Reaction
Lovecraft took pride in "The Dunwich Horror", calling it "so fiendish that Farnsworth Wright may not dare to print it." Wright, however, snapped it up, sending Lovecraft a cheque for $240, equal to $2800 in modern dollars, the largest single payment for his fiction he had received up to that point.
Lovecraft biographer Lin Carter calls the story "an excellent tale.... A mood of tension and gathering horror permeates the story, which culminates in a shattering climax". Robert M. Price declares that "among the tales of H. P. Lovecraft, 'The Dunwich Horror' remains my favorite."
S. T. Joshi, on the other hand, regards "Dunwich" as "simply an aesthetic mistake on Lovecraft's part", citing its "stock good-versus-evil scenario".
Read more about this topic: The Dunwich Horror
Famous quotes containing the word reaction:
“The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Children, randomly at first, hit upon something sooner or later that is their mother’s and/or father’s Achilles’ heel, a kind of behavior that especially upsets, offends, irritates or embarrasses them. One parent dislikes name-calling, another teasing...another bathroom jokes. For the parents, this behavior my have ties back to their childhood, many have been something not allowed, forbidden, and when it appears in the child, it causes high-voltage reaction in the parent.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)