Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre

by H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen Jones (Afterword), Les Edwards (Illustrator)

Following the phenomenal success of Necronomicon, its companion volume brings together Lovecraft’s remaining major stories plus his weird poetry, a number of obscure revisions, and some notable nonfiction, including the seminal critical essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.
 
Gathering together in chronological order the rest of Lovecraft's rarely seen but extraordinary short fiction, this collection includes the entirety of the long-out-of-print collection of 36 sonnets "Fungi from Yoggoth." Howard Phillips Lovecraft died at the age of 47, but in his short life he turned out dozens of stories which changed the face of horror. His extraordinary imagination spawned both the Elder God Cthulhu and his eldritch cohorts, and the strangely compelling town of Innsmouth, all of which feature within these pages. Stephen Jones, one of the world's foremost editors of dark fiction, will complete the Lovecraft story in his extensive afterword, and award-winning artist Les Edwards will provide numerous illustrations for this must-have collection.

Contents:

- The History of the Necronomicon
- The Alchemist
- A Reminiscence of Dr Samuel Johnson
- The Beast in the Cave
- The Po-et's Nightmare
- Memory
- Despair
- The Picture in the House
- Beyond the Wall of Sleep
- Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme
- The White Ship
- The House
- The Nightmare Lake
- Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts)
- Nyarlathotep
- Polaris
- The Street
- Ex Oblivione
- Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
- The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred Virginia Jackson)
- The Terrible Old Man
- The Tree
- The Tomb
- Celephaïs
- Hypnos
- What the Moon Brings
- The Horror at Martin's Beach (with Sonia H. Greene)
- The Festival
- The Temple
- Hallowe'en in a Suburb
- The Moon-Bog
- He
- Festival
- The Green Meadow (with Winifred Virginia Jackson)
- Nathicana
- Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman)
- The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro)
- The Wood
- The Ancient Track
- The Electric Executioner (with Adolphe de Castro)
- Fungi from Yuggoth:
. . . 1: The Book
. . . 2: The Pursuit
. . . 3: The Key
. . . 4: Recognition
. . . 5: Homecoming
. . . 6: The Lamp
. . . 7: Zaman's Hill
. . . 8: The Port
. . . 9: The Courtyard
. . . 10: The Pigeon-Flyers
. . . 11: The Well
. . . 12: The Howler
. . . 13: Hesperia
. . . 14: Star-Winds
. . . 15: Antarktos
. . . 16: The Window
. . . 17: A Memory
. . . 18: The Gardens of Yin
. . . 19: The Bells
. . . 20: Night-Gaunts
. . . 21: Nyarlathotep
. . . 22: Azathoth
. . . 23: Mirage
. . . 24: The Canal
. . . 25: St Toads
. . . 26: The Familiars
. . . 27: The Elder Pharos
. . . 28: Expectancy
. . . 29: Nostalgia
. . . 30: Background
. . . 31: The Dweller
. . . 32: Alienation
. . . 33: Harbour Whistles
. . . 34: Recapture
. . . 35: Evening Star
. . . 36: Continuity
- The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead)
- The Other Gods
- The Quest of Iranon
- The Challenge from Beyond
- In a Sequester'd Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk'd
- Ibid
- Azathoth
- The Descendant
- The Book
- The Messenger
- The Evil Clergyman
- The Very Old Folk
- The Thing in the Moonlight
- The Transition of Juan Romero
- Supernatural Horror in Literature
- Afterword: Lovecraft in Britain By Stephen Jones
- Other Collaborations and Revisions

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Classics, Lovecraftian, Poetry

560 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 2011

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

[Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

The follow up book to the glorious "Necronomicon" comes another collection of Lovecraft stories.

Unfortunately the same care and attention wasn't given to the assembling of the stories. There are a few great stories, but there are a few that aren't worth bothering with.

It goes without saying that even someone as skilled as Lovecraft will still have a few misses, it's just a shame that the editors didn't have the discernment to leave out the poorer stories in this collection.

[Rebecca Mann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A companion volume to Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft. I would say I preferred the Necronomicon, which contained more of his well known tales. This edition includes a lot of his shorter stories and poetry, as well as his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. The essay was a highlight of this volume, where Lovecraft gives an overview of the beginnings of horror literature and discusses and reviews the works of well known horror authors and I look forward to reading some of the titles he mentioned. It does make me wonder what Lovecraft would have thought of the horror authors of today!

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre is a necessary collection for Lovecraft fans. The companion volume to Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction, it collects his early tales, his poetry, and several stories of varied quality that were early collaborations with others. The early stories include his juvenilia, the first of which he wrote at just fourteen years old. His poetry is odd and often awful, but the best of it achieves that eerie, eldritch quality that is the signature of all things Lovecraftian. (His prose poems are generally better than his attempts at rhyme, though his sonnet cycle, Fungi from Yuggoth is surprisingly effective.)

Though there are some excellent stories in this collection, it’s not a book I’d recommend to those new to Lovecraft. All his major Cosmic Mythos stories, those he is best known for, are in the companion volume, Necronomicon. And the strong material in this book coexists with lesser, inferior entries that are included more for completion and to show the progression of Lovecraft as a writer. If you’re a fan, this book should be in your library. If you are looking for an introduction to this author, start somewhere else.


The History of the Necronomicon: a pseudo serious history tracing the origins of the Necronomicon, from its composition in the seventh century by Abdul Alhazred, through its various Greek and Latin translations, noting it suppressions and bannings through the ages, and present location of known existent texts.
4 ⭐️

The Alchemist: A very early Lovecraft story of revenge and generational curses.
3 ⭐️

The Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson: Lovecraft playing with his antiquarian interest.
3 ⭐️

The Beast in the Cave: (Lovecraft juvenilia written when he was just 14) Lost in a cavern, his torch gone out, the protagonist battles an unseen beast in the darkness.
2 ⭐️

The Poe-et’s Nightmare: An early poem (1916) where Lovecraft earliest displays his cosmicism. Aside from this curiosity the poem has nothing else to recommend it.
1 1/2 ⭐️

Memory: Asked the genie to the daemon, beside the River Than, “who raised the stones of this ruin?”
Said the daemon (called Memory) to the genie, “Only because it rhymes with the river do I remember — it was man.”
A short short, really just a quick word landscape.
2 1/2 ⭐️

Despair: A poem that apes the poetic style of Poe, but does it fairly well.
3 ⭐️

The Picture in the House: Seeking shelter from an approaching storm, a bicyclist enters what he take to be an old, abandoned house. It has an evil feel, which increases when he discovers that it is occupied by an unnaturally ancient Yankee who has an unhealthy fixation on a gruesome print of a cannibal’s butcher shop.
3 ⭐️

Beyond the Wall of Sleep: An unnamed intern in a mental hospital experiments with a criminally insane patient, a mad, hillbilly murderer, to prove that his dreams exists in a wholly separate realm where he is a being of light.
3 ⭐️

Psychopompos — A Tale in Rhyme: a gothic tale of pre-revolutionary France, evil lords, and shapeshifters told in verse.
2 ⭐️

The White Ship: a mystical White Ship which appears only when the moon is full picks up a hereditary lighthouse keep and sails him through lands of Dream.
”For Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”
3 ⭐️

The House: Short and creepy poem.
3 ⭐️

The Nightmare Lake: Another attempt to ape Poe’s style, not a success, unless you’re a fan of sing-song rhyme.
2 ⭐️

Poetry and the Gods: (written with Anna Helen Crofts)
”As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon, there lay about her only the mists of Dream, the purple, star-strewn mists beyond time, where only gods and dreamers walk.”
3 ⭐️

Nyarlathotep: In this prose poem, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is a kind of avatar, of the alien Other Gods, a harbinger of doom that is fast approaching mankind and all their works. He holds the masses fascinated with his dark power as he travels from city to city, despite, or perhaps because of the terror and confusion which his unholy presence spreads.
”He…gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered, and where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished.”
5 ⭐️

