"The view that human relations exist only as engulfment is a serious limitation on a narrative artist. Toward the end of his life Lovecraft seems to have been unhappily aware of this; unfortunately he also underrated his own work and died before it began to be popular. His originality and his undoubted talent (the eerily parodic autobiography of "The Outsider," details like the "gelatinous" voice in "Randolph Carter" or "a warmth that may have been sardonic" of Innsmouth) is best at its quietest, worst in its bravely direct but often inadequate attacks on a theme that requires (at the very least) poetic genius. The very rarity of literary treatments of Lovecraft's main theme give his work added interest, however, and his work will probably always appeal to readers who find his theme compelling. If he had not died young, he might have moved beyond the kind of horror story that says This is what it feels like to the kind that adds And this is what is really happening. The latter moves into tragedy and implied social criticism (as does, for example, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). Lovecraft concludes "the spectral in literature ... is ... a narrow though essential branch of human expression" (p. 106), a comment that might well describe his work: narrow, not appealing to wide tastes and even considerably flawed, yet authentic, and by those who find it congenial, securely loved."