Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

by H.P. Lovecraft, Joyce Carol Oates (Editor)

“H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”―Stephen King The most important tales of the godfather of the modern horror genre―a master who influenced the works of a generation of writers including Stephen King and Anne Rice―are gathered in one volume by National Book Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates. Combining the 19th-century gothic sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe with a daring internal vision, Lovecraft’s tales foretold a psychically troubled world to come. Set in a meticulously wrought, historically grounded New England landscape, his harrowing stories explore the collapse of sanity beneath the weight of chaotic events. Lovecraft’s universe is a frightening shadow world were reality and nightmare intertwine, and redemption can come only from below. For aficionados and a new generation of 21st-century readers , Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is a classic not to be missed.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

— Wikipedia

Reviews

[Catherine Siemann · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are florid, overwritten, offensively racist/xenophobic. And they nearly all have the same basic plot.

But there's also an odd brilliance to them. They're less terrifying than I expected them to be, but they are fascinating with their revelations of elder beings and unimaginably alien architecture and geometry that's *wrong*. There's a sense of paranoia and of secret truths, and his world-building is very effective. I think my favorite parts were the exploration of the pre-prehistorical ancient cities in At the Mountains of Madness and "The Shadow Out of Time".

So, there's part of me that wants to dismiss these stories wholesale, or at least to advocate the Cthulu-worshippers as oppressed colonial Others, but I also understand exactly why Lovecraft's stories are so influential.

[Mel (Epic Reading)]

I’m not reading these in order necessarily...
listed in reading order (top of list = earliest read)

Finished: The Dunwich Horror
Probably one of the best known stories by Lovecraft and pivotal to the Cthulhu mythos.
This is quite gruesome and gory. Lovecraft has a wonderful way of giving us the setting and carrying the plot forward. However, likely because of the time this was written, there is zero character development. This is disappointing given that there is a ‘person’ whom I would really have liked to know more about. I also want more of the book story (yes it’s the Necronomicon).
I’m hoping there is more about books origin in other stories.

Finished: The Shadow Over Innsmouth
I chose this one next because of its influence on the Aquaman movie.
So, I need to come up with Mel’s Abridged Versions of classics; because the first 20 pages of this story are completely unnecessary. There’s a lot of extra prose in this one.
Otherwise it’s a decent story. I liked the twist at the end. The one thing to note here is that this is a very xenophobic/racist story. Remembering the timeframe in which Lovecraft lived, this is not surprising. But be prepared for a lot of assumptions, prejudiced statements and pieces of the story that may make you uncomfortable. I give kudos to Aquaman for being inspired by this story; but flipping the xenophobia to make the strange or unknown miraculous and beautiful, instead of horrifying.

Finished: The Thing on the Doorstep
This is by far my favourite of all Lovecraft’s work I’ve read. Told in first person by a major player in the story, and lacking the long drawn out descriptions present in Dunwich Horror. Making this horror story feel real and thus the concept at the core of the tale even more horrific.

[Apokripos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weirder Than You Think
(A Book Review of Tales of H. P. Lovecraft edited
by Joyce Carol Oates)

Without a doubt Howard Philips Lovecraft, or more commonly known as H. P. Lovecraft, is one of the greatest writers the turbulent twentieth century ever produced. No one can refute that he is indeed the natural inheritor of the American horror tradition next to his literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe, to which Lovecraft is usually compared to. Peeking further into the life of H. P. Lovecraft, it seems — call it a trick of fate, coincidence, or a bad joke by the ghastly gods of the unknown — that more than the similar quality of the stories they churned (“bizarre, brilliant, inspired, original, yet frequently hackneyed, derivative and repetitive,” if I may quote from Joyce Carol Oates’s introduction from this particular book’s edition) both their life carve out parallel patterns, just to mention a few: both were born in New England and were fatherless at an early age; both had disastrous marriages and lived a truncated life; both tried to live off by means of their writing and sold them to magazines with little financial pay off; and though branded as literary misfits of their respective times, more importantly, both established a body of work (ironically appreciated only after their death) that became the foundation and left an indelible mark for much of today’s horror fiction. Writers old and new pay them both tribute for their timeless macabre and pitch of fascinating malevolence. Acclaimed author Stephen King once said of Lovecraft: “[He was] the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”

What’s distinctive about H. P. Lovecraft is that he is perhaps one of the early Western authors to write exclusively in the horror genre, fusing together elements of classic gothic tale steeped with mysticism, the occult, and hidden cults along with what would later be known as science fiction creating a subgenre which he calls “cosmic horror”. Besides this his stories feature a keen, psychological dread, rather than an intrepid, obvious threat. His themes often center on “what maybe” instead of “what is”, externalizing inner fears and demons into universal horror stories that share a helpless, hapless view of the fate of humanity. Ultimately, the fears in Lovecraft’s stories are all about things we can’t see, can’t find, and can’t understand. What if those things beyond our understanding are best left there? What if we push the envelope of discovery a little too far and find something that will swallow us whole, destroying our perception — of what we think of as “what is” — underneath the crushing weight of truth too hideous to comprehend?

Before delving into the individual stories included in this collection I want to, at this juncture, commend Joyce Carol Oates for her insightful introduction to this edition (this really convinced me that I should try some of her books sometime soon), from which I learned a lot, and her splendid choice of some of H. P. Lovecraft’s seminal short stories. Truth be told, this is the first time that I had read Lovecraft and I can’t recommend this edition enough if some of you Gentle Readers want to try him out. Though not arranged in the chronological manner by the time either which the stories were written or published, Oates see it fit that the reader will not be swamped — else potential readers thought that they had bitten more than they could chew — by its otherworldliness presenting each stories by increments, like a ten course meal starting off with a simple yet delectable appetizer that as your done with the first and satisfied will urge you to try the next one until you get into the heavies, the meat and potatoes.

A caveat of sorts: Lovecraft writes in a flowery prose that certainly harks back to the nineteenth century sensibility and use of language. If you’re already familiar with the short stories of Poe, then you’re in good company, you’ll trudge along just fine. Unlike Poe, who in times meanders in abstraction and philosophize before he even starts his story, Lovecraft dives on into the kernel of his tale.

Following are the stories in this edition and arranged in the order of their appearance in the book along with my comments and observations on them:

• The Outsider — the tone of the narrator and the setting which he describes just screams — Gothic! It is easily one of my favorites at the outset and works the best, in my opinion, as an introductory story if you want a sampling of Lovecraft. The unnamed narrator’s voice soothes; like a friend he invites you in his world of “vine-encumbered trees” and a castle of “infinitely old and infinitely horrible.” Seemingly, it’s a conversation starting off sensibly well till self-doubt gnaws our protagonist. The tale quickly slides into a slightly disturbing derangement. It uses a truly classic twist that the reader might never expect.

• The Music of Erich Zann — set in Bohemian Paris Lovecraft clearly evokes in here the world of impoverished students and tortured artists. It’s not as scary as such, but has a fine, feverish mood that builds to a classic Lovecraftian freakout. With excellent use of suggestive atmosphere along with the ambiguous nature of the supernatural threat (which you get a lot of if you’re a veteran reader of horror short stories), it lends the tale with a fairly nice edge of madness.