Polaris: In this short, early work (1918) the narrator can’t distinguish his dreams from reality, as he dreams of a city under siege and his failure to protect it. (Suspected at being autobiographical, expressing Lovecraft’s frustration at being unable fight in World War I.)
”But still the pole star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane, watching eye, which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing, save that it once had a message to convey.”
2 1/2 ⭐️

The Street: In addition to being virulently racist, Lovecraft was also anti-immigrant and anti-labor, and this little parable (inspired by his horror of the Boston Police Strike of 1919) was his expression of that backwards bile. Unfortunately, Lovecraft fit right in to a “basket of deplorables.”
1 ⭐️

Ex Onlivione: A prose poem perhaps inspired by Lovecraft’s reading of Arthur Schopenhauer, expressing a longing for oblivion as superior to existence.
”So happier than I had ever dared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the demon life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.”
3 ⭐️

Arthur Jermyn: A tale of hereditary, generational madness, springing traced back a century and a half to an African explorations of the progenitor of the Jermyn house, and the mysterious marriage he made there. Unfortunately, this is a story where the author’s reprehensible racism is clearly evident, particularly his frantic horror at the idea of miscegenation.
”Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”
2 1/2 ⭐️

The Crawling Chaos: A collaboration with Winifred V. Jackson (Lovecraft wrote the story but the idea originated in her dream) this tale describes an opium induced dream/nightmare that swings wildly between ethereal bliss and apocalyptic destruction.
4 ⭐️

The Terrible Old Man: Notable as the first Lovecraft tale to make use of his New England setting — the ancient fellow of the title, ”so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name,” was rumored to be an old sea captain, pays with Spanish silver for his food, and oddly talks to bottles on his shelves. The locals fear and shun him, but three outsiders determine he would make an easy mark to rob. They were…mistaken.
4 ⭐️

The Tree: An atmospheric period piece of Ancient Greece, short and slight. An unnatural olive tree, growing from the tomb of a dead sculptor, becomes the doom of another sculptor, his old friend.
2 1/2 ⭐️

The Tomb: Jervas Dudley, the original goth kid, develops an unhealthy obsession with the Hyde family tomb and nearby abandoned, burned mansion — an obsession leading to madness or worse.
”Henceforward, I haunted the tomb each night, seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal.”
4 ⭐️

Celephais: Part of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle. Kurnanes, the dreamer, (his Earthly name is forgotten) dreamed the great city of Cemephais, and eventually became trapped there permanently becoming its king, while his mortal body dies. King Kurnanes and his city Celephais feature prominently in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath as well.
4 ⭐️

Hypnos: A sculptor, dedicated to “art, philosophy, and madness,” explores, together with his mysterious friend, indescribable worlds and unutterable knowledge through strange drugs and dreams travel, with grandiose ideas of total domination. They penetrate too deeply into these realms to their peril, and come to shun sleep and dream as something deadly. But sleep will come, and with it dissolution.
4 ⭐️

What the Moon Brings: A prose poem fragment, taken from a dream. Disturbingly creepy.
”And when I saw that the reef was but the black, basalt crown of a shocking icon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight, and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked, lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that learning and treacherous yellow moon.”
4 ⭐️

The Horror at Martin’s Beach: A 50 foot long sea creature with forelegs, six toed feet, and a single eye is killed by sailors. Marine biologist determine that this unknown specimen is but a juvenile. The sea captain who captured it tours with the grotesque specimen, until its mother emerges to reek hypnotic retribution.
3 ⭐️

The Festival: An atmospheric tale of an ancient unclean and unholy festival secretly observed in underground vaults in quaint New England.
”It was the Yuletide that men call Christmas, though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.”
3 1/2 ⭐️

The Temple: A manuscript, sealed in a bottle and cast into the sea, chronicles the curious madness that afflicted a German U-boat crew, leading to the deaths of its crew and its sinking to sea bottom. Manuscript was written by the boat’s captain (a grossly stereotyped Prussian officer), its last survivor. The story climaxes in the discovery of a sunken city and its central temple on sea bottom.
”What I have seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This demoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own, weakening brain.”
2 ⭐️

Halloween in a Suburb: Just another subpar poem.
2 ⭐️

The Moon-Bog: A wealthy American reclaims his ancestor castle in Ireland to restore it. But when he ignores the warnings and superstitious dread of the locals and goes ahead with his project to drain the bog on the property said to hide ancient ruins he invites an eerie doom.
”Yet still there came that monotonous piping from afar, wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of fauns…it would not let me sleep.”
”And upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow, slowly writhing, a vague, contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen demons. Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance, a nauseous, unbelievable caricature, a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Dennis Barry.”
3 1/2 ⭐️

He: Lovecraft here played with autobiography, — the young narrator, so disgusted and traumatized by NYC that he sees it as a repellent, dead thing, is a mirror of Lovecraft during his brief, traumatic residence there. It’s a truly weird tale, where the strange factor keeps amping up as the narrator follows a creepy guide who shows him secrets of the city, its colonial past and alien future. After that all hell breaks lose.
3 1/2 ⭐️

Festival: Rhyming poetry was not Lovecraft’s strength, but this one is a tick better than some of his others.
And may’st thou to such deeds be an abbot and priest,
Singing cannibal greeds at each devil-wrought feast,
and to all the credulous world showing dimly the sign of the Beast.
2 1/2 ⭐️

The Green Meadow: An fantastic, indestructible notebook is discovered in a meteor newly fallen to earth. Written in Classical Greek, the story it tells is as implausible and dream-like as was its form of delivery.
3 ⭐️

Nathicana: Lovecraft, referring to this prose poem in a letter to a friend, saying it was “a parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning.
2 ⭐️

The Black Bottles: This story of unholy ministers, ancient sexton sorcerer, and souls in bottles is a fun and creepy spook-tale.
”I’m not sure that my uncle is dead, but I am very sure that he is not alive upon this earth. There is no doubt that the old sexton buried him once, but he is not in that grave now.”
”His sermons had become weird and grotesque, redolent with sinister things which the ignorant people of Daalbergen did not understand. He transported them back over ages of fear and superstition to regions of hideous, unseen spirits, and peopled their fancy with night-haunting ghouls.”
4 ⭐️

The Last Test: A fanatical doctor, dedicated to science and research, studies to overcome Black Fever. This one just didn’t capture me at all, possibly because it was overlong. It just dragged on and on.
2 ⭐️

The Wood:
”Thus down the years, till on one purple night a drunken minstrel in his careless verse spoke the vile words that should not see the light, and stirred the shadows of an ancient curse.”
3 ⭐️

The Ancient Track:
Around was fog, ahead the spray of star streams in the Milky Way.
There was no hand to hold me back
That night I found the Ancient track.
3 ⭐️

The Electric Executioner: A curious tale of an inventor of an electric execution machine gone mad with old Aztec mysteries.
”I realized, as no one else has yet realized, how imperative it is to remove everybody from the Earth before Quetzalcoatl comes back, and realized also that it must be done eloquently.”
4 ⭐️

Fungi from Yuggoth: A cycle of 36 sonnets, an unholy stew of grotesques, nightmares, and antiquities. This isn’t brilliant poetry, but it is oddly effective in conveying Lovecraft’s macabre flare.
1 The Book ~ 2 Pursuit ~ 3 The Key ~ 4 Recognition ~ 5 Homecoming ~ 6 The Lamp ~ 7 Zaman’s Hill ~ 8 The Port ~ 9 The Courtyard ~ 10 The Pigeon-Flyers ~ 11 The Well ~ 12 The Howler ~ 13 Hesperia ~ 14 Star-winds ~ 15 Antarktos ~ 16 The Window ~ 17 A Memory 18 The Gardens of Yin ~ 19 The Bells ~ 20 Night-Gaunts ~ 21 Nyarlathotep ~ 22 Azathoth 23 Mirage ~ 24 The Canal ~ 25 St. Toads ~ 26 The Familiars ~ 27 The Elder Pharos ~ 28 Expectancy ~ 29 Nostalgia ~ 30 Background ~ 31 The Dweller ~ 32 Alienation ~ 33 Harbour Whistles ~ 34 Recapture ~ 35 Evening Star ~ 36 Continuity
4 ⭐️

