another good Lovecraft sentence

When describing Wilbur’s decaying monstrous corpse on the floor of the Miskatonic Library:

“It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions.”

Neutralize the tempting cliché in advance, but then express roughly the same thought in far more frightening terms. Nicely done.

Also “ideas of aspect and contour” is a nice touch. Ha! “Yes, come to think of it, my ideas of aspect and contour have always been a bit too closely bound up with the known three dimensions. I’ll need to work on that.”

A detailed description of the corpse does follow this passage, but it too undercuts its own literal tendencies. The first few elements of the description are already very difficult to visualize clearly, and then Lovecraft says something roughly along these lines: “that part was easy to depict in visual terms [no, it wasn’t] but below the waist the corpse becomes nearly impossible to describe.” He says it more eloquently than that (the book isn’t in front of me at the moment) but that’s roughly the tack he takes.

An even more wonderfully over-the-top example is the description of the polar mirage city seen from the airplane in “At the Mountains of Madness.” He lists a dozen or so features of that city, and while a good artist might be able to slowly read through it and depict each of its elements to some extent, there’s no way as a reader that you can feel anything other than completely overwhelmed by it.