• The Rats in the Walls — the thing with Lovecraft is that he seems to create characters that’s a stand in / representative of himself (which I also noticed with some of the characters of Stephen King, especially if that character happens to be a writer). Lovecraft during his lifetime believes that he is the scion of a minor New England aristocracy, the last of a noble line, which happens to be the background he gives to this story’s protagonist, Walter Delapore. Why Lovecraft did it so is a thing you will discover for yourself as you read along. The horror of this one pretty much worked for me and its scare tactic is one used by a number of authors who had been inspired by this short story. Case in point: if you’ve read Jerusalem’s Lot by Stephen King you might know what I’m speaking of. More importantly, Lovecraft seems to be striving to place his story in the context of the contemporary world by particularly placing this one along the current events of his time. Unlike the previous two this one specifically follows a definite pattern: specific, detailed, and placed expertly in the real world — a structure he will later use in the stories to follow.

• The Shunned House — specific, detailed and placed expertly, this is a structure Lovecraft closely goes after in the fourth short story in this collection. Apparently the titular house of this tale is actually a real house (which stands up to this day) at 135 Benedict Street in Providence, Rhode Island. I thought I would be served with a clichéd haunted house tale (I partly blame the shabby title, heh) only to be surprised by a curios story told in the first person narrative of Elihu Whipple and his confrontation with a fiendish horror. Lovecraft’s level of historical detail — an almost obsessive recitation of dates and names covering two centuries and more — anchor’s the story to a convincing real world narrative. Evidently, this is one of Lovecraft’s earlier outings into the nascent science fiction realm using the technical advancement of the time to make his horrors sound plausible.

• The Call of Cthulhu — this piece alone stands out as the archetypal Lovecraftian story and initiates the reader into what fans have called as the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Look no far for all the ingredients of Lovecraft’s horror concoction is here: dreams, ancient myths, degenerate cults, and impenetrable and incomprehensible horror. The structure of the story is also typical from what we expect from him: a distant, anonymous, narrator; the accumulation of information from diverse sources; the slow build up and suggestion of dread. The long-winded crescendo that starts with the dreams of a few aesthetes, to the hideous final ritual in the swamp up to one of the characters encounter with the monster gradually raises the scope and stake of the story from the trivial to the Earth-shatteringly profound. Furthermore, the quality of Lovecraft’s narration makes it stands out among the others epitomized by the chilling expression of the cosmic horror in the opening line that makes a killing: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

• The Colour Out of Space — again Lovecraft’s strength in creating atmosphere and memorable description is very much felt here illustrated no less by a very poetic opening line: “West of Arkham, the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axes has ever cut.” Reading that one made the hairs on my neck stood on end, instantly inspiring images of a dark, malign landscape that looms and threaten. The opening paragraph carry this theme through, outlining the history of unsuccessful settlement in the area, establishing man’s weak grip on the Earth and the ineffable nature of the wilderness. The sudden intrusion from outer space into the lives of the modest and god fearing folk of rural New England depicts a horrible insight into man’s own smallness, breaking their minds and bodies both, and vividly portraying, in the best gothic tradition, their physical demise by an outward affliction which also works as a perfect metaphor for man’s inner dissolution. Also one of my favorites!

• The Dunwich Horror — gripping, horrible and totally bizarre, that‘s how I describe this seventh tale. Throughout Lovecraft’s story there’s a running thread of recurring motifs that give the impression that these short stories are somehow linked. Some of these elements are the Necronomicon, an ancient book of evil spells; Arkham, a fictional city located in Massachusetts; and Miskatonic University, an imaginary college near the area. As the The Dunwich Horror unfolds readers can see these Lovecraftian ideas at work and pretty much enjoy this story garbed in the traditional good vs. evil plotline along with its noticeable relevance to the “Cthulhu Mythos”. As expected from such tales, yes the good guys will have to face and defeat a hideous fiend, but don’t worry they’ll almost make it. What makes this story out of the ordinary though? I will not tell you, but this one just left me speechless, gaping at the final page.

• At the Mountain of Madness — the longest tale in this collection; by its sheer length alone I think it’s a novella. Like any men of learning of his time Lovecraft also dabbles in a bit of science, and one his constant interest is polar exploration, which in the twentieth century is one of the uncharted, harshest regions in Earth. This fascination ultimately seeps through in At the Mountain of Madness, about the expedition of William Dyer and some professors from Miskatonic University in the cold, desolate continent of Antarctica. The details of the expedition, the gadgets and mechanisms used (available technologies of the era) are thoroughly depicted. I admit that this one bored me on the few pages, but what sustained me in slogging through this glacial mass of narration is the question of why does the protagonist foil other explorers from venturing in this deadly place. Lovecraft’s real life scientific knowledge about geology evidently embellishes this tale as much as he does with his other tales with a heavy historical background. However, what makes At the Mountain of Madness stand out from the rest is its meticulous level of realistic detail in the plot and the evocative description of the frozen wasteland with the confluence of horror in the story — the devastating chasm of time and the fact that a race of beings with a thousand year history had lived, thrived, and perished long before the evolution of man. This tale, I believe, is one of the finest among stories using the theme of strange horrors unexpectedly exposed in rediscovered lost or ancient places.

• The Shadow Over Innsmouth — the single story representative of weird fiction, Lovecraft shows the very best of what he can offer in this outlandish account of Robert Olmstead about the village of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Writing at his best, Lovecraft pools his various oddities such as the mysteries of a town shrouded in secrecy, whispers of cults, and of course ties this one in the famed “Cthulhu Mythos” to produce a sublime mounting horror where all rudiments harmonize resulting to very unsettling climax. The story also focuses on some of his favorite themes like racism, deterioration, superstition, the phantom of madness ever present over all his first person narrators and (added on this list) a perverted view of sexual aggression. So far this one has THE most disturbing ending — my flesh literally pricked at the final reveal! Favorite among favorites this one is!

• The Shadow Out if Time — foremost of the stories that Lovecraft wrote before his death, The Shadow Out of Time tells the experiences of Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee under an alien race and their ability to take over or switch host bodies. I suppose this is one of the precursors of the alien abduction tale. The story has a tone of a febrile dream, where — like the narrator — you distrust even your own senses, where reality and insanity is separated by a thin line. Despite that, Lovecraft’s message here is crystal clear: in the absence of knowledge, chaos ensues and that even in his twilight years he’s still a force in horror fiction to reckon with.

Whether or not propped by an undercurrent of supposed “mythologies” present in such wild yarns, and though themes, symbols may run counter to what Lovecraft initially have in mind, a tale is just a tale after all, and that “myth” (in whatever guise) is the dregs it scatters about picked up by anyone who finds (whatever) meaning from it. It cannot be denied, however, that the true allure of the gothic tale is in how it stirs deep-seated fears, and by that I don’t only allude at the ones you feel inside your guts, I also mean those that can short circuit your brain fuse haywire, for as Lovecraft said: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.”


_________________________
Book Details: Book #34 for 2011
Harper Perennial Modern Classics
(Trade Paperback, 2007 Edition)
346 pages
Started: August 22, 2011
Finished: August 30, 2011
My Rating:★★★★★

[See this review on my book blog Dark Chest of Wonders and for many others.]

[Steve]

This style of horror writing just isn’t for me. I couldn’t engage with Mr. Lovecraft’s voice. It felt as if I were riding my bicycle on a waffled road rather than on smooth pavement, the pages did not want to turn very fast.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two central recurring elements in Lovecraft's stories: the academic and the fear of miscegnation. The academic nature of his stories is what causes so many of them to bloat and become glacially slow reads, but at the same time it is essential to Lovecraft's idea of horror: an idea which does not fit into our mental world, which scares even when there is no immediate danger. In a way Lovecraft's stories can be seen even as an assault on academia, showing the limits of the pursuit of knowledge. This is theoretically a good idea for horror fiction -- the reader doesn't have a serial killer breathing down their neck, but they read the ideas just as well as the characters. The problem is that to a modern reader, or at least this modern reader, most of these ideas are less frightening and more just kind of cool.