The Trap: A fascinating story of a schoolboy who is drawn into his master’s antique mirror. The follow tale tells how the master (our narrator) discovered this, came to communicate with the boy within the mirror-world, learned of its history and creation, and attempted rescue of the boy.
4 ⭐️

The Other Gods: In his pride, Barzai the Wise scaled the mountain Hatheg-Kla to gaze upon the long absent gods of earth, believing himself their equal. He did not count on finding the Other Gods.
”The Other Gods! The Other Gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the evil gods of Earth! Look away! Go back! Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses!”
4 ⭐️

The Quest of Iranon: Iranon sings and dances in the dire city of Teloth (which values only toil and scoffs at song), singing of his lost city of Aira, a beautiful place where he had been Prince. Driven out of harsh Teloth, he quests in vain for Aira, remaining ever young as his companions age and die. Then one day his wandering brings him to startling knowledge of himself and his lost city.
”That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.”
4 ⭐️

The Challenge from Beyond: (This tale was a unique experiment in round-Robin writing. The story was written in sections by Lovecraft and authors Frank Belknap Long, Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, and Abraham Merritt) George Campbell, while vacationing in the Canadian woods, discovers an ancient cube which propels him on a disorienting bodiless journey across cosmic distance, where his consciousness inhabits the body of a huge, worm-like creature. A cosmic tale of superior races who explore the cosmos through mind transference with lesser species on far flung worlds.
4 ⭐️

In a Sequestered Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d:
Lonely and sad, a spectre glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, tho’ his song
Peals down thro’ time with a mysterious spell:
Only the few whose sorcery’s secret know
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
4 ⭐️

Ibid: A parody biography of Ibidus, which chiefly traces the post-life travels of his skull — from King Autharis, to Charlemagne, on to William the Conqueror, seized by Cromwell’s soldier, then carried to New England, and lost in a game of chance, and so on and on, until eventually it was lost down a prairie-dog burrow.
”His remains were…exhumed and ridiculed by the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, who took his skull to King Autharis for use as a wassail-bowl.”
4 ⭐️

Azathoth: (Fragment) This dream fragment has the feel of Lord Dunsany’s influence about it.
”Opiate oceans poured there, lighten by suns that the eye may never behold, and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea nymphs of unrememnnerable deeps.”
3 ⭐️

The Descendant: (Fragment)
”Perhaps he held within his own half explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.”
2 1/2 ⭐️

The Book: (Fragment)
”Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it. But this book was very old, indeed. No printing press, but the hand of some half-crazed monk had traced these ominous Latin phrases in awesome antiquity.”
3 ⭐️

The Evil Clergyman: (Fragment) This was a dream Lovecraft had and wrote up in a letter to his friend. It was published after his death. The menacing image of the clergyman burning his magic books and preparing to hang himself, and the transformation in the mirror at the end might have made a good story.
3 ⭐️

The Very Old Folk: Another tale of a vivid and detailed dream of Roman times. A bit overdone.
Yrs in Gothic supremacy — C • IVLIVS • VERVS • MAXIMINVS

The Thing in the Moonlight: (Fragment) taken from a letter to a friend.
”I was aware that I only dreamed, but the very awareness was not pleasant. Since that fearful night I have prayed only for awakening. It has not come. Instead I have found myself an inhabitant of this terrible dream world.”
4 ⭐️

The Transition of Juan Romero: This was a sort of writing exercise that Lovecraft tossed off in a day. He never allowed it to be published and never showed it to anyone until very near the end of his life.
3 1/2 ⭐️

Supernatural Horror In Literature: Here Lovecraft penned a lengthy, illuminating essay on his own line of work and its history.
”The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
”The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world, and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn life so strongly conduced towards a feeling of the supernatural that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.”
”Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot, but the creation of a given sensation.”
4 ⭐️ I

[Mizuki · Rating 3 out of 5]

LINK: https://twitter.com/The_Weirdling/sta...

Rating: 3.5 stars

(1) The Beast in the Cave: this piece reads like some online horror story, about a man getting lost in some underground cave system and then... he heard the sound of 'something' approving him, there is a twist in the end (though I wouldn't call this twist shocking). That's over all what the story is about. 2.5 stars.

(2) Facts Concerning the Late Jermyn and His Family: it's a well written interesting piece of short story about family secret and cursed bloodline, although the racist undertone is just so......obvious as well when the cursed bloodline is formed by a white man and a hairless ape-princess in the jungle, I can understand Lovecraft's fear of 'impurity of bloodlines' when both his parents winded up locked in an asylum and died when he was just a boy, but racism like this is just uncalled for, especially when it's viewed by modern readers. 4 stars.

(3) The Moon-Bog: your typical Gothic castle horror stuff which looks strangely familiar with Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'. 3 stars.

(4) The Temple, The White Ship and The Very Old Folks: I think I'd read these stories from somewhere else in the past, these are your usual Lovecraft's murmuring and murmuring and murmuring about ancient evil, family's secrets, curses and lost civilizations, these usual staff. Not practially outstanding but if you were Lovecraft's fans I think you'll still read them anyway. 3 stars.

(5) Nyarlothotep I wrote a short review for this story in my review for Lurking Fear: Collected Short Stories: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

To be honest, this book is kinda a DNF because there are plenty of stories I didn't finish (and I DNF all of the poems, not in the mood for Lovecraft's poems though I'm not saying these are bad), and a few short stories feel like the author was repeating himself with so many similar themes and backdrops showing up over and over. Haha!

[Carly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eldritch Tales: A micellany of the Macabre
H.P. Lovecraft was a fascinating poet and writer of the 1920's. He was also a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, which is obvious in some of his work, that it was influenced by Poe. I can also say that I am a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe as well. In the supernatural horror in literature essay by H.P. Lovecraft himself,he gives his opinion on other writer's work and criticizes it as well. This book like the Necronomicon contains the lesser known work by H.P. Lovecraft, but it has a refreshing mix of short stories and poetry and like the necromonicon, it is beautifully bound in leather and illustrated.
The following will be a list of the contents within the book, and I will give a summary of the stories and poems in this book. Their may be some spoilers sorry :/ Beside all my favourite stories/poetry I will but this symbol *

Contents:
The History of the Necronomicon*
The Alchemist*
The reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
The Beast in the Cave*
The Po-et's Nightmare (Poem)*
Memory
Despair (Poem)
The Picture in the House*
Beyond the Wall of Sleep*
Psychopompos- A Tale in Rhyme*
The White Ship
The House (Poem)
The Nightmare Lake (Poem)*
Poetry and the Gods (With Anna Helen Crofts)*
Nyarlothotep*
Polaris
The Street*
Ex Oblivione*
Facts concerning the late Jermyn and his family*
The Crawling Chaos (With Winifred Virginia Jackson)
The Terrible Old Man*
The Tree
The Tomb*
Celephais
Hypnos*
What the Moon Brings*
The Horror at Martin's Beach (With Sonia H. Greene)*
The Festival
The Temple
Hallowe'en in a Suburb (Poem)*
The Moon-Bog*
He*
Festival (Poem)
The Green Meadow (With Winifred Virginia Jackson)
Nathicana (Poem)*
Two Black Bottles (With Winifred Blanch Talmon)*
The Last Test (With Adolphe De Castro)*
Fungi from Yuggoth:
1-The Book
2-The Pursuit
3-The Key
4-Recognition
5-Homecoming
6-The Lamp
7-Zaman's Hill
8-The Port
9-The Courtyard*
10-The Pigeon-Flyers
11-The Well
12-The Howler*
13-Hesperia
14-Star-winds*
15-Antarktos
16-The Window
17-A Memory*
18-The Gardens of Yin
19-The Bells*
20-Night-Gaunts*
21-Nyarlathotep*
22-Azathoth
23-Mirage
24-The Canal
25-St Toads*
26-The Familiars*
27-The Elder Pharos
28-Expectancy
29-Nostalgia
30-Background
31-The Dweller*
32-Alienage
33-Harbour Whistles
34-Recapture
35-Evening Star
36-Continuity
The Trap (With Henry s. Whitehead)
The Other Gods
The Quest of Iranon
The Challenge from Beyond
In a Sequester'd Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk'd*
Ibid
Azathtoth
The Desendent
The Book
The Evil Clergyman*
The Very Old Folk
The Thing in the Moonlight
The Transition of Juan Romero
Supernatural Horror in Literature*
Afterword Lovecraft in Britain By Stephen Jones*
Collaborations and other Revisions

