I love eldricth horror precisely because of this. Imagination will almost always be scarier than something that can be put into words. Descriptions give handles to hold onto for your understanding, boundaries and walls for the horror to fit in.
Give me more vagueness about how, gazing at it, the room could not have possibly contained its size. The feeling of the split second while tripping before you connect with the ground, stretched into an interminable constant in the back of your mind.
My problem with that is that it’s always the same descriptors for that unimaginable horror. Makes them boring if it’s always the same.
Also, I feel like both Howard and Lovecraft were prone to incredibly lengthy descriptions of things
Yep, which for them it was fine cause they pioneered the genres but modern writers can’t coast on that.
Lovecraft’s stuff has that reputation, but on a listen through his works, he had a tendency to actually be properly descriptive when it was appropriate. I think it’s a case of later, lesser writers gloming onto to making things indescribable as a lazy crutch that made the reputation of the mythos like that.
I think only ‘The Unnamable’ by Lovecraft really goes incredibly vague at a point where it should be describing the creature, but that story feels like a joke about this exact topic.
