H.P. Lovecraft: Babe magnet?!

So. Three days into reading from H.P. Lovecraft´s at long last-- which translates into three days carrying that book around the bus, the mall, the office, and so on.

Oddly enough, three days into being stopped out cold by cute girls asking me, "May I see that book?" or "What are you reading?"-- at the bus, at the office, at the goddamn mall for chrissakes!

I´ve been pulling exactly the same routine now for years: From Jack Kerouac to Charles Dickens, from Kurt Vonnegut to Phillip Roth, and onwards, and I´d never been stopped at the mall by a total stranger. Kind of cute, too.

Do bear my being entirely blown away here please: If it´d happened with a Dave Eggers book, cool, makes lots of sense: Eggers has got that coffee house-flirting vibe going after all. Michael Chabon? Well, Chabon´s got it too I guess, paved the way for Eggers in that sense, and that was even before the Pulitzer. Even Gaiman, right? Neil Gaiman, in these weird, surprisingly wondrous post-Sandman years of his.
I guess I could pull off flirting with a Neil Gaiman novel after all, with a little ease and some luck to boot.


But really? Lovecraft? H. P. Lovecraft, with all his adjectives, and the haunted house-slash-tentacled beast thing going? Nineteen-twenties Lovecraft? Weird Tales-published Lovecraft?!

I´m sorry. Makes no sense to me.
I mean-- don´t get me wrong-- I´m three days into being absolutely in love with his work as well: I mean, Rats in the Wall? The Shunned House? Man, that´s so cool-- But to go from my newly-found love for pulpy-horror genre fiction to girls actually stopping me by at the mall to ask about it? Thrice over?!


I dunno: Is that what they mean by the "call" of Cthulhu?!
Jeez... where was Lovecraft when I was 16?!