History of the Necronomicon: The historical information is insightful, and interesting information about the abhorrent Necronomicon.
The Alchemist: This is a good story about French characters that are cursed with witchcraft.
The Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson: This story is about the journal and last remaining thoughts of a dying man.
The Beast in the Cave: This is a good short story about a beast in a cave, that a man discovers.
The Po-et's Nightmare (Poem):This poem is about demons
Memory: This short story is about apes that are man, the first of their kind.
Despair (Poem): Another poem about demons. (I will add a bit more detail about them when I have re-read them)
The Picture in the House: This story is about a picture of grotesque origin and a haunted book about cannibals.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep: A mentally ill man, in an institution is plagued by nightmares that result in his death. He is afraid to sleep, because when he does he dreams, and he has nightmares.
Psychopompos-A Tale in Rhyme: This is a poem about wolves and demons, it is similar to Poe's writing style. H.P. Lovecraft was a big fan of Poe's work so his influence is recognizable in Lovecraft's work, since I am also a fan of Edgar Allan Poe as well.
The White Ship: The boat in the story is used to travel to strange distant lands.
The House (Poem): This is a poem about Forgotten memories.
The Nightmare Lake (Poem): This is a poem about creatures in a lake being devoured.
Poetry and the Other Gods (With Anna Helen Crofts): This is a poem about artisans and poets, one of them is the muse and poet of the Gods in Olympus. I really liked this story, since I am really interested in Greek Mythology and Artisans of the 18-20th Century from all over the world, they are interesting, intelligent people, and they inspire me.
Polaris: This story is about an alien race that exists in a dream world.
The Street: This short story was about an ancient street that had a soul, that is affected by a necromancer.
Ex Oblivione: This short story was about demons that exist, in a secret place that you can visit but not return from.
Facts concerning the late Jermyn and his family: This story is about the Jermyn family. There was madness within the Jermyn family and they all posses obscure facial features. There was "an object" in a box that was of strange and terrifying origin. The protagonist turned out to not be human, he was of an unknown race, that was not from our world.
The Crawling Chaos (With Winifred Virginia Jackson):
De Quincey is the main character in the story, he used opium to avoid sentient beings that wished to harm him.
Hypnos: Two people in this story do whatever is possible for themselves to avoid sleep at all costs, no matter what. They both avoid sleep, in the aid of a drug that they both take. Time is dis-proportioned and at a rate that is out of their control and beyond our laws of time and science.
What the Moon Brings: A dead sea creature arises from the sea and it is powered by the moon. Other dead creatures also awaken, whenever the moon glows.
The horror at Martin's Beach (With Sonia H. Greene): A strange and unique creature is washed ashore, a group of men are curious and go and investigate what it is. However, they get pulled into the water by the strange creature and die, while something is laughing in the background unseen.
The Festival: An ancient sea town celebrates forgotten hideous ceremonies during their festival of Yuletide. They perform hideous rituals and summon demons.
The Temple: The Main character in this story, is a German Imperial Navy Officer named Karl Heinrich Graf Von Altberg upon the U-29.
The Imperial Navy discovers Atlantis, after the U-boat falls to the bottom of the ocean. One of the crewmen kept a strange coin in his hand most of the time, since he was superstitious. However whenever a person was in possession of this coin, it had a strange affect on them psychologically. It caused visual hallucinations and drove the crewmen mad. Karl escapes the U-boat, to wander around the ancient crumbling underwater city, he discovers that the temple he found is beckoning people to it, to their death.
Hallowe'en in a Suburb (Poem): This poem is about vampires and other supernatural creatures. Dead creatures are beckoned by the moon.
The Moon-Bog: The servants and laborers are disturbed by the moon-bog since that is where the dead are including the protagonist.
The moon-bog is illuminated by the moon.
He:This short story is about a man with knowledge of ancient civilizations, that is a guide to a fellow antiquarian. He is also a necromancer and shows off his powers.
Festival (Poem): This poem is about cannibalistic druids.
The Green Meadow (With Winifred Virginia Jackson): Fishermen have found a slate rock or meteorite, that contained a strange book inside. People started chanting in the green meadow.
Nathicana (Poem): This poem is about a godlike, pure beautiful being the land of it's people is destroyed by the presence of a demon.
Two Black Bottles(With Winifred Blanch Talmon): The main character Vanderhoof is in league with the devil. Another character Abel Foster is similar to him, but he is a grave robber.
The Last Test (With Adolphe De Castro): A scientist (Dr. Claredon) sets out to create a cure for the disease black fever, he had good intentions, but along the line he becomes very cruel and evil. He is cruel especially to his animal specimen and eventually to his sister and assistant Surama. Dr. Claredon, does experiments on his sister's dog, but it later dies.
The antidote he created for the black fever disease is not yet perfected, so that is why he has animal specimens in cages. It is not quite ready for human testing. Surama his evil assistant that always chuckles is neither living or dead or entirely human when he is killed in a fire, when Dr. Claredon burnt the animal specimens, his sister's dog and his assistant Surama. Surama's remains look human, even though while he was alive, he looked like he was anything but human.
Dr. Claredon is bewitched by Surama and the primordial gods that he worships. Surama chuckles at the pain or destruction or others human or animal alike. However the last time he chuckled was when Dr. Claredon said that his sister would be the first human subject for the antidote that he created, even though it would have unstable results and result in her death. When it fails to work he burns all of his specimens, his research. I don't like the fact that this story involved animal cruelty, like the story The Cats of Ulthar.
The Wood: This poem is about a wood that has been destroyed, but the dead have awoken upon words that have been spoken there.
The Ancient Track: This poem is about an ancient track that no one knows about except the person that discovered it.
The Electric Executioner (With Adolphe De Castro): A man left the mining company that he works for with important legal documents.
The main character needs to retrieve them, so he travels by train, where he notices to his annoyance another person, in the carriage opposite him. The man notices that the strange passenger is possessively holding a suitcase that contains a strange devise.
The devise affects the man's appearance and time itself. The man that is holding the suitcase radiates light, but no one ever pays enough attention to notice. The man, wishes to use the other passenger as his first human test subject. The end result of the story was that the man was either never really there or he disappeared completely. I think that the tired passenger fell, asleep and had a very vivid dream, since that would explain why he wasn't there when he woke up.

