>In a review of Michel Houellebecq's essay "H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life" published in the Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2005, Stephen King implies that Howard did not work at his craft and was merely pastiching Lovecraft.[188] King described his disapproval of the sword and sorcery genre, and superheroes, in his book on writing Danse Macabre: "[It] is not fantasy at its lowest, but it still has a pretty tacky feel. ... Sword and sorcery novels and stories are tales of power for the powerless. The fellow who is afraid of being rousted by those young punks who hang around his bus stop can go home at night and imagine himself wielding a sword, his potbelly miraculously gone, his slack muscles magically transmuted into those "iron thews" which have been sung and storied in the pulps for the last fifty years."[190]
Why does /lit/ have such a hard time accepting that the Pulps are not literature? Lovecraft and Howard just don't belong in the literary canon any more than "Flowers in the Attic" or "Ice Planet Barbarians" or even /lit/'s ironic favorite "When The Side N*gga Catch Feelings". Imagine meeting a woman, going on a date, asking her favorite books and she replies with a Ulysses, Lolita, Crime and Punishment, etc and then she mentions those books. That's what you sound like when you discuss Cthulhu and Conan as if they are serious literature.
>b-b-but Stephen King
the Shining is more literary than anything Lovecraft and Howard ever wrote.