The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft, Leslie S. Klinger (Editor)

The essential literary collection of H. P. Lovecraft’s ten finest short stories, from the celebrated editor of the two-volume New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft . An indispensable collection of the best of one of literature’s “most critically fascinating and yet enigmatic figures” (Alan Moore), featuring H. P. Lovecraft’s most bone-chilling tales, “Dagon”, “The Outsider”, “The Music of Erich Zann”, “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Call of Cthulhu", “The Colour Out of Space”, “The Dunwich Horror”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, “The Shadow Out of Time” and “The Haunter of the Dark”. Though he died an unknown, dejected pulp-magazine writer in 1937, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is now considered the first great “genius of weird fiction” (Peter Straub). There is no better guide through the peculiarities of his universe than Leslie S. Klinger, whose work as annotator of the “exciting and definitive” (Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review ) New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft has proven him a leading Lovecraft scholar. Keenly aware of the author’s inspiration of “dozens―hundreds―of stories written by others playing in [his] galactic sandbox,” Klinger now presents this essential reader’s edition for both fanatics and newcomers to the canon. Equipped with explanatory annotations and sharp historical insight, this highly accessible?collection features Lovecraft’s ten most profound and unnerving short stories. From the early tale “Dagon” to the mature and sprawling “The Haunter of the Dark,” these expertly curated stories built a Lovecraftian sense of dread that has reverberated in the world of horror literature for that all of us are “outsiders” in the universe. 11 black-and-white photographs

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

432 pages, Paperback

Published February 22, 2022

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

[Erin (she|her) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this a 3 because I've just realized all the horror menus I love is inspired by lovecraft so I guess it deserves some flowers, but I did not enjoy reading this. It was boring, pretentious, and racist.

[Adrianne Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

can't even write a decent horror story without being so racist it actually made me laugh in shock

[Madison Preuss · Rating 4 out of 5]

love this as a concept

[Peter Dosedla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve had a lot of mixed feelings while reading this collection. I appreciate what these stories meant at the time of their publication over a 100 years ago, and how many of the “horror tropes” paved the way for subsequent books and movies. I liked the aspects and ideas of cosmicism or cosmic horror and what it represents about our place in the universe.
What I didn’t like as much was how most of these stories here explored these ideas. It felt like most of them used a similar formula of the story where only the variables (like characters, places, monsters, etc.) changed. It just became pretty repetitive after a while. I might’ve felt differently about them if I read them individually, spread out over a longer period of time, but it is what it is. I don’t like leaving books unread, but as there wasn’t that much left, I guess it’s fine if I just move on.

[Debra Wendt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew about Lovecraft but had never read any of his work. After reading this book, while I can appreciate the world he created, the "bone chilling horror" gets lost in his language. The writing is littered with classical allusions and archaic language, and for me, it gets in the way of the story. Perhaps in his day, these references were widely known; just not a timeless writer in my opinion.

[Josh Morrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first I've read of H.P. Lovecraft, and I can see why he has a name for writing horror. The imagery he uses in each of these stories, the wild, ferocious, and hideous creatures he invents are truly terrifying. However, he also has a penchant for keeping the reader removed from the story. In each take in this collection of stories, either it's told first-person after the fact, so there is no immediate danger to the narrator, thus no tension to the story, or, the omniscient narrator stays with the point of view of on-lookers who watch the horrifying scenes play out, and again, are in no immediate danger, and therefore there is no tension to the story. It could be that these stories are victims of their time, back when ideas like this were new and frightening, and having too close a POV, or characters in grave immediate danger was too much for the readers of that time. I don't know. I just know that, while I really enjoyed the imagery, the stories themselves were a bit of a disappointment.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Barely 3 stars. One of the stars is just because of his contribution to the horror genre, but geez, it’s not aged well, possibly because we’ve become desensitized with modern horror and sci-fi stories.

I found it dull and at times frustrating to read. Everything doesn’t have to be ”cyclopean”…

[Energy Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I might be a bit obsessed with Lovecraft. I first read him as a teen, late at night after lights out. His works were among the few sci-fi I read when I was younger, as it was a genre I didn’t get into until recent years. I sleep next to a Cthulhu wall tapestry, and he watches me each night while I sleep. Lovecraft has a unique way of telling stories.