Fungi From Yuggoth (Poetry):
1-The Book: Old crumbling books in a library are discovered.
2-Pursuit: Someone is in pursuit of the book thief.
3-The Key: The book thief has acquired key, the person that is in pursuit of him, is fumbling at the window of his house.
4-Recognition: An altar was discovered, the man recognized that he was inhuman and feasted upon a human being.
5-Homecoming: The man is reminded of his home by a demon.
6-The Lamp: The man discovered a lamp in the hollow cliff side. There is also a scroll with written incantations and obscure symbols all over it.
7-Zaman's Hill: Dead animals, and dead people were supposedly found. People have also disappeared.
8-The Port: An eerie port shrouded in darkness.
9-The Courtyard: A courtyard full of corpses that have no hands or heads.
10-The Pigeon-Flyers: There are lots of evil pigeons from other-worldly lands.
11-The Well: Two farmers are trying to cover up a well, one of them went insane while the other covered the well and killed himself.
12-The Howler: An animal with four paws but a human face was discovered howling in pain.
13-Hesperia: Sphinxes, the river of time. The land has never been soiled by humans.
14-Star-Winds:
Twilight gloom's inspiring poets of forgotten ancient alien lore.
15-Antarktos: A distant forgotten land that is dimly guessed by the elder gods what actually inhabits it.
16-The Window: An old house with a window sealed with stone.A blast of air unveiled a dream world in another reality.
17-A Memory: At a campsite, a dead cloaked form appears.
18-The Gardens of Yin: Moss covered towers with terraced gardens.
19-The Bells: The bells recoil buried memories, summoning people to the sea.
20-Night Gaunts: Creatures crawling out of a crypt, they are horned demons with wings and tails, they are taking a man to a hideous lake.
21-Nyarlothotep: Ancient mummies bow down to Nyarlothotep and wait for his command, to arise and play hideous ancient music and dance.
22-Azathoth: In the presence of a demon, where there is no space or shape to anything that is natural, only chaos exists in this realm of the demon.
23-Mirage: A vague image of a floating world, that may or may not exist.
24-The Canal: An evil place, that has a spectral glow.
25-St. Toad's: Warnings from the toad's of the chimes of the bell's.
26-The familiar's: John Whately is talking to his demon familiars. The town, that he lives in believes that he is mad.
27-The Elder Pharos: Ancient elder beings that still communicate with their brethren.
28-Expectancy: Expectancy of unrivaled marvels in the universe.
29-Nostalgia: Birds wish to return to a land of their memories.
30-Background: A land remembered from childhood dreams.
31-The Dweller: A long forgotten buried secret in ancient times, that a dweller discovers and then leaves with it.
32-Alienation:A creature that does not belong in our time, our even in our world.
33-Harbour Whistles: Sounds emanate from a ship that no one else other than the main character in the poetry has ever heard before or since.
34-Recaptured: The man was recaptured back into the dream-world.
35-Evening Star: The rays of the evening star reveals the man's lost home.
36-Continuity: Without any form or weight ancient beings are connected to time and space in our world.
The Trap (With Henry S. Whitehead): A teacher posses a strange ancient mirror, one of his students has gone missing and is now stuck in the mirror. There is a portal-lie entrance to the mirror, that sucks people in and traps them there forever, so long as the mirror is still intact they will remain stuck there.
The Other Gods: This short story is about elder Gods that miss their land and want it back.
The quest of Iranon: The prince of Iranon, a singer wishes to own the land of his childhood memories. Iranon is supposedly dead, but he still remains at the end of the story.
Thew Challenge from Beyond: This story is about ancient beings that are travelling trans-galactic gulfs of space with their minds. They are worm-like in appearance, they use a human being's body as a vessel, in which they are able to animate.
In a Sequester'd Providence Where Once Poe Walk'd:Edgar Allan Poe spectral form is walking around in a graveyard, which is befitting of the style of poetry and short stories that he wrote.
Ibid: A writer/scribe in Roman times is murdered and his skull is passed between leaders of invaders.
Azathoth: "Mere walls and windows soon drive a man to madness" Edgar Allan Poe Quote A dreamer glimpses a fascinating world at night time.
The Descendant: A man shrieks at the sound of the church bells ringing he lives by himself, and it driven mad by the sound they make. The main character is dying and wishes to avoid all forms of thought, anything that might inspire his imagination is abhorrent to him. Lord Northam is a descendant of an ancient castle, in his mind and soul, he holds the key to other worlds.
The Book: A worm-infested book was discovered in a ancient decaying room. It contained a key or guide, that opened a way to beyond our realm of three dimensions.The man felt as if someone was following him, after he discovered the book. He has no memory who he is, or if he had a family, or even the year that he was alive. His soul was temporarily separated from his body when he was chanting incantations from the book that he found.
The Messenger (Poem): To Bertrand K. Esq. This poem is about the arrival of a demon.
The Evil Clergyman: An evil clergyman performed evil rites at the church, the other priests are very afraid of him, and won't even say his name. They refer to him as "him", "it" or the evil clergyman.
The other priests are unaware of the grave of the evil clergyman.
An object was left on a table and the priest said not to tamper with it. Another person, was curious and they did pick up the object, it hurt his mind and personality till it drove him to insanity and he shot himself. This man became the evil clergyman, that the other priests are afraid of.
The very Old Folk: Strange older mountain folk, that speak very fast perform hideous rituals. Some people have gone missing, these people might have from their tribe and were sacrificed, in their rituals. People from the tribe have noticed their absence, and they are curious about what happened to them. Tethered horses at the bottom of the mountains screamed as a man killed himself, and a group of centurions were seized by flying demon.
The Thing in the Moonlight: A man unable to speak English coherently suddenly feels the urge to write in English. He was haunted, by a man howling at him in a strange dream-world every time he fell asleep.
The Transition of Juan Romero:Juan Romero, a Mexican miner died during a strange storm and stole his friend's ring. It might have a been a dream, or it may have been real.
Supernatural Horror in Literature: This essay is about influential and possibly lesser know, authors of supernatural horror in literature in the 18th-19th century and on-wards. Of course Edgar Allan Poe is mentioned among some of the greatest authors of supernatural horror fiction or horror in general. Some are known to me, while others are of a foreign land so I have not ever heard of them or read their work, but I look forward to discovering new authors of influence in this genre of writing.
Afterword-Lovecraft in Britain: This afterword is very informative, as was the information about H.P. Lovecraft in the Necronomicon. It was interesting to read, but I never quite understood why. H.P. Lovecraft never bothered to claim, intellectual property rights of his short stories and poetry so no one could illegally publish it with his or August Derleth's permission.
This book was much like the Necronomicon, because it is a collection of stories by H.P.Lovecraft but also contains poetry. It was refreshing to be able to read poetry between the short stories, since before reading this book I wasn't aware that H.P. Lovecraft wrote poetry. Some of the short stories however, seemed like they were rushed, when they written, and the story wasn't long enough for anything interesting to happen. Most of them seemed like they were half a story, since they were only a few pages long. I liked reading this book, and would recommend this to fans of H.P. Lovecraft. I like the poetry and the beautiful illustrations, just like in the Necronomicon. I also have the complete collection of his work, and I intend to read that, the second Anthology comic book as well as a Necronomicon by Alan Moore and a book about the films that were made based on his work.

[Irena · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the Eldritch Tales were the first Lovecraft book you picked up, you may have ended up really disappointed. It really is a "miscellany" of his stories, the leftovers that aren't to be neglected but aren't as good as the ones in Necronomicon. While I can recommend a bunch must-reads from N., there isn't a single story I'd point out in the Eldritch Tales. However, if you're a Lovecraft fan or a completionist like me, you will want to have it all read :)

[Tulpa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Below, I have rated every story/fragment/poem/essay. Many of these are better left forgotten, or shouldn't even be considered HP Lovecraft works (I am thinking in particular of the execrable Adolphe de Castro collaborations, but also the story fragments and recordings of dreams extracted from letters HPL sent). Don't bother reading/listening to anything rated lower than 3 stars, and even the 3 star entries can safely be skipped with no loss.

This collection features many Dunsany pastiches, which I happen to have some fondness for.