And then there's the miscegnation thing. Most people treat the racism in Lovecraft as incidental, a relic of the era (although this excuse is, as always, a little inadequate), but it's essential to several of his stories. ("The Dunwich Horror" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" both play heavily on this fear of racial mixing. Weirdly, these stories are the ones with the most conventional horror narrative.) The fear of the outsider is a key element to Lovecraft's stories.

As for actual quality? Well, the problem with Lovecraft is that there are a lot of brilliant ideas inside overwritten stories with one-dimensional characters. This was the early 20th century, so there was no such thing as RPG sourcebooks or websites to post your awesome worldbuilding stuff in. Some stories are almost pure exposition -- the entire plot of "The Call of Cthulu", for instance, is a guy researching something and then getting scared. The world Lovecraft created is pretty freaking cool, and has been used as the basis for a board game and several tabletop RPGs, but it had an awkward way of getting out.

There's no doubt that Lovecraft was a hugely influential horror author, possible the most influential, but I can't say that his stories are essential reading. Like a lot of early genre fiction, it's worth checking out if you want to see how the genre develloped, but it can be a bit of a slog to get through.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I'm in the mood for a couple of sleepless nights spent listening for hell-beasts under my bed, I just wrap myself in a few blankets and settle in with my big book o' Lovecraft.

[Amanda Hupe · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

I see how these horror stories influenced so many amazing authors. I see the brilliance in the horror. I can't get over the racism. The only monster here is the author.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprising DNF. HP Lovecraft is a terrible writer. I may have left this book in more fear of his inability to tell a story, than by any of the creative SciFi Horrors he imagined. Don’t get me wrong, he does have some good creations, which have inspired many writers), but they don’t amount to anything fruitful when one can’t establish characters or even a reasonable narrative arc.

Each of these stories instead follows a repetitive & confusing construct: Insert Creative Idea (good), then a quick paper thin character, a house/phenomenon, a ridiculous history list of past horrors at said location, odd tangents, revulsion & screams, a wild vocabulary of adjectives, then obfuscated action (wait did something happen? or is this still just listing things again? I don’t know, I’m lost!), oh and some eugenic racism, and then just abruptly end with a muddled incomplete conclusion.

I did like ‘The Outsider’, it was like Grendel meets the Twilight Zone. ‘The Music of Eric Zann’ was ok. ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ was terrible and racist, as were several others till I gave up.

I guess I’m glad I read a couple of these stories so now I understand references to HP Lovecraft. He’s over rated imho. If you want great short stories turn to Alice Munro, Ted Chiang, Jorge Luis Borges, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner. What they can do in character development or a gripping story in a single page, surpasses anything Lovecraft does in these 328 pages.

[Xavier Guillaume · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first time reading H.P. Lovecraft. I've always heard his name mentioned, particularly in reference to "The Call of Cthulhu," which is mentioned quite frequently in pop culture. I've seen Cthulhu stuffed animals, Cthulhu T-Shirts, and even World of Warcraft references H.P Lovecraft lore with their Ancient Ones. Anyway, I finally read his works, and I do have some mixed feelings about his writing style, but overall, I really liked this book.

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft is a general collection of his better known short stories. I'll break it down story by story, to give a good idea of my impressions.

This Introduction itself by Joyce Carol Oates is highly interesting. I do suggest reading the Introduction first as it gives some very good background information on H.P. Lovecraft's life and writing style. I don't think it's the best sort of biography you can find if you're interested in that. I'm actually curious and wouldn't mind searching around to see if such a biography exists, but this introduction does give a general idea of his backstory, which adds depth to my enjoyment of his stories.

The first story is "The Outsider." The story itself is very cryptic in nature, meaning I found it perplexing in what exactly was going on and who this narrator was. This made reading the story very fun, and I'd say it has a fantasy and horror element to it. The ending is highly predictable, but nevertheless enjoyable, and so it makes sense why this story is placed first in the collection.

The second story is "The Music of Erich Zann." I actually preferred this story a lot more than "The Outsider." Basically, it's about a young man who was living on a small street in Paris called the Rue d'Auseil. Unusually, however, since moving, he was never able to rediscover it, despite much searching, and it doesn't appear to be found on any map. This is just one of the many aspects of Lovecraft's stories, where inconceivable instances such as this happen quite frequently. But what's intriguing about this book is the curtain found in the old man's room upstairs. There is so much suspense involved with the viol player and what is occurring outside the window. And then it is revealed, and it completely dumbfounded me. It was not what I expected. Overall, a wonderful story, although since loving the story so much I read it a second time, and I found the second reading to be a tad bit less enjoyable, but it is still good nonetheless.

"The Rats in the Wall" is next. Honestly I find this story to be a tad more forgettable than most of them. It does have a whole slew of characters, as the narrator introduces almost every member of his crazy family as he does research into his family's ancient dark past. Strangely, we get a taste of H.P. Lovecraft's slightly racist side, as the narrator's cat is actually named Nigger-Man. Yes! Can you believe that? The ending is quite fantastical though, and probably the best part of the story. It reminds me of the episode of Angel when he goes into the other dimension with the spider like creatures that worship Jasmine. Lovecraft really has a sense of the visual in this story that excites the imagination.

The next is "The Shunned House." This one too is very much like "Rats in the Wall." The narrator goes into the history of this strange abandoned house, where all the vegetation is dead and freaky looking, like strange purple fungus, etc. So, the narrator goes through the town annuls, and he researches about the family who once lived there. So here we get a real sense of the strange history of what happened. I actually found that part the most intriguing, because it felt like I was unraveling a mystery while reading his story. However, the culmination of what happens with the narrator and his uncle is quite anti-climactic. It seems like it would be this huge exciting thing, but the "monster" disappears like a puff of smoke, which was slightly disappointing. Overall, it is a good story, but I wish the ending could have been a tad bit more exciting.

The next story is "The Call of Cthulhu," which is actually my least favorite of all the stories. This one goes on and on in complete tedium. Basically the narrator ties together all these stories, which are supposed to connect through his grand-uncle, but to me they seem so jumbled and unrelated. Apparently, his grand-uncle was walking to his house, when a "nautical-looking negro" (basically a black sailor) comes by and pushes his grand-uncle down a hill and killing him. This whole event is completely ridiculous, and I feel like H.P. Lovecraft just throws it in to show his dislike towards black people. Either that or he really wanted to write the words "nauticaul-looking negro."

The rest of this story isn't too bad. I mean sure it's tedious, but where it gets really bad is the part with the mystery derelict found at sea. I don't see the point of this portion of the story at all, and I recommend skipping it if you appreciate any bit of your time. The ending is quite interesting, however, and I love how H.P. Lovecraft describes the Ancient Ones' island. Although, I swear, Lovecraft has an obsession with the word Cyclopean. Sure, it's a good word, but he uses it constantly, that I can't help but wish he used something else.

Next is "The Colour Out of Space." This story stands out as it is so different from the previous stories. It takes place in a super small town, and here we get a really good sense of local color. I love it for that, and this is why it's one of my most favorite of his stories, at least of the stories found in this book. It reminds me of that story shown in Creepshow with the meteor that falls on the farm, and eventually turning the man into some sort of moss creature; however, this story is ten times better. I highly recommend it.