I enjoyed some of the annotations that furthered parts of each story, but others felt unnecessary to me. And perhaps with fewer unnecessary annotations, they could have made the text larger and easier to read. The graphics were iffy, but it’s a black and white book on low-quality paper, so I understand there are limitations. But some of them were washed out, and I feel it does a disservice to the stories. Book quality aside, I like the stories they put in this collection, as The Rats in the Walls is one of my favs.

[Fred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection for someone new to Lovecraft. It includes some of his most well known work (the intro talks about why At the Mountains of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward were excluded.) Has a lot of footnotes and also illustrations from the magazines where they were first published. The only problem with a collection like this is that they rarely have any Lovecraft deep cuts like The Quest of Iranon.

What's included:

Dagon
The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark

[Willow Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly for the most part pretty meh writing. Some stories are definitely better than others (I personally really enjoyed, Shadow over Innsmouth, The Outsider and The Colour Out of Space).

Be warned this book contains a lot of hate speech and general nastiness that one can expect from a agoraphobic racist white man from American in the 1950s (A least he’s consistant in hating everyone that’s not a wealthy upper white class man).

[Mark Gendro · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 stars]

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would

[the · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft, but Cobbled by Edward F. Dass, is a book with many short stories, all of which follow the same area. These ancient Gods when you would look at them, would incite Insanity, and it breaks their minds, sends them to the very edge of insanity for some, and kills others. But it is not just those mythical monsters, some Rocks defy all laws of mass conservation, and slowly shrink. There are deaths on every page, including the rats in the walls. All of the stories breed suspense, and in some, the dramatic irony overflows, as H.P Lovecraft has created whole worlds, with a very intricate religion that spans eons of time in his books, all around the same area, this Michigan town named.
Arkham, which is Lovecraftian for the evil town. In this town, many things happen, from people returning from the dead to aliens appearing.
In my opinion, this is one of the best books that I have ever read. The entire time I was so engaged. Every time that I changed a different character, you could understand everything that was happening, what the character felt, what the character was seeing, and what the character was thinking. Everything that was happening, and their slow descent into madness. All of the gods there are ancient 40 god's.there are Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Cxaxukluth, Daoloth, Darkness, Ghroth, Hastur, Shub-ziggurat, C'thalpa, D'endrrah aid, Gnashal, Altheia, and others. The most well-known is Cthulhu. Explaining most of them is hard, but Cthulhu is easier to understand. He is a large being, with greenish-gray skin, a fat body, a squid forehead, and red eyes that pierce through you. But it gets stranger, as it has Bat wings and also.
One such story of a person looking at a god is in the very first story of a god named Dagon. An unnamed sailor is recounting the time he finds himself stranded on a Boat with enough food and water for a week. Or so he thought, as after just a few days, he ran out of food and water. To stay alive, he falls asleep to starve of imminent death. His dreams start normally, and then one night he has a lucid dream. He finds himself all of a sudden in a desolate place, with a landscape of darkness, and this rock in the middle, a rock that he has the feeling of, that this rock has been here for longer than time has existed. As he walks closer to it, he notices something very peculiar carved upon the rock, as it shows this fish-headed man, and this causes our protagonist to think that this is just a god made up of native islanders. But then he hears a noise, and then at the end, he dies.
I rate it 5 out of 5 stars, and I recommend this to all who enjoy the death of the main character. These books express a love for writing that I have never read before.

[Bill Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

SCARY STORIES FOR HALLOWEEN 🎃 For October one of my book clubs read and discussed 3 tales by H.P. LOVECRAFT 📚 the master of cosmic horror = fiction informed by the notion that humanity is nothing more than a tiny speck in a vast universe 🪐 filled with ancient, powerful and colossal forces—and entities!—that are totally beyond our comprehension—and that do their thing with no regard for our existence at all 😧 Lovecraft's is a universe of terrible gods and hideous monsters 👹, of murderous cultists and mad scientists 🧑‍🔬, of forbidden texts 📖 and secret cities, of gelatinous flesh and repugnant smells 🤢 Have you heard of Cthluhu?—a gigantic green alien, the spawn of the stars ⭐️—with the combined features of an octopus 🐙, a dragon 🐉, and a human 👱—who in the long-ago past descended to Earth 🌎—and now lies in slumber under the seas 🌊 with many other Old Ones—until the time comes for them to wake and emerge and enslave us all ⛓️? THAT'S Lovecraft