History of the Necronomicon - ***
The Alchemist - ***
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson - **
The Beast in the Cave - *
The Poe-et’s Nightmare - **
Memory - ****
Despair - *
The Picture in the House - *
Beyond the Wall of Sleep - *
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme - **
The White Ship - *****
The House - *
The Nightmare Lake - ***
Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts) - **
Nyarlathotep - ****
Polaris - **** (would be 5 if the one racist sentence were deleted)
The Street - * unreadable sentimental bigoted trash
Ex Oblivione - ****
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family - *
The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred Virginia Jackson) - ****
The Terrible Old Man - *
The Tree - ****
The Tomb - **
Celephaïs - ****
Hypnos - ***
What the Moon Brings - **
The Horror at Martin’s Beach (with Sonia H. Greene) - *
The Festival - ***
The Temple - *
Hallowe’en in a Suburb - *
The Moon-Bog - **
He - *
Festival - **
The Green Meadow (with Winifred Virginia Jackson) - ***
Nathicana - ***
Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman) - *
The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro) - *
The Wood - **
The Ancient Track - ***
The Electric Executioner (with Adolphe de Castro) - *
Fungi from Yuggoth - ****
The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead) - ***
The Other Gods - ****
The Quest of Iranon - ****
The Challenge from Beyond - ****
In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d - **
Ibid - **
Azathoth - ***
The Descendant - **
The Book - ****
The Messenger - **
The Evil Clergyman - **
The Very Old Folk - ***
The Thing in the Moonlight - **
The Transition of Juan Romero - *
Supernatural Horror in Literature - ****

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

History of the Necronomicon - 4 Stars
The Alchemist - 4 Stars
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson - 2 Stars
The Beast in the Cave - 4 Stars
The Poe-et’s Nightmare - 4.5 Stars
Memory - 4 Stars
Despair - 4 Stars
The Picture in the House -5 Stars
Beyond the Wall of Sleep - 5 Stars
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme - 4 Stars
The White Ship - 3.5 Stars
The House - 4 Stars
The Nightmare Lake - 5 Stars
Poetry and the Gods (with Anna Helen Crofts) - 2 Stars
Nyarlathotep - 3 Stars
Polaris - 3.5 Stars
The Street - 4 Stars
Ex Oblivione - 4 Stars
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family - 4 Stars
The Crawling Chaos (with Winifred Virginia Jackson) - 4 Stars
The Terrible Old Man - 4 Stars
The Tree - 4 Stars
The Tomb - 5 Stars
Celephaïs - 4 Stars
Hypnos - 3.75 Stars
What the Moon Brings - 4 Stars
The Horror at Martin’s Beach (with Sonia H. Greene) - 4 Stars
The Festival - 3.5 Stars
The Temple - 4.5 Stars
Hallowe’en in a Suburb - 5 Stars
The Moon-Bog - 4 Stars
He 4.25 Stars
Festival - 4.25 Stars
The Green Meadow (with Winifred Virginia Jackson) - 2.5 Stars
Nathicana - 3.75 Stars
Two Black Bottles (with Wilfred Blanch Talman) - 3.5 Stars
The Last Test (with Adolphe de Castro) - 3 Stars
The Wood - 4 Stars
The Ancient Track - 5 Stars
The Electric Executioner (with Adolphe de Castro) - 4 Stars
Fungi from Yuggoth - 5 Stars
The Trap (with Henry S. Whitehead) - 4 Stars
The Other Gods - 3 Stars
The Quest of Iranon - 4 Stars
The Challenge from Beyond - 3.5 Stars
In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk’d - 4.5 Stars
Ibid - 3 Stars
Azathoth - 3.5 Stars
The Descendant - 3 Stars
The Book - 4 Stars
The Messenger - 4 Stars
The Evil Clergyman -3.5 Stars
The Very Old Folk - 3 Stars
The Thing in the Moonlight - 3.5 Stars
The Transition of Juan Romero - 4.25 Stars
Supernatural Horror in Literature - 5 Stars
Afterword: Lovecraft in Britain by Stephen Jones - 3 Stars

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nice hardcover edition, Gollancz really does not disappoint.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finishing thus book is a little bitter sweet for me. Several years ago I had begun re-reading the works of H.P. Lovecraft with the intention of reading them in the order that he wrote and/or published the various stories and short novels. Completing this volume the completion, for the most part, of that endeavor. So, yes I've re-read the works of Lovecraft, but now I'm done. Except I'm not. At least not exactly. While researching the order in which I would be reading these narratives I discovered that Lovecraft was a rather petty racist who, at least, kept the worst of these sentiments out of his fiction, but was quite fore coming about his bigotry in his person letters. Thus my enthusiasm for his stories diminished somewhat. But I also discovered several stories that I had not previously read. But even more surprising was nearly two dozen collaborations, some that were posthumously done, with other authors. These represent some of the frustration I feel and the reason I'm not quite finished as several of these stories I still need to track down. But this particular volume also includes a wealth of material I'd not yet read, including the collection of verse Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems. And, more so thank anything else, it is Lovecrft's poetry that, for me at least, pulls the rating of this volume down. Lovecraft was a xenophobic racist and he effectively channeled that fear into his fiction, but he ability as a poet did not come close to his ability to craft the tension of the slow-build horror story. So, while this is a wonderful collection that no Lovecraft enthusiast should be without, I just can't whole-heartedly endorse it with a Rickommendation. Like I said, bitter-sweet.

[Wendelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

baroquely written fantasies, sharing themes of rejection of modernity, wishfulness for antiquity, mysteriousness, dreams, the unknown, that sometimes drives the central seeker/protagonist to madness or a horrific experience....

[Overhaul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first volume, the Necronomicon, has all the best stories, in my opinion, but Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre, has beautiful and creepy short stories to, it makes this a lovely collection with gorgeous illustrations. I highly recommended to any true H.P Lovecraft fan.

[The Usual · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of pieces, distinctly variable in quality, that didn’t make the cut for Gollancz’s Necronomicon. Some of them aren’t half bad but for me the chief, rather geeky pleasure is that, because they are presented in more-or-less publication order, it’s possible to trace the author’s development from conscious imitation of Poe, through something that looks a bit like Machen, and out the other side into what you’d have to call full-blooded Lovecraft territory.

Oh, and there’s Ibid, which doesn’t remotely fit but is an extended joke you’ll also find in Pratchett.

Also included are two pieces of non-fiction: Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature – essentially a long, rather spoilery reading list rather than an essay (I made the mistake of taking notes and covered three sides of A4 with names and titles, and, please note, my handwriting is not the largest); and an afterword tracing the history of Lovecraft’s publications through Gollancz.

I’m not sure I’d read much of this again, but it was worth a try.

[Andrew Pixton · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite part of the collection I read (if it was this one) was the too often overlooked poetry. Lovecraft's poetry lacks the xenophobia prevalent in his stories and carries lyrical strength close to Poe. The stories too were lesser read and involved contributions from others.

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review After First Reading - 2011

I'll just throw myself out into the open and list two of many things that I find are very overrated. These are that beloved band 'The Beatles' and that beloved author 'H.P.Lovecraft'. Going off this compilation, which I admit is the only one I have read, I thought that Lovecraft was very inferior to such others legends as Poe, Bierce, LeFanu, and Stoker. Some stories were very good, but most of them were just so vague and fantastical that I found them to be silly and rather pointless. They were not scary, they were just (as the title suggests)...weird. It surprises me, incidentally,that S.T.Joshi (a fucking Lovecraft fanatic) criticizes Stephen King so harshly for his stories being implausible and unexplained, when they are nothing compared to some of the dreamlike shit that Lovecraft wrote. Funnily enough, the most enjoyable excerpt of this book is a non-fiction article written by Lovecraft himself, in which he modestly admires all the other horror writers of his time, and displays a keen understanding of the horror genre which seems equal to King's 'Danse Macabre'. It's a shame, I think, that he didn't apply this knowledge to his own stories.

