Regular readers of this site know I tend to make fun of H P Lovecraft’s prose style. In his better written stories, it has a quasi-nineteenth century sound to it. But in some of his less ably written material it instead just sounds kind of overblown. But recently I’ve been listening to a YouTube channel called Horror Babble by some guy called Ian Gordon who sounds a little like the actor who played Jay Peterman on Seinfeld. He provides an accent that, I guess, is supposed to sound like something between 1920’s Oxbridge English and possibly early twentieth century Boston Brahmin.
After listening to a few of these recordings I’ve realized that this presentation makes these stories incalculably more entertaining. Let me qualify this statement. It doesn’t make the stories better horror stories. But the presentation is just more fun. I think the accent makes the ridiculousness of the stories seem intentional. It’s camp.
And maybe it works because that’s more or less the “voice” that Lovecraft was hearing in his own head. It’s always seemed to me that Lovecraft’s work was sort of an homage to Edgar Allan Poe. And because Lovecraft lived far removed from the era when Poe’s prose was contemporary and because Poe was a consummately better writer Lovecraft’s language always seems stilted. But with a spoken word interpreter somewhat bridging the gap with his theatrical reading it somehow works pretty well.
Now most of you probably already listen to audio-books. The only ones I’ve ever listened to were Larry Correia’s Adventures of Tom Stranger with Adam Baldwin providing the voice talent. And come to think of it the specific voice really does make a big difference in the enjoyment of that story too.
Well, anyway, this little epiphany has got me thinking about the voice that you hear when you write something. I mean, unless you’re writing a character that’s more or less you, how do you hear that character or characters speaking. What do they sound like? Is it a regional accent? And that’s kind of a big deal. If all my characters sound exactly like me that might make it hard for my readers to see these characters as real people. Going back and reading some of my dialog I would say that there are definitely differences in speech for the different characters. And this is most noticeable for characters that differ in sex, age and generation. So, I’m not worried that I have to reinvent all of my dialog.
But it does occur to me that maybe I’d like to add some characters that have very flamboyant speech patterns just to give the story some extra zing. After all, even Shakespeare added dialect characters to make some of the scenes comical or memorable. His dialect characters were usually Irish or Welsh or Scottish. I guess I could throw in a Southie from Boston or a South Asian character for good measure. But if I really want to get exotic, I’ll throw in a Millennial Social Justice Warrior. Now that’s a foreign language that’ll take some practice.