The stories my book group read were 'The Call of Cthluhu', 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', and 'The Rats in the Walls'. These were actually MY recommendations! 😎—I had previously consumed everything Lovecraft wrote cuz I'm a fan. CUZ, his imagination is staggering, his narrative constructions are clever, his antiquated prose style ✍️ is effective at creating a sense of, like, the primeval, the primordial. Plus the tales really are awful and dreadful and creepy as hell 😱

ALTHOUGH, this: Lovecraft's work is occasionally kind of racist? 😬

There are negative caricatures of Black characters. There is an underlying acceptance of ethnic and cultural hierarchies. There is an obsession with genealogy 🧬 and an attendant abhorrence of "mixing blood" with those who are different—of creating "half-breeds". To some extent these attitudes reflect the times—Lovecraft was at his most prolific in the 1920s and 1930s—but such elements are so pervasive that it's impossible to just give the guy a pass 😡 It can be disturbing

BUT that observation has me reflecting on the degree to which the horror genre GENERALLY leans into anxiety over what we do not understand, and suspicion of what we regard as foreign or strange—of fear of the Other. The seeds of prejudice and of horror fiction are the same!!—maybe? I'm not sure what to make of the idea?—but, food for thought 🤔

(Okay, well, there has been ONE concrete result of this conception of mine: I have a renewed appreciation for the filmmaker Jordan Peele 🎥🍿 whose horror movies, like 'Get Out', flip the script and demonize not the Other but the people who do the Othering! That's really cool 👏)

[Pepijn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in London I came across this volume comprised of several of Lovecraft's most well-regarded stories. Seeing as I was already interested in his mythos and had read At The Mountains of Madness a little while ago, it was a no-brainer. A few days ago I finally tackled the 10+ stories, varying in length and subject matter and I was thoroughly impressed.

First and foremost, I realise Lovecraft was a problematic individual who sympathised with my racist ideas the Nazis embraced, including eugenics. We also do not need to go over the name of his cat. In addition, these ideas (and the cat) feature in some of his stories, so we cannot and should not separate the art from the artist here. That being said, his stories were and have been revolutionary and extremely influential, so they do have their merit.

Lovecraft clearly has a formula to his works, which you quickly catch on to as you read his short stories (10 - 100 pages in range) in quick succession, but this does not take away from their quality. His use of unreliable narrators, chaotic and distressed human psyches, seen and unseen horrors, and their effects on how people understand their (lack of) place in the world/universe/time are consistently and violently challenged. Everything people think they understand is based on illusions, nobody is safe and nobody can be fully trusted to keep their wits about them. While some stories are suspenseful from start to finish, others take some time to get going, but boy do they pay off in the end.

My personal favourites from this collection were: The Call of Cthulhu (classic/OG), The Dunwhich Horror (truly terrifying) and The Shadow out of Time (as an H.G. Wells The Time Machine fan). Honourable mention for The Shadow over Innsmouth, because it had a great twist in its 'fishy' (extremely funny if you've read it, thank you) tale.

My usual critique is that some books run out of steam or could've been more poignant if they'd been somewhat shorter, but this is something I cannot accuse HPL of. This man has a method to his madness and there is nothing said that doesn't play some role in piecing together the puzzle of the Cthulhu/Elder/Old Ones mythos. I can easily see Poe shine through his work and how HPL in turn has inspired many other writers all the way to the 21st century. He is truly a behemoth in the land of weird horror fiction. Read it if you dare.

[Demi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t think I’ve written a review for a book in years, but this collection was so repetitive, boring, and unnecessarily wordy that I need to get this out of my system.

I understand these stories were written around the turn of the century and so, unfortunately, there is an undertone of racism in almost every single story. But unlike other authors I’ve read from this era, it’s not just an outdated term or a sentence here or there. It’s clear that for HP Lovecraft, the greatest conceivable horror is black or native people. Aside from the constant belittling and moralizing of other cultures, most of the story’s endings were the reveal that it was black and native people secretly worshipping the “devil”. Essentially, he’s writing about voodoo.

I can’t tell you how many stories had an identical set-up. Highly educated white man hears stories and rumors of horror and either through reading letters, word of mouth, or documents, recounts to us what he has discovered. Already, I’ll note here, that’s a boring ass way to tell a story. Especially for any of the longer stories, none of the actual narrators experience any horror. They are simple recounting another person’s recounting. And anytime a terrifying moment is about to happen, HP Lovecraft takes A WHOLE PAGE to warn u about how scary the reveal is going to be. And it’s like….ummmm, I’ll be the judge of that. Please don’t spoil your own story HP. How about you just tell me what happened, and I’ll handle my own emotions.