"The Dunwich Horror" follows that one, and this is probably one of his better known stories. There is a board game based on it, and Yog-Sothoth, if you've ever played World of Warcraft you'd know of the boss Yogg Saron that most definitely references it. Haha! Love you Blizzard! Anyway, this story is definitely worth reading if you want to read H.P. Lovecraft. The entire story is good all round, but the final few pages are such a letdown. I was hoping for some epic battle, but it seems that H.P. Lovecraft is good on the suspense but bad on the epicness.

Next is "At the Mountains of Madness." While researching H.P. Lovecraft, I've found that this story always comes up for some reason, although I've never heard of it prior to this. On it's own it's a pretty decent story, although it's way too long for what it is. I wish Lovecraft could have kept it shorter, but you take what you can get. The story takes place in Antarctica where a group of scientists discover a giant mountain with a hidden cavern underneath, where they find these strange plant-like alien creatures. One of the scientists, a biologist, dissects one of the plants, but something goes awry. A huge blizzard sweeps across the camp destroying everything, and so a rescue team comes and guess what they find...wait for it...the biologist is found on the operating table completely cut open and dissected. And of course, these scientists, are like what the f*** happened? But guess what happens next! They forget about the whole thing and decide it would be in their best interest to go exploring these mountains. Okay, maybe the mountains turned them mad, hence the name, but who else thinks that's strangely weird? I mean if I found a body dissected on a table, I would think, personally, that there was some crazy psycho on the loose and it's time to leave. But no, they go exploring until they stumble upon the monster who of course ends up chasing them. I mean, what else would you expect!? This sucker is a whopping 93 pages, so it's much longer than any of the other stories. It's still worth reading, but I might skim through some of the boring parts next time.

Next is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." This one is definitely the most exciting of all of the short stories found in this book. I actually couldn't put this story down, and I read it pretty much all the way through. Seriously, it was that good. It's about a guy who comes upon this town where things are mighty weird. And they get mighty weirder as he realizes they're going to try and kill him and sacrifice him to the sea monsters. So, the narrator is constantly trying to find an escape so he isn't killed, and it's just awesome to read how he does it. This one is probably my absolute favorite of all of them. I didn't see the ending coming at all. I mean I did once the character started referring to what was happening, but the majority of the way through the book I had no idea. So 5 stars to Mr. Lovecraft for his story on Innsmouth. :)

Finally, we have "The Shadow Out of Time." This one is nice, because it definitely adds to the Lovecraftian lore, but personally, if this story was not in the book, I don't think it would have been missing that much. I mean, it's good, overall, but it just leaves you with this sinking, empty feeling, which isn't a really good way to end the book. Personally, I would have liked it to end with Innsmouth, where I was blown away by what happened, and left excited by what happened. This one, I was like, oh okay, yeah, that makes sense. After all, the end of the story is given away in the first paragraph. I never really understood when authors do that. I mean, yeah I get it, it's about hooking you, and then getting you all suspensed up along the way, but then you're not really surprised by what happens, you know? Anyway, it's a good story, I get why it's last, because it refers to a lot of stories referenced before, so you get a really good idea at this point on Lovecraft's style, which really fleshes out this story; however, I would have much preferred Innsmouth to be the last one, but what can you do! :)

Anyway, I do recommend reading H.P. Lovecraft, but you have to love horror sci-fi. Since I love both, it works for me, but I could see a lot of people not really getting into his stories. However, since so much pop-culture references Lovecraft, I feel that it behooves one to become familiar with his works. I mean, when you start looking and you know what to notice, things reference Lovecraft all the time, whether it's other authors or video games or trading card games. Also, Lovecraft does a really good job in creating his own Universe and Mythos, which he does so well and successfully. :)

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft
Written by Lovecraft, stories selected by Joyce Carol Oates and forward.
Read it in Paper-back and came in at 328 (not counting forward or 'reader's helper' at the end.

I won't go into any details of Lovecraft, or his unfortunate life. All of that is pretty well documented and can be found via a Wikki or Internet search. One thing that should be mentioned however is that he is considered the father of Weird Fiction, with a lot of authors claiming influential ties to his work.

I have wanted to read a collection of his work for some time but had never quiet committed, till now. Whatever collection I chose only had one stipulation, that it contained At The Mountains of Madness. Thus when perusing I found this edition, which met said criteria, and threw it on the stack to eat up some day. That day was last month.

-Potential Spoilers Below-

Introduction - Nothing new in the intro. Joyce sums up Lovecraft's life and makes inferences to his writing potential and her own and others experiences with his writing. Probably can skip unless you have a lot of interest into Lovecraft or really want Joyce's opinion on the matter. In no way does Joyce cover some of the shady attributes of Lovecraft characters, but there is nothing to gain from defaming the dead.

The Outsider - First published in Weird Tales in 1921. In this tale a man who has been stuck in a castle/tower for as long as he can remember finally breaks free in search of others. Overall I felt it was a little light on substance, but perfect for a magazine which obviously was the target. Short and weird enough to hold interest and was probably a great selection for a first story but no real conclusion.

The Music of Erich Zann - First published in 1922 follow a man who's neighbor plays for a shady crowd and he is determined to see what all of the ruckus is about. Once again, it leads nicely but ended without satisfaction.

The Rats in The Walls - Also published in Weird Tales circa 1923. Longer than the two above, The Rat in the Walls follows a families attempt to restore a lost castle estate and change the shadowy legacy of the place. This was a nice change from the two previous stories and while it does not add much in terms of long term fulfillment, it was a good read.

The Shunned House - First published in Weird Tales in 1937 while originally written in 1924. A house with an unusual stain and clouded history. Out damn spot. The whole time I read this story, all I could think of was "that will teach you not to clean next time you spill something."

The Call of Cthulhu - Written in 1926 and first published in Weird Tales in 1928. The story that's probably gotten more infamous than it deserves. The story itself is short, blabbers on with no proper structure and then ends. I get it, Cthulhu is cool and all. He's big and leathery, has tentacles for a face, is infinitely old and will chase you while you dream. It's a terrifying concept and it's grand. Looking at the scope of the mythos he was trying to create I can definitely say that this was an important story, but on its own I was simply not impressed.

The Colour Out of Space - Written and published in 1927 to Amazing Stories. The story of a small family who witnesses a meteorite strike on their land which subsequently ushers in some unfortunate events for them and the community. This is one of my favorite stories in this collection.

The Dunwich Horror - Written in 1928 and published to Weird Tales in 1929. This tale follows the strange events of family named the Whateley's. Wilbur, the newest addition to the family is not normal and matures very quickly and is soon shunned by the town. Wilbur pursues his grandfather's dark arts. I really liked this story.

At the Mountains of Madness - Written in 1931, Weird Tales originally declined to publish on the merits of length and wouldn't be published until 1936 by Astounding Stories. At the Mountains of Madness follows an Antarctic Expedition in which they find some peculiar things and meet tragedy. This is my favorite story in the whole collection. Lovecraft had the page count to elaborate and build the overarching mythos put forth in almost all of his tales.

The Shadow Over Innsmout - First written in 1931 and published in 1936. A young man travels to Innsmout with great curiosity in the fields of architecture and antiquarian and the town is fabled with both. Upon traveling to the town he soon realizes that much of the legends surrounding the town are in fact true and horrifying. Faced with his impending death, he must flee the town.

The Shadow Out of Time - First published in 1936 in Astounding Stories. A not so conventional story of possession. The Shadow Out of Time sees a man 'body swapped' with a strange creature. During this time the possessed body does many strange things and the host is written off as crazy all but abandoned by his family, save one son. Upon the return to his body he begins to fill the gaps and try to discover what he has done during his lost years.

