking about talking but almost no real talking.
Also true in the Perloined Letter and the Tell-Tale Heart.
Once again, he fell into that “Romantic” generation, but, as I remember, didn’t Lovecraft say he had been quite affected by Poe?
TV
I wouldn’t be surprised if Lovecraft was. I like Poe, especially the stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, the introspective, guilt-ridden narratives, with the insane narrators and their terribly warped perceptions. Poe didn’t have it all on the ball himself, being a manic-depressive, an alcoholic, and possibly worse.
But Lovecraft was much more atmospheric than Poe, and I think he wrote more effective horror. If Lovecraft did draw on Poe’s works, he vastly improved what he had to work with.
I would say that in many respects, Lovecraft captured the very essence of the classic ghost story. His stories had all sorts of common references that contributed solidity of plot with barely imaginable elements of horror to give them verve.
Nahhhhhhhhh…M.R. James captured the very essence of the classic ghost story.
You can call Lovecraft a lot of things, but a writer of classic ghost stories isn’t one of 'em. “In the Vault” would probably be as close as he came to a spook tale…but whatever was left of nasty old Asaph Sawyer had some very corporeal teeth left in its head.
Oddly enough, many of M.R. James supernatural entities were not ghosts either; they were often quite corporeal. Yet his works are still considered “ghost stories.”
As for current authors who use little dialogue, I can’t think of any. Still, some authors may use this style as a change of pace for particular passages of a book. For instance, the “History of the Mayfair Witches,” in Anne Rice’s THE WITCHING HOUR, contains conversations, but much of it is written to sound like a historical document put together by scholars after the fact – just as many of Lovecraft’s stories are meant to sound like reports of actual events pieced together after the fact by the narrator.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com