Aside from all of this, this is just so unnecessarily wordy. I enjoy a long book. I enjoy a book which has a fancy prose style. I enjoy a book that is not afraid to meander. This is so much more than meandering. A narrator will spend pages and pages discussing a vast family history that bears no relevance on the story, for no other perceivable reason than to clarify his own superiority.

I think a lot of the horror elements were effective in concept, and imaginative. I wish I could just have Jeff Vandermeer rewrite all these stories in his own words. The more I’m writing this, the more I’m realizing, my big issue is just HP Lovecraft. I think any one of these stories could’ve worked for me, if it was just ANYBODY ELSE was writing it. I hate this guys POV.

[Natalie Remiszewski · Rating 3 out of 5]

i left this anthology of some of hp lovecraft’s works feeling satisfied but slightly underwhelmed. i picked this book up for super cheap at my local bookstore and, though im usually NOT a horror girlie, i was interested in the eldritch horror genre that lovecraft had pioneered. something about it felt less scary and thus, more approachable than your typical horror stories. in this way, i think it was a really good intro to the genre for someone who is usually afraid of their own shadow. i generally enjoyed the stories and their brevity made them really nice to pop in and read in tandem with another book.

my biggest issue with lovecraft’s work is that it is both extremely repetitive and predictable as well as the fact that he uses unexplainable horror as a replacement for decently describing what is happening. if i had a dollar for every time he called something “indescribably horrible” or “too terrifying to think about” or anything like that, i could buy a library filled with “unexplainably horrible” books. his stories also tended to follow a very predictable pattern in that it would be a ton of buildup and genuinely the very last sentence of the chapter/story would be the reveal. this made the stories a little boring after a while and i would actually have to cover the last page up to avoid accidentally reading the end. there’s also, obviously, a lot of really racist language and names used in the stories so just prepare.

overall, the stories were entertaining and fun to read and made me want to explore the horror genre a little more (i’ve got skelton crew on deck now at the recommendation of a friend!), so they’ve got that going for them. they’re relatively approachable as long as you don’t hyper focus on the old language too much and they don’t require much time investment due to their length. they can get a bit repetitive and monotonous, but kinda like how a scooby doo episode feels after you’ve been watching it for a few hours. you know who’s under the mask (it’s always some weird cult to blame) but it’s still fun to watch anyway. would recommend for someone to pick up as long as you don’t set your expectations too high.

[IamKatsuo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lo importancia que supuso este señor a toda la Mitología actual tétrica es innegable, aunque he encontrado bastante regulares sus cuentos. La llamada de Cthulhu empieza increíble, tiene un misticismo y estudio tras él que asombra, pero como muchos de sus relatos decae en gran medida al no dejar suelta o en incógnita esas fuerzas del Cosmos incomprensibles, deshaciéndose de ellas con facilidad y no imponiendo así una amenaza real.
La Tragedia de Dunwich es magnifica, y de nuevo tiene el bache final, pero la angustia y saber de primera mano que algo anda mal, y no puede ser parado es muy terrorífico, me encantó. La mejor novela que leí suya hasta la fecha.
La sombra sobre Insmouth pintaba ESPECTACULAR en ambientación, el pueblo pescador con aires de terror se puede incluso decir que sentó base esta obra, y mucho potencial que se trató de manera rápida y que con mayor calma hubiera sido top1.

Tras esto leí unos cuentos cortos de apenas 20 paginas, Ratas en las paredes prometía mucho e infligía un tanto de incomodidad, que si era el objetivo genuinamente conseguido. Finalmente el Modelo de Pickman resulto bastante curiosa y extraña a la par, intrigante.
Los 2 últimos cuentos fueron Hipnos, que me flipo el viaje lleno de porros que dio (Un comienzo un tanto gay que si se hubiera dado cuenta Lovecraft creo que se mataría XD) y El Intruso, que es corto y al punto, perfectos ambos.

