local boy makes good or something like that

Gavin reviews Lovecraft Tales, edited by Peter Straub, for the LA Times Book Review:

Lovecraft's oft-parodied style (all those adverbs) is in full, glorious effect, starting with his earliest, clunky stories, such as "The Statement of Randolph Carter" and "The Music of Erich Zann." Lovecraft reveled in the English language: This is a writer whose thesaurus, if marked up, would make excessively, affrightedly good reading. However, if read after the perfect age (which anecdotal evidence suggests is in the early teens), Lovecraft lives up to his reputation for overblown, occasionally repetitive descriptions. "Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable."

Indeed. But right there is another of Lovecraft's attractions. For outside of a story, most of us — touch wood! — might never expect to experience such a shock. Lovecraft's amazingly atmospheric tales, his great eye for detail, the slow and unending buildup of dread: What's not to like?

How about that?