-End Spoilers-

This took me much longer to read than I anticipated and I am not sure if it was the structure, word choice, and embellishment of his writing style or my simple constant failings at reading short story collections that are cause for the long completion. Overall I guess I enjoyed it but often found myself having to re-read paragraphs. Mr. Lovecraft isn't always the most clearest writer.

Out of the collection, The Rats in The Walls, The Colour Out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmout, and The Shadow Out of Time were my favorite stories. It appears that Mr. Lovecraft was robbed of the opportunity for a proper novel, with only At the Mountains of Madness being the closest thing in duration. This is a shame I think and I would love to have seen what he could have done with the opportunity to pull all of his developing mythos, present and building in the shorts, into a true book. It could have been grand.

I guess I liked 50% of the stories, so for Goodreads, it will get a solid 3 stars from me.

[Zeke]

Can’t really rate this because it was a collection of short stories but overall pretty good! Aside from random unnecessary racism it was entertaining. This particular collection also had less racism toward the end. I only listened to this one and it was actually hard to effortlessly enjoy this because my vocabulary is simply not on the level at which I could drift away while listening to this writing. Very dense. Especially these being short stories they really don’t let you breathe much. Stuff is happening and then it’s over.

[NarraTea · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Had I once veritably talked with mind from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives?” - The Shadow out of Time

[Darren Cormier · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stopped reading this collection after the fifth story "The Call of Cthulhu." The first two stories--"The Outsider" and "The Music of Erich Zann"--were actually pretty good, if standard genre structure. "The Outsider" in particular read like The Twilight Zone's episode "Eye of the Beholder" from the point of view of a demon.
However, once I got to the third story "The Rats in the Wall," I had a faintly sickening feeling I wasn't going to finish the book.
As many reviewers here have noted Lovecraft's style is overwrought, overwritten, and, in a word, boring. Each story is the same structure: first person protagonist with absolutely no emotional characteristic comes across a house or story with mysterious and possibly supernatural quality. The atmosphere and architecture of the area is described to a nauseating degree, with enough Anglophilic density to make Joseph F'ing Conrad want to scream. (The Conrad reference is deliberate.)
And then there's the overt racism. The beginning was with "Rats in the Wall" where his cat is casually named "N------man," along with a handful of debasing references to African-Americans. Once I finished that story, I researched a little about Lovecraft, and discovered that he was overtly racist and xenophobic in his lifetime and didn't try to hide it. I thought maybe this was the only story where it was blatantly apparent, and since a number of sci-fi and fantasy authors I admire praised his work (Gaiman, King, and, although not sci-fi, definitely fantastical, Jorge Luis Borges) I figured I'd keep reading, while knowing this information in the back of my head.
"The Call of Cthulhu" however is even worse than "Rats." Lovecraft can barely conceal his antipathy and bigotry in the story. And with that, I was done.

I can see why he is considered influential. He definitely creates an imaginative world where supernatural and demonic entities are facts of everyday life. And his story ideas are interesting. But, like my reactions when I read Heart of Darkness a few years ago, I don't understand why people were not able to see past both Conrad's and Lovecraft's colonial, xenophobic beliefs. And maybe I'm reading this with a 21st century outlook, but I don't think I am. There were probably writers then who shared their sentiments who didn't include it in their writings. There are sci-fi authors of today who I can read their works and look past their odious personal beliefs (Heinlein, Orson Scott Card).
Life is too short to read books you aren't enjoying.

[Imogen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine, I guess. I like the back stories of all the monsters way better than anything else, and I know that folks didn't have goodreads.com back in the day so they were excited when a story where three things happened dragged on for seventy pages. I just... I don't want to say I don't have enough time for all the words ol' HP felt like he needed to use. I just lose interest. Etgar Keret, who I also am not too stoked on, could have told all 325 pages in a goddam chapbook, I bet.

I will never run out of names for pets again, though. I am naming my first cat Yog-Sothoth.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories are to horror literature what hops are to beer--strongly floral, ocasionally overpowering (adjectives, dear lord, so many adjectives), sometimes adding a ridiculous, ill-tasting, or pompous flourish, but utterly essential to keeping the basic recipe interesting. I read some of these stories while I was traveling in England and quite ill, and I recommend them to those with fevers. "The Colour Out of Space" is especially satisfying--effective and creepy.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Damn, those tales were damned! After awhile, they began to resemble each other too closely, but I had been waiting to read "The Call of Cthulhu" for a long while and--the experience I must not speak of.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well…this felt like it took a thousand years to finish.
I felt obligated to read Lovecraft as a horror fan in order to understand the origins of so many common troupes and storylines. Let’s just say, I’m glad so many authors have improved on them.
That’s not to say, however, that I didn’t absolutely love a few of these stories. The Color Out of Space was perhaps my favorite, with its countryside alien esque horror plot and really wonderful pacing/description. I also quite enjoyed Rats in the Walls, as the true gothic horror fan I am. That one was exquisite. The Shadow over Innsmouth was also a treat. If these were the only stories in this collection, I may have rated it higher.
However.
It’s very well known that Lovecraft was a raging racist, and it shows in his writing. There are so many unnecessary racist comments and characters that add nothing to the stories except uncomfortable and sometimes outraging moments for the modern reader. I understand that this is something we have to deal with reading texts from his time, but it gets quite upsetting after a while.
The biggest problem I have with some of his stories is his writing itself. He seems to like to use big words and L O N G confusing descriptions to make himself sound better. Some of the stories should have been cut off halfway through to maintain suspense, like At the Mountains of Madness, and some just straight up didn’t need half of what he wrote, like in the Shadow Out of Time. To be quite honest, I find his writing quite masturbatory. And worse, when it’s not masturbatory, it’s lazy, relying on statements like “it could not be described in human words” to avoid having to make complex images.
Anyway.
I really loved some of these tales, and others were just poorly written. I’ve read the classics. I love how we’ve built on them.

[Isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

H.P Lovecraft has to be one of my favorite authors ever, though not for the reasons one might assume. His writing is purposefully archaic, and many of his characters lack any real dimension. The plots of his stories are simplistic and highly predictable, almost formulaic: step one, someone finds something scary. Step two, that someone gets scared. Step three, that someone either dies or goes insane (or both). Many of his stories are blatantly racist and xenophobic, and in his more popular works, an inherent fear of other races is required to share the paranoia the author so desperately tries to instill in the reader.
Ironically, it is this excessive paranoia that makes H.P Lovecraft such an amazing horror author. He was a hateful little shrew, and would have been an absolute nightmare to deal with in person, because he was fearful and suspicious of everyone and everything that wasn't alike to him (among many reasons). Authors seldom confine themselves to writing about the things they know, but fear was Lovecraft's companion throughout his entire life, more specifically fear of the unknown. Horror authors constantly strive to scare their readers, but who can do it better than someone who's afraid of everything?
Of course, the things H.P Lovecraft feared the most aren't all that terrifying to the modern reader, but I have been scared and apprehensive reading his stories, if only by living vicariously through the narrator. Lovecraft could probably make me deathly afraid of a bunch of bananas, if the fear they inspired in the narrator was as well conveyed and genuine as in his others.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very late to the Lovecraft party, but mightily impressed. I definitely see how much influence he has had on his successors in horror and scifi and how timeless Lovecraft's creations are. I'm still not at all a fan of short stories, but I find it absolutely amazing just how much the author manages to convey in so few pages.