After Second Reading - 2017

Well for starters I definitely appreciated and enjoyed these stories more the second time. For the most part that is. Don't get me wrong, there were still many times in this book where I felt I was reading the same nonsense again and again. I understand, however, that these stories are mostly his more obscure ones. Excluding a few exceptions like The Picture in the House, Terrible Old Man and The Temple - (inserted most likely to grab the reader's attention while lesser content caused it to wane) - most felt like B-sides. I took me a while to get into Lovecraft's style. I read part of one story to my girlfriend. She thought he was "too verbose". I tend to agree. But like any author, it just takes some getting used to. It is like being driven down an unfamiliar road, in a different car, and the author is the driver. You need to get accustomed to how they handle sharp corners, how fast they take the speed bumps, if they like to gun it on an orange light or play it safe. Silly analogy, but I am writing this after three hours of lectures and studying.

While I would still say, on general terms, I am not a great fan of Lovecraft - that I much prefer Bierce, Kipling, M.R. James and Poe to name but four - I do have a newly-formed appreciation for his work as well. Particularly after reading some reviews of Goodreads members (and friends), I got the impression I was storming through the stories too quickly, like a James Patterson reader, not actually taking the time to properly savour the man's work. That is true as Eldritch Tales is by no means a short volume, and I always think that reading so much of one author's work consecutively is rarely a good idea. I grew very tired with Lovecraft's frequent tropes of describing dream cities for instance. It's like having someone senile tell you a story you politely let them tell you each time they see you. "Crystal bridges and towers made of emerald dust; seas of crimson; skies azure, speckled with the glittering cobalt sands of time". Yada yada yada.

For what's it's worth, there were some great stories as well. I cannot list all the ones I loved or liked without the contents page before me. So I will just say the ones that immediately spring to mind. The Temple. The Picture in the House. The Tree. The Trap, which felt like something Rod Serling might have introduced his weekly viewers to Night Gallery or The Twilight Zone. The Last Test as well as another longer story I can't recall the name of. The Street was a funny one as it differed to his usual stories, retaining yet his racist views of outsiders. I actually really liked that one. Other short stories like The Transition of Juan Romero and The Electric Executioneer were also good.

I did not like or appreciate the final part of the book, which was not written by Lovecraft but Stephen Jones or someone; recounting, quite tediously, the story of Lovecraft's publication history in Britian. Thanks to my completionist OCD, I was forced to read it.

[Tinuviel · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a big classic horror fan, I decided to give Lovecraft another go by reading a miscellany of his short stories.

I have to say that I've lost interest in the stories less than half way through. The main problem with Lovecraft is the storytelling. Every story has a similar pattern, with a twist at the very end. There's also not much depth to them, so the reader is left with lots of questions.

I was a bit disappointed, as I really wanted to like it! Maybe I'll give the book another go sometime in the future.

[Michel Avenali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a solid collection of Lovecraft's lesser known stories, poems, and collaborations. I recommend it to fans who can't get enough macabre lovecraftian horror. There are two essays in the back that were especially interesting detailing the role of horror in literature and Lovecraft's influence in the UK. As a nice bonus there was some cool art interspersed throughout. Personally, this didn't really add much to the mythos and you won't find any new exploration of the Elder Ones in it but it was a solid read overall.

[Matthew Talamini · Rating 5 out of 5]

HP Lovecraft Eldritch Tales

There are some writers whose vision is so powerful that they become the foundation for a whole genre. Walpole, Tolkien, Richardson, Poe, Shelley, Lovecraft. Many contemporary authors owe Lovecraft a huge debt for these stories.

They can be repetitive. Too often, the ending is, "...and then I went insane." But the thing making the protagonist go insane is always interesting. Or deeply weird. Or would be terrifying if it actually happened.

These stories have something in them of what Kant might have called the 'sublime'. You look out from some small space into a much bigger one; and what you see there isn't friendly. Bigger ponds have bigger fish. Like a goldfish watching dimly as a blue whale goes by.

Frankenstein's monster is a monster, sure. Dracula is a monster. A serial killer is a monster. They're dangerous. But what about the monster that could destroy your entire world by accident?

I think Lovecraft wants to remind us that the world is real by reminding us that the world isn't safe. Think about it. Are you living a rose-colored, solipsistic illusion? Are you sure? How can you be sure?

Well, if there's something hunting you by night -- something so weird you could never invent it in your wildest dreams -- that's a sign.

Imagine giving these stories to an ancient Greek. And mixing in among them some stories involving contemporary real-life science. I don't think she'd be able to tell which was which. We've discovered and invented such weird things in the last hundred years! And terrifying things, too. Is there a shudder or a thrill at the strangeness of a Lovecraft story? You ought to feel the same about your own life, which is fully as fearsome and thrilling.

These stories have value in being able to make you feel that your own life is real and wonderful. Not despite their horror and strangeness; but because of it.

I should also mention the fabulous essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature. To go through from the beginning and read all the books he mentions would be a real education in horror literature. A fantastic guide to the genre, and a very interesting theoretical perspective.

[Mike Futcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining but inessential eldritch companion to 2008's Necronomicon collection. The best of H. P. Lovecraft's stories suck you in with their mysterious, oppressive atmosphere, then win your heart with their strong storytelling bones, erudite depth and creative horrors. In this way, they compel the reader to forgive their verbosity and predictability, and make every cultured reader a fan, whether passionate or begrudging.

I didn't write a conventional review of the Necronomicon when I read it a few years ago (preferring instead a pastiche meta-review written in Lovecraft's style, which I'm still rather proud of), but the above praise is more fitting for the stories of that collection, which stated – and proved – to contain "the best weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft". The subtitle for 2011's Eldritch Tales declares it to be a "miscellany of the macabre": stories and oddments which had not already been collected in a single volume.

All of the best tales were indeed collected in the Necronomicon – in fact, everything that is worthwhile for all but the most committed of fans. Eldritch Tales is certainly an inferior volume, hoovering up what remained and putting it on display – or, as Lovecraft himself puts it in one of the stories here, "things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl" (pg. 180). It doesn't really have any hidden gems, not even a single star story that you could raise as a selling point. It does have many serviceable stories, and even Lovecraft's juvenilia is not too shabby, but that in itself cannot recommend it too highly.

What Eldritch Tales does have is that same perverse, malignant atmosphere of unseen horror which seeps into all of Lovecraft's lines. The stories might be lesser, and the collection only for the completist fan or the hoarder of demoniac lore, but that compulsion to feel what has become known as 'Lovecraftian' will always draw us in.

[Lorryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON – 2 STARS
2. THE ALCHEMIST – 3 STARS
3. A REMINISCENCE OF DR SAMUEL JOHNSON – 3 STARS
4. THE BEAST IN THE CAVE – 2 STARS
5. THE PO-ETS NIGHTMARE – 2 STARS
6. MEMORY – 2 STARS
7. DESPAIR – 2 STARS
8. THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE – 2.5 STARS
9. BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP – 4 STARS
10. PSYCHOPOMPOS – 3 STARS
11. THE WHITE SHIP – 2 STARS
12. THE HOUSE – 2 STARS
13. THE NIGHTMARE LAKE– 3 STARS
14. POETRY OF THE GODS – 4 STARS
15. NYARLATHOTEP – 4 STARS
16. POLARIS – 3 STARS
17. THE STREET – 2 STARS
18. EX OBLIVIONE – 3 STARS
19. FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ARTHUR JERMYN – 3 STARS
20. THE CRAWLING CHAOS – 3 STARS
21. THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN – 2 STARS
22. THE TREE – 2 STARS
23. THE TOMB – 3 STARS
24. CELEPHAIS – 3 STARS
25. HYPNOS – 4 STARS
26. WHAT THE MOON BRINGS – 2 STARS
27. THE HORROR AT MARTINS BEACH – 2 STARS
28. THE FESTIVAL – 4 STARS
29. THE TEMPLE– 2 STARS
30. HALLOWEEN IN A SUBURB – 3 STARS
31. THE MOON BOG – 3 STARS
32. HE – 3 STARS
33. FESTIVAL– 2 STARS
34. THE GREEN MEADOW – 3 STARS
35. NATHICANA – 2 STARS
36. TWO BLACK BOTTLES – 2 STARS
37. THE LAST TEST – DNF
38. THE WOOD – 2 STARS
39. THE ANICENT TRACK – 2 STARS
40. THE ELECTRIC EXECUTIONER – 3.5 STARS
41. FUNGI FROM YUGGOTH – 2 STARS
42. THE TRAP – 2 STARS
43. THE OTHER GODS – 3 STARS
44. THE QUEST OF IRANON – 3 STARS
45. THE CHALLENGE FROM BEYOND – 2 STARS
46. IN A SEQUESTER’D PROVIDENCE CHURCHYARD WHERE POE WALKED – 2 STARS
47. IBID – 2 STARS
48. AZATHOTH – 2 STARS
49. THE DECENDANT – 4 STARS
50. THE BOOK - 3 STARS
51. THE MESSENGER – 3 STARS
52. THE EVIL CLERGYMAN – 3 STARS
53. THE VERY OLD FOLK - 3.5 STARS
54. THE THING IN THE MOONLIGHT – 4 STARS
55. THE TRANSISTION OF JUAN ROMERO – 3 STARS
56. SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE -DNF

