I wondered about Lovecraft, having read very little and that very long ago. From the perspective of today, it would seem he has three strikes, having read a few stories and short novel yesterday.
The obvious racism behind a lot of it. The racism isn't incidental, but hard-baked into his vision. Sometimes it is merely implicit, but it comes out explicitly enough to be undeniable.
The fact that it's genre fiction, not high brow stuff in the first place. So then you don't have to balance out the racism with the fact that it's literature of the highest quality that happens to be racist.
The prose itself is over-heated and a bit cringe-worthy. He has a great lexicon, but the prose is always purple, and never settles down into a kind of normal writing. Everything is fortissimo, fff, with very little dynamic range.
Three strikes, and he is out. Yet there is something about the sheer force of his imagination that makes people want to read him (including me, this particular week).
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