I'm definitely a fan of the Lovecraftian horror and the tentacled monsters, which makes The Dunwich Horror my most favorite tale, followed by The Color out of Space and The Shadow over Innsmouth. Rats in the Walls gets an honorable mention purely for the wtf insanity factor and cats. The more SciFi oriented tales didn't capture me as much, because they felt much too dry and ponderous in their endless, scientific type reports of utterly alien notions. Perhaps if all the discoveries therein would have been parcelled across novels, interspersed with actual plot and suspense, I might have found myself less glassy-eyed.

If anything, I am left with a sense of diffuse cosmic dread that is not at all unpleasant, I should like to read other stories by Lovecraft and definitely watch lovecraftian horror/SciFi movies.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

rating short stories collections feels kinda weird, especially if the author wasn't the one doing the organizing and collecting... dunno feels like giving a rating to a greatest hits album. which maybe other people don't find weird but i do. like the idea that the author never intended for these disparate stories to be read together as a single united work of art w/ a singular vision. i know i'm overthinking it but it's like, when i rate this ok what am i really rating? i guess i'm just giving 5 stars to lovecraft in general, as an author, or this is just the most efficient way of saying that i would give 5 stars to "the call of cthulhu" and "the shadow out of time" and "the dunwich horror" etc. even though i would not give 5 stars to for instance "at the mountains of madness" which is tedious and overlong w/ a lame payoff. actually tbh i would give most of those stories 4.5 stars if i could so consider this a "light" 5 but it's ok, i like that full star rating forces me to be generous, which is always a good thing, and to simplify ratings into essential love/like/dunno/dislike/hate categories.

actually have a lot of thoughts on lovecraft which isn't usual for me with books, gonna try to come back to this review later and write them

[Erin]

Dnf

[Jack Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE OUTSIDER: An individual who has been living in a dark and isolated castle for as long as he can remember resolves to escape to the outside world.
4/5
Really well-written and ends with a wild twist. When I first read this in high school, the implications of it all sent chills up my spine for the rest of the day.

THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN: A university student studying abroad longs to uncover the meaning behind the hauntingly otherworldly melodies of the elderly musician occupying the apartment above him.
4/5
This thoroughly spooked me. Lovecraft's characterization of Zann really drives the mystery.

THE RATS IN THE WALLS: The lone scion of a family with an unpleasant past crosses the Atlantic and reoccupies his locally shunned ancestral manor in the English countryside only to be confronted by an ominous scurrying in the walls that only he and his horrifically-named cat can hear.
5/5
This story unfortunately marks the point in the collection where my sparkling admiration of Lovecraft necessarily falters, if for only one reason: the aforementioned naming of his cat. In any discussion of Lovecraft as an author/person, especially nowadays, one must inevitably confront the man's profound xenophobia - apparent here in the protagonist's pet bearing a vile racial slur for a name. Lovecraft's childhood pet cat purportedly had the same name, which comes up with startling frequency in this story. It is here that I stand conflicted. Lovecraft has contributed so much to Gothic and horror fiction - yet many stories of his possess a fundamental undercurrent of racial prejudice disguised as and channeled through a fear of the truly unknown and alien. How to separate the art from the artist? Is it possible to appreciate these pieces while fully acknowledging and decrying the horrible ideologies of their creator? Everyone must come to their own conclusions on this issue; I, for one, believe it is possible.
With that, I say that this story is fantastic; easily one of the man's best. Its subtle allusions to his larger mythos leave ample room for its own status as an isolated and horrifying tale.

THE SHUNNED HOUSE: The abnormally lethal history of an old abandoned house draws the attention of a pair of anthropologists who suspect the influence of supernatural forces.
4/5
This was a neat little tale. The fate of the protagonist's uncle was thoroughly disturbing, and I loved Lovecraft's super-detailed history of the annals of the eponymous house. This man was a phenomenal world-builder.

THE CALL OF CTHULHU: When an acclaimed archeologist dies under mysterious circumstances, his great-nephew's suspicions of foul play lead him into an increasingly dangerous investigation of a hidden cult--and the unfathomably ancient being its members seek to awaken.
4/5
This is such a weird one. Super-pivotal place in his overall mythos, with Cthulhu being Lovecraft's most recognizable monster by a long shot - and yet the whole thing is just a guy going over reports of OTHER guys actually living the horror. I guess in its own way this story constitutes several smaller stories, which is certainly interesting, and the concepts explored are pretty incredible. Of particular mention is the part where a man trips and gets swallowed up by an impossible geometrical angle. That's just ridiculously cool.
Unfortunate racial stereotypes abound, however, something that rather dampened my enjoyment.

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE: In the Massachusetts backcountry, a surveyor stumbles upon a horrific local legend concerning the land he has been assigned to.
5/5
Terrifying. One of the most chilling stories I've ever read and one of Lovecraft's more well-paced tales. The imagery in this has haunted me for years and will continue to do so (and I love it for that).

THE DUNWICH HORROR: The residents of a remote New England town and a trio of urban academics must fight for their lives against the otherworldly offspring of a family of local occultists.
5/5
This one rocks. Massive fan of how Lovecraft fleshes out Dunwich and incorporates different aspects of his larger mythos into the story. Also, the concept of a monster that is completely malevolent, house-sized, and also INVISIBLE just freaks me the hell out.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS: A university-sponsored palaentological expedition into the heart of Antarctica unwittingly discovers a prehistoric secret hidden behind an unfathomably massive mountain range.
5/5
Lovecraft's masterpiece. This is a crushingly slow-paced build-up of a story that may leave many readers put off or bored by its lack of immediate or continuous impact, but I will always affirm that the prevailing Lovecraftian motif of unimaginable and alien horror viewed through a gradually crumbling scientific-rational lens has no greater example than this novella. For those who allow themselves to fully accompany Dr. Dyer on his plunge into the most oh-hell-no situation in all of fiction, there are few higher models of cosmic horror.

THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH: On his sightseeing odyssey through rural New England, a young tourist makes a memorable detour to a scorned and isolated coastal town controlled by a mysterious religious order.
4/5
Innsmouth's characterization is legendary and worthy of recognition; additionally, the action scene in the Gilman House (one of few in Lovecraft's bibliography) was actually really sick, and the twist at the end was super chilling.
However, maybe this is just because it's my second time reading this one, but I found the protagonist's escape from Innsmouth to be rather long-winded and over-described; certain pieces of imagery were very well-done, as always, but I found my interest in the story waning until he found the abandoned train tracks that would lead him out of the town.
Additionally: this one's probably got the worst xenophobic allusions out of them all. I swear, was Lovecraft into eugenics or something?

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME: An amnesiac and nightmare-haunted academic seeks the truth behind the five years of his life in which his body was reportedly and inexplicably inhabited by another personality.
5/5
Tremendous.
Absolutely tremendous.
Second favorite.
From the moment I started this story in high school, I was hopelessly in love with the central concept. The imagery and substance is of sufficient caliber to haunt one for years.

I grieve for Lovecraft. For the success that never graced him in life; and for the xenophobic and antisocial seclusion that marred his mental and physical health, preventing him from enjoying life to its fullest.
Simultaneously, I rejoice for his recent popularity, a place in the zeitgeist offered with equal parts admiration and cautious awareness of the man he was.
What a stunning talent.
Elements of these stories are difficult, particularly with modern sensibilities; but those willing to delve into Lovecraft's world with this in mind will not find themselves wanting of intricately crafted imagery and glimpses into some of modern horror's pioneering concepts.

I give this collection 5 strange, unknowable aeons out of 5 non-Euclidean, cyclopean monoliths riddled with foetid green ooze.