[Judith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have now read quite a few classic and modern classic horror stories, and the majority of them always left me this sense of unfulfilled potential: writing from the 19th century and early 20th century often felt too distant from the action and senses for it to be sufficiently spooky. I knew Lovecraft was one of the founding fathers of horror fiction (on top of being a super gross and racist character lol), but I had so far never read any of his stories. After finishing this collection I definitely understand how influential he has been to later authors: finally, some truly hair-rising classics !!

« Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. » (The Outsider)

« There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an inde-finable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. » (The Music of Erich Zann)

« 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 Call of Cthulhu)

« They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it, something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part. »

« Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth. » (The Colour our of space)

« Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror. »

« It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. »

« Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps!? lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence. » (the Dunwich Horror)

« The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. »

« I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name. »
(The Haunter of the dark)

« But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. »

[S.O.B · Rating 3 out of 5]

H.P. Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror, and for that he deserves respect.

Unfortunately, the short stories are difficult to read and often not entertaining. There is so much detail in his writing, but not the fun visual mind-theater type of detail. We are talking the historical and boring worldbuilding detail which is a chore to read, like studying for a history test back in high school.

I read all the short stories as I felt they are an important piece of literary history, but I did not enjoy the process.

Still, three stars because it was written in a different time for a different type of audience.

[Carsen Grave · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have rated “The Call of Cthulhu” a 3/5, had it not been for the terrifying ideas expressed within. That ever-looming fear of the unknown is what makes the story so gripping— something Lovecraft masterfully instills at times. On the other hand, his documentary approach towards telling this story often feels tired and boring. It lacks charisma. After I finished the book, I couldn’t even remember the main characters’ names. Lovecraft probably should have devoted more time focusing on our protagonists and what they are feeling.

[Sofía Frausto · Rating 4 out of 5]

If only it didn't have that last awful story! It's so goddamn descriptive, it's the first book ever I could not finish and I won't. I'm sure it is for someone (freak!) but not for me. Otherwise the first four stories were amazing and very descriptive, yes, but in a good way, in a, there's-still-things-that-happen-way. My favorite was The Dunwich Horror, mostly for the atmosphere and I'm excited to re-read The Call of Cthulhu in a couple months for school.

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 — hella creepy, and did such a great job eliciting terror through the rapid dissent into madness of the characters. everything from the setting, the widespread phenomena of people in separate places all over the world experiencing the same dreams and visions, and the concept of “some things the human mind is not able to comprehend,” added up to a thoroughly chill-inducing story. my thalassophobia hates me for reading this 😅

[Faith Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cthulhu is honestly one of the poorer short stories from Lovecraft. The feeling of “Eldritch horror” is better felt in stories including “The Color out of Space”, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”, and “The Shadow in the Dark”.

Klinger’s annotations mostly take away from the stories rather than add to them. Some annotations are painfully unnecessary and basic.

[Helby · Rating 3 out of 5]

these stories are probably best picked up sporadically rather than plowing through the book as a whole. The majority of the stories follow the same exact structure - first person narrator telling a story of something that happened to someone else who’s either dead or missing, or a story that someone else told him. Gets very tedious.

[Pedro Garrido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me se había olvidado que me leí esto este año pasado. Dentro de este compendio desde luego hay de todo… son muchos libros y algunos realmente merecen mucho la pena y dan mal rollo y otros se hacen bastante bola por la forma de escritura que tienen. Aún así varios de ellos más que recomendables y sin duda ejemplo de muchísimas de las obras de ciencia ficción de nuestro tiempo.

[Asher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it but the stories seemed to blend together and lose their appeal after a while, feeling like the same story told in different ways. Probably on me as horror isn't really my cup of tea but still am glad I read it. Definitely should not have read while in the Arctic.

[Kiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d probably have to read a physical copy instead of an audiobook fr but like it wasn’t spooky for me fr, just verbose n occasionally racist - “nautical negro” went crazy fr why would he say that 😭 LOVEE the emphasis on how ugly whateley was tho lmao

[Lee Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some stories are interesting others are hard to get through. He has an interesting style when it comes to describing otherworldly creatures which is great, but many stories narrative build-up is boring.

[Sophia Jae]

Ich hab nicht genau dieses Buch gelesen, deswegen weiß ich nicht, ob es die selben Kurzgeschichten sind. Aber ich empfehle es auf Deutsch zu lesen, ich hab weniger als die Hälfte verstanden und konnte mich deshalb nicht so drauf einlassen. Die beste Geschichte war the dunwich Horrors.