In loving memory of Christine Della Trevett...

Editor's Note: In the unlikely event that "thine instrument be blunt" ... here follows a humorous round of retorts ...
One of the most unintentionally revealing moments in Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature is his faint praise of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. After admitting it possesses a “serious tone and sustained atmosphere of cosmic terror,” he then huffs out the kind of backhanded compliment you'd expect from a theater critic reviewing a Shakespeare revival that upstaged their one-man show about screaming into the void. Lovecraft's praise of The Modern Prometheus turns caveat with: "...despite its more or less mechanical plot and clumsy epistolary form."

Well well! This is rich—coming from a man whose idea of narrative sophistication was to have a trembling narrator write down a ten-page panic attack before being eaten by an idea. Lovecraft’s own plots, if one dares call them that, often feature some variation on:


Man goes somewhere.
Man finds thing.
Thing is unspeakably gross.
Man faints, dies or goes mad.
The end.

Shelley's Frankenstein, by contrast, is a sophisticated, layered meditation on creation, guilt, ambition, and estrangement—delivered through interlocking narrative perspectives, not just one long dribble of dread. It’s as if Shelley built a tragic fugue while Lovecraft clanged a dinner bell and screamed "squid!"
But that’s the fun of it. Lovecraft’s jab isn’t just a misstep—it’s a crack in the marble. You can almost hear the subconscious whine:
"Curse her ability to write compelling characters and moral complexity! And in 1818 no less! And she was twenty!"
Lovecraft, for all his innovation, likely sensed what Frankenstein revealed: that the truly terrifying thing isn’t the alien—it’s the mirror, and Shelley had mastered that dark alchemy with a poet’s hand and a surgeon’s precision long before “weird fiction” knew what it was.

To criticize Frankenstein’s form as clumsy is like a man in a soggy opera cloak accusing Mozart of being “a little too fussy with the harmonies.” Where Shelley offers moral complexity and psychological realism, Lovecraft gives us terror that lurks somewhere between the plumbing of space-time and the repressed eroticism of invertebrates. Her monster reads Milton; his protagonists recoil from footprints. She crafts a tragedy of creation and alienation; he submits a diagram of madness and tentacles in lieu of character development.

Still, we must acknowledge: Lovecraft’s real brilliance was not in writing about fear, but in constructing fear as a metaphysical topology. He wasn’t interested in what we fear, but where we are when it finds us. A literary cartographer of dread.

So, in fairness— Let us hear from a reader who disputes our petty disparagement of Mr. Lovecraft, and gives high praise to the Gentleman of Providence at Ms Shelley's (and our) expense!

A certain Mrs. Della Trevett, who apparently self-identifies as a sort of aristocratic housepet... writes:
To the Editors of the so-called Literary Pantomime Review,
It is with equal parts dismay and insouciant feline hauteur that I respond to your recent effort to drag poor Mr. Lovecraft across the moors of mockery like some shrieking English governess in a nightgown. Permit me, as a devoted acolyte of eldritch grammar and aristocratic neurosis, to correct a few of your insinuations.
First, Frankenstein is not a work of genius. It is, at best, a well-meant philosophical trifle stitched together from Rousseauvian sentiment and adolescent trauma. Oh, she was clever, your precious Mary—clever like a governess with a library card—but she lacked the moral spine to make her monster truly monstrous. He reads Goethe. He weeps. He begs for affection like a damp governess in a cold bed. Is this horror? No, my dears. This is the tragic opera of Enlightenment guilt.
Contrast this with Lovecraft: a man so intimate with the abyss he built vacation homes in it. You sneer at his plots, but his genius was conceptual—topological, as you admit, and rightly so. He invented psychogeography for the damned. His monsters do not want love. They want you—your insignificance, your atoms, your epistemic boundaries.
And as for epistolary awkwardness: Mr. Lovecraft’s narrators may sputter and faint, but they do not indulge in romantic hand-wringing about divine fire. They collapse beneath the weight of cosmic indifference—which, unlike Mr. Shelley’s tormented student, never asks to be pitied.
I remain,
Mrs. Della Trevett
Housepet, devoted cultist of the Unnameable

We thank Mrs. Trevett for her passionate rebuttal and must concede: Lovecraft’s awkwardness was, perhaps, the very mechanism by which the weird broke free from the tropes of Gothic rationalism and melodrama. While the fact remains that Shelley created a monster to ask whether man should play god, our beloved Gentleman of Providence created gods to laugh at man for even asking.