Darnell, Meredith2018-07-192018-07-1920142160-617Xhttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/234227 pagesThis paper aims to prove that H.P. Lovecraft, a celebrated twentieth-century American author of “weird fiction,” terrifies the reader not with content alone but with a particular style of language. It operates on a premise that syntactic structure is a tool to analyze language in order to reveal further insights into the function of its content. It argues that the patterns in Lovecraft’s style of elusive language, when parsed at a grammatical level, lay the foundations from which literary effects emerges to mold his horrifying vision of man on the precipice of madness in an incomprehensible universe. Characterized by sidestepping explication, Lovecraft’s syntactic patterns in “The Picture in the House” provide ground for grammatical structure as a literary device of its own: symbols connected by these patterns heighten the story’s suspense, and when woven together at the climax, they expose a secret horror still beyond our grasp, its lasting obscurity being the key demonstration of Lovecraft’s inferential style.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USLovecraft, H. P.Coordinating conjunctionInversionLeft branching sentenceRight branching sentenceSyntactic parrallelismSyntaxArticle10.5399/uo/ourj.6.1.5