"it did not occur to them that this twelve-year-old boy might be as gifted at peace as he was at war"
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Leafing through a few HPL stories I found The Thing on the Doorstep stood out enough to look up individually, and was surprised at finding it panned by at least the reviews cited on Wikipedia. To me, while not one of his best it's still one of Lovecraft's better works, and my reason for seeking commentary in the first place echoes that commentary's negative tone: it's not what you expect from him. But I would add: you say that like it's a bad thing!
It is indeed surprising to find this one of his last publications (a few months before he died) because its gothic horror tone better fits his earlier career rather than his later, more scientifictitious bent. It also plays up the interpersonal angle uncharacteristically, and there I think it's not given enough credit for character growth, not of the narrator but of Derby, whose soft, pampered upbringing is hardened through his years of psychic sparring into a superhuman effort of will by the end, living up to the superior intellect bestowed him by birth. The horrors of Derby's last act are by bulk left to the reader's imagination, yes, but you are nonetheless meant to imagine them, scrape by agonizing scrape and shuffle. Imagine, and salute!
Oh, Howie, you classically bigoted Boston asshole, did you not know you're supposed to manage your audience's expectations? When your middle name is cosmic horror, don't start writing about screwdrivers or they'll criticize how you handle the riveting!* And that brought to mind an example from more recent decades.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy's world-class work, a rare modern SF classic. Unfortunately after that he dove into the 2000s' environmentalist disaster thriller fad, and I'm solidly in the camp viewing that by-the-numbers sensationalism as more detrimental to environmentalism than any amount of public interest it generated. But a couple of years before Red Mars he wrote a book so sadly underappreciated it rates no more than a three-line blurb: A Short, Sharp Shock. Granted it's a hard book to blurb, of a genre (if it can be called so) more obscure than the text itself. Fantasy, yes, but neither of the dark nor high nor low nor urban varieties. Oneiric fantasy strings together semicoherent imagery and recurring themes in the disjointed yet obsessive manner of dreams. It's easier done in movies than print (Mirrormask jumps to mind) and too often falls into Alice in Wonderland mimicry. A Short, Sharp Shock on the other hand rides its uphill romance and creeping multiple threads of horror beautifully, dipping between chase nightmare, body horror, existential dread and bittersweet lulls of contentment. And yet, for all the Mars books' deserved attention, for all the stupider 40-50-60 books' in-genre appreciation, this little short sharp book's never mentioned. The author's other digression from terraforming/environmental themes, the alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt, fares somewhat better.
I've touched on this before with regard to H.G. Wells, whose well-deserved fame is strictly limited to the first decade of a half-century career, despite later books like Tono-Bungay, The World Set Free or The Research Magnificent being arguably better written, more quotable or more psychosocially incisive. They're just, strictly speaking, less high-concept scie fie than his earlier stuff. Even his fans won't touch them. I myself am guilty of this tendency. I've read a baker's dozen or more of Ursula K. LeGuin's SF stories, but not-a-one of her fantasy books despite being well aware the science in her fiction falls so far into the soft side as to dip routinely into science fantasy.
In science one might view more skeptically the expert outside his field, but even there we're forced to acknowledge that intellect is by its nature widely applicable. If it weren't, our fang-less, clawless, flabby species wouldn't be here. Bad enough that nomini sancti of every field of human pursuit from labs to offices to recording studios will strike down upstarts and defend their turfs against perceived encroachment, bad enough that every pulpit's wrapped in barbed wire. Must we mere mortals dig more trenches for them, even between fields of fabulism?
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* See? My audience expects puns. Mission accomplished.