I've reached this point quite a few times in these reading lists -- floundering to find books for authors whose names begin with the letter...  Now, I am on "L."  I've read Lovecraft and Le Guin, but horror author Bentley Little's Night School, while an homage to Lovecraft's Miskatonic University, is a little too sleezy for my taste; and the book I already had in my library, Snake Oil by Bruno Lombardi, is science fiction, not fantasy.  I'm reading through Marc Laidlaw's Neon Lotus right now... and wondering what my next two "L" books will be. Surely, Robert Levy's new book.  Perhaps this Ken Lieu, recommended by IO9.  Perhaps a L'Engle book I haven't read, if she has something that veers closer to fantasy.

This is part of the path through this forest that a reading list makes for you -- peeking down the side trails that you decide not to take.  It's a fascinating and pleasing process, even though it is tinged at times with frustration and a little niggling sense of lost-ness.

"Where is Selidor?"
"Very far out in the Western Reach, where dragons are  as common as mice."
"Best stay in the East then, our dragons are as small as mice."

How lovely it is to read a book that I can finish in a day.  And how lovely it is to be on Book 50 of my "100 Great Fantasy Novels."  This has been such an adventure, though I would prefer it were the next fifty books nor take four years to read.  My priorities are wrong, somewhere.

Written in 1968, when there was no real YA, many women had to write under male pseudonyms to get published, and all characters were chiseled Nordic types, this story about magic, wizards, dragons, and facing our fate is beloved by so many.  There is much to love, but I feel the message of the story is somehow greater than the story itself: not a bad thing, perhaps, and the story truly shines best when that message is coming forth.

Manhood is patience.  Mastery is nine times patience.

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow that act.

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

But it is time you recalled that, though I am a servant, I am not your servant.

Lessons for Writers: I write in this style, somewhat.  I must have read books by LeGuin or books influenced by her -- I certainly am influenced by the writers of the 60's and 70's.  I can see what is lovely and annoying in her writing, and perhaps in my own.  Lovely: evocative images, like wizards forgetting who they are and remaining as dolphins in the sea.  Annoying: back-loading of images to make readers have to double-back on the sentence.  It's good in small doses, but not all the time.

                          Visit Ursula Le Guin's website; she writes beautifully on navigating Story.

I have heard the echoes of these stories all my life, from Straub and King to the X-files and beyond.  It would be far, far easier to list what has not been influenced by these dank and dense writings.  You have been touched by these stories yourself if you have ever screamed at a hapless hero “Don’t go that way!”
 
I read a 1982 Del Rey collection of sixteen stories, including the now-ubiquitous-in-geeky-circles “The Call of Cthulhu,” but the ones that stood out for me were “The Colour of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”  All of these stories, however, had amazing opening paragraphs that drew me in quickly.  Also, all of these stories are written in infamously convoluted sentences that I really fought to comprehend – and oddly, when I was finally able to hold them in my head, found myself caged completely by the imagery.  It took more effort, patience, and concentration then I will usually put into reading, but the resulting effect was deviously poetic, and quite unique.   
 
Of course, the monsters and suspensefulness of Howard Phillips are renowned, but they are couched remarkably in lush, though dyspeptic settings.  Here are just two of the so many:
 
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically.  Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries – the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass.  Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region.  I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives.  Sodoma and Leonardo conceived of such expanses, but only through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades.
 
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.  There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without having ever caught the glint of sunlight.  On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled side bulging beneath low gambrel roofs.
 
Lessons for writing: As I was reading each story, I thought: “What a fantastically amazing movie this would make!”  But it also brought home to me the magic, ingenuity, and technology of really fine writing when it is done right: it makes a movie in your head, it's portable, and it's created on a much smaller budget!
 
Oh, H.P Lovecraft's life and personality were suitably bleak and miserable enough to provide the yeast that made his stories rise, but why don't you visit his alma matter, Miskatonic University?