Howard Phillips Lovecraft,
Heaven knows, had a talent for writing which was of
no mean proportion; only what he did with this talent
was a shame and a caution and an eldritch horror.
if he had only gotten the Hell down out of his auntie's
attic and obtained a job with the Federal Writers Project
of the WPA, he could have turned out guidebooks that
would be classics and joys to read,
forever. Only he stayed up there,
muffled up to the tip of his long,
gaunt New England chin against the cold which lay more
in his heart than in his thermometer,
living on 19 cents worth of beans a day,
rewriting (for pennies) the crappy MSS of writers whose
complete illiteracy would have been a boon to all mankind
- ah, but life is a boon; and producing ghastly,
grisly, ghoulish and horrifying works of his own as
well - of man-eating Things which foraged in graveyards,
of human/beastie crosses which grew beastlier and beastlier
as they grew older, of gibbering shoggoths,
and Elder Beings which smelt real bad and were always
trying to break through Thresholds and Take Over -
rugose, squamous, amorphous nasties,
abetted by thin, gaunt New England eccentrics who dwelt
in attics and who eventually Never Seen Or Heard From
Again. Serve them damn well right, I say.
In short, Howard was a twitch,
boys and girls, and that's all there is to it.