[Keith Jackewicz · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could do half-stars on here, this book would get 1.5 stars because Lovecraft, for all of his flaws as writer, really did have something, ideationally. The idea of merging science fiction with horror was not new, but a central focus on the horror and existential dread that arises when one recognizes and really contemplates the limits of science and that which is not (and perhaps cannot) be known is a solid hook.

That said, it is really only an isolation of that hook into something apart from and above the work that contains it, a collectively unconscious stewing in some generalized and abstracted essence of what the author seemed to be going for, that explains Lovecraft's literary reputation, because let's face facts: the man could not write.

Sure, he had a certain kind of erudition to him, but verbosity is not a substitution for editorial judgment or actual command over the basics of storytelling structure. It's basically accepted, even by his fans, that the man had an atrocious relationship with adjectives, that they render his narratorial cadence annoyingly affected, but what goes unsaid is that he used adjectives as a substitute for artistry. It is truly amazing that a man could base almost his entire corpus of literary output on encounters with the indescribable, maddening horror of that which lies outside the ken of our collective understanding, yet think of no better way to evoke it than endless, adjective-riddled encyclopedia entries admixed with proclamations of terror that is claimed to be felt. How a man wouldn't get *bored* writing like that for years and years can only be explained if the actual writing was ancillary to what was interesting to him about his project, if the real Muse of the thing was the fascination he developed toward his own lore.

Yet even that does not really hold water as an explanation, because the cosmology that suffuses his tales never coheres with the kind of fixity and pseudo-historical vividness of a Tolkien or a Martin. This compilation does not contain everything Lovecraft wrote about his pantheon of gods and ancient races and cults, yet even here, there are noticeable and notable contradictions and inconsistencies between the different tales. It seems clear that the "Cthulhu mythos", as it has come to be known, is a literary device conceived to *be* flexible, to assume the shape that it needs to assume in any particular story. But if that's the case, then why are his works almost all interchangeable with one another? Why is every story told by a boring, 20-50 year old white guy with some Academic professional affiliation going and looking at something and being horrified? The only one of Lovecraft's "major" works included in this collection that even slightly diverges from this is "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", where the main character ends up realizing that he may be of the same substance as the horrific thing he encountered and becoming bizarrely fascinated by the idea of becoming a part of that which had earlier horrified him, but even then, that's not an extremely significant divergence, because almost every one of his narrators evinces at least a partial interest in, or sympathy to, the thing they purport to be describing or warning of.

Mere monotony would be one thing, but the worst part of Lovecraft is the utterly anemic way that his formula plays out on the page. Not a single character in any of these tales has a memorable character trait, something that distinguishes them on an internal level from any of the other characters. Sometimes, they'll have an atrociously phoneticized accent, but that's about it. They show up, do the things they need to do, deliver the exposition they are there to exposit if they have any to provide, then exit stage left, no more vividly-limned than they would be if no ink had instantiated them at all.

Worse than that, though, is that these samey tales of interchangeable mannequins are interminable, relative to the amount of real content they have to impart on the reader. You can get almost everything essential from his stories simply by reading the Wikipedia summary of them, as there simply is no humor, poesy, characterization, or anything else of real literary substance to justify the extra time spent engaging with them in the expanded form that Lovecraft delivered them. In the final story, "The Shadow Out of Time", there is a light conceit that the mythos content may simply be a delusive construct stemming from a multi-year dissociative break on the part of the main character, but not only does Lovecraft not do anything interesting with this concept, it rings hollowly when presented in the context of his whole corpus, as here.

Also notable is that Lovecraft is just plain bad at describing action unfolding in three-dimensional space - a fact that, according to the small amount of research I did, even he was aware of and self-conscious about. Simply trying to keep track of what characters are doing, how and where they are moving, is frequently a chore, and no, this is not a recapitulation of the metaphysical discombobulation the characters are undergoing; it's simply bad writing, simply a lack of care and attention paid to the basic foundations that good storytelling has to rest on.

Then, of course, there is the racism. It's always important to consider the content of a work of art separately from the views of the artist that produced it, but in Lovecraft's case, the racism is built right into the text, right out in the open! Not only does he routinely portray black and mixed-race people as monster-worshipping savages performing bestial rituals of obeisance, but there is a trope that runs throughout his corpus of the displacement of superior races by inferior ones, which has a more than coincidental resemblance to "white genocide" bullshit of the modern era. Obsessed with decadence and degeneracy, it would not at all be unfair to say that I could revise my earlier characterization of most of his stories to "a boring, 20- to 50-year old eugenicist goes and looks at something and is horrified". That it's racist does not totally preclude the possibility of artistic merit, but, as previously stated, it's not even well-written. It is moderately interesting that Lovecraft's central writerly concern seemed to be that he, a white man, might be to superior life forms what black people and immigrants were to him, i.e. intrinsically and obviously inferior, but this is something of an extradiegetic reality and so not attributable as a virtue to his work, itself.

Overall, Lovecraft really exists more as a cultural referent for a certain kind of nerd or hipster than as a writer in his own right. The abstract idea of eldritch horror, of a universe full of unknown yet hostile horrors that can challenge mankind's comfort and hubris, persists in the cultural firmament, but the actual execution of the concept as realized by Lovecraft reads more like loquacious fan fiction than a real literary endeavor. Stephen King, often called Lovecraft's natural successor, is a hack, but at least he's a hack! Lovecraft couldn't even get that far.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read a smidgen of Lovecraft here and there over the years, but thought to myself, why not crank through more?

It took a while, if only because this excellent collection of short story/novella length works didn't really lend itself to a straight read-through.

In part, that was because each "tale" is self-contained, and of adequate length to make for a nice little evening read. More significantly, I found myself with only so much tolerance for the Lovecraftian vernacular...after a while, I do find myself wishing he'd find a rackafrackin' synonym for eldritch. There's a sameness to it all, particularly taken in large doses.

Still worth the read, and even more fascinating because--while Lovecraft is technically "horror," he reads more to me like a peculiar brand of sci-fi. These aren't vampires and ghouls and zombies, but *alien* thing, part of a natural order that is so much vaster than our old myth-making that it is almost inherently terrifying.

Cool stuff.

[Sean Barrs · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does one review the epitome of fear, mystery and suspense; the means by which every horror novelist should be judged. Not easily that’s for sure!
H.P Lovecraft is the master of the horror story. In every short story the “horror” is revealed at the last possible instance creating mounds of anticipation. The language is some cases is a bit academic and seems like it would be more suitable for a scientific journal but that’s the beauty of it. It captures the bizarre worlds that Lovecraft has created and conveys a sense of past time.
Lovecraft truly is wonderful and should be read by any horror enthusiast!

[Brent Woo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, each one more disturbing and unsettling than the next: the Outsider, Dunwich Horror, the Outsider, Mountains of Madness, Color out of space...! It's pretty fun to read Lovecraft stories in a collection like this, since they all follow similar themes of cosmic horror, it begins to feel samey, yet it's scary every time. And it's extremely unsettling to keep hearing the elder horrors show up in all the different stories, with no real closure or answers. They could be anywhere.... While I was getting a full dose of heebie-jeebies I was also luxuriating in his long, almost overwrought sentences. I love crafted sentences like that. Where can I get my gothic fix, without the tentacles?

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't actually read this book, but rather i am in the process of reading Loecraft's short stories one at a time on this website: http://www.tmoct.co.uk/lovecraftlibra....

