Quote Originally Posted by Winter_Wolf View Post
And it's explicitly a great ape. And white. And there's a few more details which make it slightly less guffaw worthy. Or more, depending on how you want to look at it. I happen to like the story, just about short enough not to be a long grind. You can (and I did) literally skip somewhere on the order of 30-50 pages in the middle of "At the Mountains of Madness" and it makes no difference at all to the story. The man really needed an editor.
In my opinion, Lovecraft's main strengths were in creative conceptual ideas and hitting a certain tone. You do not need a good story or good pacing for those to be successful elements.

I generally think he was a pretty bad writer, actually, but he has had a big impact on the horror genre for good reason. He was the Steven King of his day.