possibly the very most over-the-top sentence Lovecraft ever penned

It’s from “The Haunter of the Dark,” one of his last, and another Providence-based classic.

“He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.”

What an image.

But if simply stated out of context like this, it could easily sound like self-indulgent, adolescent pulp, which is precisely what Edmund Wilson (and I greatly admire Wilson too) thought about Lovecraft.

Yet what you realize if you go through the stories and analyze 100 or so individual passages and how they work, which is precisely what I’m doing, is that Lovecraft was something like a composer of fugues. He has a few simple tricks that appear early in the great tales, then combines and varies them or reverses or expands them.

He works his way up to things, so that the passage above about Azathoth is a stunning delight once you’ve taken a look at all the previous stages that it amplifies. By the time he says those words, he’s earned the right to do so. They’re not the arbitrary outburst of an alienated 15-year-old alone in his bedroom, any more than Jackson Pollock paintings are just random dumpings easily executed by a chimpanzee.