[Gene Parish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently listened to Eldritch Tales written by H. P. Lovecraft and narrated by various narrators.

This is a compilation of some of Lovecraft's lesser known tales, poetry, short stories, and even some uncompleted works. The stories are very much what one would expect from a master of the cosmic horror genre. They brim with old ones fishing for vengeance, tales of bards from cities that never were, and German submarine commanders dragged into the cold embrace of Atlantis.

To cap the entire thing off, it ends with a treatise written by Lovecraft. It lays out the foundation of the weird tale and horror in literature. It lays its foundations in ancient poems, moves forward to the viking Edda, and step by step follows its progress into the turn of the century. This most intriguing work of study is almost worth the cost of the book by itself as it lays out the progress of horror tales through the ages.

The narrators were many and generally well chosen. Most do an excellent job. While there are a few odd points of narration I would prefer changed, I generally feel it was carried off well.

Conclusion: This is a very Lovecraftian book. Weird tales and horror stories are, generally speaking, a niche interest. Those who want a bit of fright will find delicious delight in these pages. All others may safely stop before opening the cover, the mental gates of forbidden knowledge, lest they hear of cyclopean monstrosities that may warp the steadiest of minds.

[Vladan Arsenijevic · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book certainly changed something within me. As a teenage boy I always enjoyed weird and horror stories and movies. One day I came across a video explaining Cthulhu and it instantly caught my attention. That was the first time I ever heard of H.P. Lovecraft.

After some time I saw a hardcover version of Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft in my local book store and decided that I have to have it. I bought it but didn't read it since I wasn't really into reading at that time. However, after I met my girlfriend and told her about my interests, she bought me this book - Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre. That was a push that I needed to start reading again and I did not regret it.

Even tho english is not my first language and I found it hard to read this book at times, I got through it without having to take breaks or read other, for me easier literature.

Lovecraft's essay - Supernatural Horror In Literature - provided me with so much information and knowledge that I marked some of the oldest works containing horror elements that I will check out as soon as possible. Of course there are some more dull and too abstract tales for my liking but they are easily overshadowed by all the other embodiments of master craftmanship that H.P. Lovecraft showcases.

Overall I found it extremely interesting and consider it a must read if you truly like the horror genre and want to know more about it's roots.

[Rumi Bossche · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished Eldrich Tales, A Miscellany of The Macabre by H.P Lovecraft. It has some very nice short stories, but also a lot not so good ones. It really is an odd mix, some of the stories end very abruptly. It contains for the first time the entire Fungi from Juggoth. Also a very interesting essay called Supernatural horror in literature, and  an essay called Lovecraft in britain, with a short history how he first got published in england and all sort of cool and informative information. Both are worth the purchase of This book alone. It also has great short stories, some of my favorite are,

The picture in the house
Psychopompos a tale in rhyme
The House
The Tomb
The Temple
Two black botles
The Last Test
The descendant
The book,
Psychopompus a tale in rhyme may be my favorite, lovecraft really excells at poetry.
And The Temple, his first ever short story in Weird Tales is also brilliant.

I would recommend this collection for people who  already read some of Lovecrafts work, but not really for first timers, for them i would prefer the much better Necronomicon with all his best tales. 3.5 stars for me.

[Shrewbie Spitzmaus · Rating 3 out of 5]

First of all, let me say that I LOVE Lovecraft's fiction... some of my absolute favorite horror writing. That being said, I would say that about a third of his work is AMAZING top-notch stuff while another third is very good to excellent. The last third is meh to OK. It seemed to be the goal of this collection to collect most of the last third into a one volume, combined with some of his poetry (most of which for me is meh), some collaborations, and his (IMO) overly long essay, "Supernatural Horror In Literature." There are a few decent stories in this collection but nothing to the level of "The Colour Out of Space" or "The Thing On The Doorstep." As such, if you are new to Lovecraft, this is NOT the volume to start with as there are far, far better ones.

[Patrick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unutterable shit. sentences like:

"That nevermore should i behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief."

If someone wrote that in an exam or for a writing project you would fail. For a damn good reason.

"High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors."

That's right, 26 words in and we find our verb for that sentence.

DIDN'T THIS MAN HAVE AN EDITOR?!

[Dirk Grobbelaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any Lovecraft is good Lovecraft, but please, for the love of Lovecraft, don't start your Lovecraft journey here.

Eldritch Tales is pretty much a miscellany of the macabre, with the focus on miscellany. Collected here, you will find all kinds of oddities, such as collaborations and stories that were written when the author was still very young (I believe he was 14 around the time one of them was published).

This is a wonderful book, but it is intended to complete or enhance your collection. The really good stuff, that you absolutely should sink your teeth into, is collected elsewhere.

This isn't the best of Lovecraft, this is the rest of Lovecraft.

Even so: kudos

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology is for those whom Lovecraft has already won over with his Dream Cycle or Cthulhu Mythos. Most of the pieces included here feel unfinished and scrappy - like rough drafts not yet ready for public consumption. Most end abruptly, with little in the way of full plot arcs. Still, I enjoyed being able to see works unrelated to Cthulhu or Kadath, and the extended essay included is also quite interesting. Just don't let this book be your first introduction to Lovecraft as it will give you the wrong idea about his work. Neophytes should read 'Necronomicon' instead.

[Ronnie Komstedt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovecraft wrote hundredes upon hundredes of short stories, but most people have only ever heard of a handful of them...
There is a reason for that... 9/10 of the stories are pretty shit, either being pure word salad, or worse, just plain boring, but most is somewhere between the two...

Now this book has some 60 short stories of the less known variant, and i would say that 10-20 of them were pretty good, and the rest, well, wasnt...

but damn i didnt expect the comedy poem, and it was pretty damn good, i think maybe Lovewcraft should have tried to do more comedies X)

[izzyipee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Im never sure how to review short story compilations so we're getting a 3 i guess.
Some stories were hits, some were misses, and many in this compilation were just "mid". I know that the necronomicon contains most of lovecraft's most well known stories, and now i see thats for a reason. I guess that when you write the sheer volume that lovecraft did, there's going to eventually be some stories that fall through the cracks quality wise.
Beyond the wall of sleep was my personal favourite in here, and i really loved the essays on horror included at the end

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found most of the short-stories included in this collection rather slow, and even though I tried my best to find immersion and frightening meaning in them, I just couldn't. I would recommend getting Necronomicon instead. It holds a lot more interesting stories with more depth, and definitely higher scare-factor to them.