His writing shows it's age; it is scientifically dated and horribly racist, and the entire writing style is hokey and cliche, but nameless terrors and tentacled cosmic horrors are so darn cool to read about. You can't really call yourself a geek unless you have read The Cal of Cthulhu!

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

They all ROCK!
-- Sean Wyndham

Hell yeah.
-- Eddy Rosenbaum

Dudes, rly.
-- Yog-Boy

[d4]

Read enough to get the gist/a feel for his style. Gotta move onto something that engages me more in the moment though. The cosmic horror is very horrifying, I get it.

[Elizabeth (Miss Eliza) · Rating 3 out of 5]

*Special Content only on my blog, Strange and Random Happenstance during Going Gothic (March 2018)

The world is stranger than it seems. No one knows this better than those who have been to Miskatonic University. But then, if you've been to this Ivy League school you've probably been there to catch a glimpse of their extensive collection of occult books and are therefore used to the strange. Perhaps you are even hoping to see the famous Necronomicon, capable of summoning the Old Ones. If that is the case, stories of ancient creatures plaguing the dreams of artists and poets are probably your bread and butter. Meteorite's bringing luminosity and madness to a small valley might seem plebeian. But at least you are forewarned. At least you know of the dangers that can be had on a street that can never be found again where you listened to the most haunting of music played on a viol. You know that sounds within the walls might bring a sleepless night or they might bring death to those you care for. You know that there are aliens and creatures beyond man's knowing and that sometimes this knowledge brings madness. Perhaps you yourself are mad. Maybe you were a professor at Miskatonic University who was called to a strange happening and your eyes were opened to the depravities that are possible when man and beast unite. Or maybe you went on an expedition, nothing more simple or academic than that. Then something went wrong. Someone went missing. Your worldview was forever changed and you were left with one purpose, to conceal the discovery of this horror from the rest of the world forever. Here's hoping you succeed and don't get in league with evil. But evil is so persuasive...

While most readers would probably place Lovecraft in the horror or fantasy sections of their bookshelves, he was distinctly influenced by the Gothic and in my mind that is where he belongs. Such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert W. Chambers helped lay the groundwork for Lovecraft and all three of these men straddled genres. If you keeping going backwards in classification you'll see that Gothic is the only way to encapsulate all of them, because horror eventually arose out of the Gothic tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet Lovecraft has almost defied classification, he has become a byword for cosmic horror and knowledge beyond the ken of man, knowledge that often leads to insanity. His greatest creation, Cthulhu, is known by those who don't even know who Lovecraft or Arkham or Miskatonic University is. His imagery has become a part of popular culture and his influence is still felt. For me his influence is felt even closer to home in that my family owns Stanton and Lee Publishers which started as an imprint of Arkham House, which was founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish Lovecraft's work in beautiful hardcover editions. Therefore it's kind of embarrassing to admit that while familiar with Lovecraft's work I had actually never read it until now. What struck me most about this collection of his short stories is you can instantly see why his writing is classic. It's not just looking beyond his work and seeing how much influence he has had on other writers from August Derleth to Terry Pratchett to Bruce Campbell to the Duffer Brothers, but it's how his work was so original. His work feels so modern, so fresh, so out of it's time. His legacy might be great, but it's endured because he was a gifted writer who saw the world differently, much like the afflicted artists who people his stories.

As for this collection hand-picked by Joyce Carol Oates after all the copyright issues were settled... without having read any of Lovecraft's stories not included here, I'd say it's a very solid collection that should have left "At the Mountains of Madness" out. Now I know those who are fans of Lovecraft are wondering why I would omit his most famous work. Well it's because a novella has no business being included in a collection of short stories, it creates an imbalance in the book's flow. Also, his writing style works better on a smaller scale. I'm not talking worldbuilding, I'm talking length. He has a way of packing such a punch with his shorter stories that having the time to search miles and miles of Antarctica AND see giant penguins who actually have nothing to do with the plot makes the punch lose it's impact. It's true, shorter is sweeter. As a reader I'm not a fan of short story collections. One really badly picked or placed piece can throw off my entire opinion of the book, IE "At the Mountains of Madness." Though in fairness to this collection I didn't hold the novella inclusion against it, that's Joyce Carol Oates's fault. But I did have issues with Lovecraft's writing, and not just with the occasional out-of-touch reference that is the product of his time that he expressed through his continued use of inbreeding as a plot point, but through his repetitive use of certain words, phrases, stylistic elements, and plot twists. That's the problem with a writer who has certain ticks when stories that weren't meant to be presented together are, you see where he repeats. You think perhaps you should start a drinking game for every time he uses the word "cyclopean" but then worry that you will die of blood alcohol poisoning. But I think that if you were to just space out the reading of his work you wouldn't find this as annoying as someone who reads right through.

Yet this repetition isn't all bad. Yes, it can be irksome, but it also helps his stories to have an inter-connectivity. It's interesting to me, reading these stories almost a hundred years after they were written that he is obviously setting all these stories within the same universe of his creation. He's worldbuilding on a level that, as time goes on, is becoming more and more popular. How many tie-ins, prequels, sequels, what-have-yous are now out there in the world? Characters from Miskatonic University reappear or are referenced in other stories. Events that have happened in an earlier story with say a University expedition have consequences in a story that was written later about a different expedition. This more than anything else is why people have latched onto his work. He has created his own universe and while his longest story is nowhere near a sizable book if you put them all together you have one heck of a story. I think this is why so many authors are drawn to writing stories within his world. It's not just that it's iconic, it's that it's so specific, so well built that to write within these confines gives you a freedom and the hope that a little of his genius will rub off on you. While I'm not going to debate the difference between true literature and fanfic here, because that is too thorny an issue, there has to be something said to the freedom of writing in someone else's voice. Even Neil Gaiman has gone all out fanboy with his Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in Lovecraft's universe, "A Study in Emerald" which should be noted isn't the only time Sherlock has fought with Cthulhu in various other authors work. But it is very interesting to muse on the fact that Conan Doyle and Lovecraft are contemporaries... makes you think, doesn't it?

Though, for me there were two stories that really struck home, "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Shunned House." Both stories deal with houses that have weird effects on the residents. Needless to say these homes have death within their walls yet hint at "the other." Be it cannibalism, paganism, werewolves, these stories work because not only are they suspenseful, but they are also left open ended enough that you have to draw your own conclusions. With the mysterious, sometimes having everything tied up neatly in a bow is dissatisfying. The hints, the surmises you reach, they can scare you more then knowing exactly what was going on. These two stories need to be read in one sitting, the pages turned as fast as your eyes can take in the words. These stories go for the tropes of traditional Gothic stories, and yet, Lovecraft knows how to tweak the narrative just enough to make the genre all his own. That is why I think so many people shy from calling him a Gothic writer, he has made the genre his bitch. While "The Shunned House" is slightly predictable, following genre conventions, I defy anyone to see that ending coming in "The Rats in the Walls!" A story about a man restoring his ancestral home, you expect a bit of ghosts and ghouls, you don't expect him to become a cannibal and eat his son's best friend after dreaming that he was a pig now do you? Right there is the essence of Lovecraft. Serving up the unexpected in a very macabre way. He's fused his own weird notions of aliens and outer space with what people expect from the Gothic and created what is and will always be Lovecraftian.

The Outsider ★★
The Music of Erich Zann ★★
The Rats in the Walls ★★★★★
The Shunned House ★★★★
The Call of Cthulhu ★★★
The Colour Out of Space ★★★
The Dunwich Horror ★★★
At the Mountains of Madness ★
The Shadow over Innsmouth ★★
The Shadow Out of Time ★★★