Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft

by H.P. Lovecraft

This eBook presents the complete fictional works of H. P. Lovecraft, with beautiful illustrations, rare texts and the usual Delphi bonus material.

2032 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 23, 2021

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

[Cwn_annwn_13 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without hindsight you could make a case Lovecraft is overrated. There's a certain repetitious formula to most of his stories. You have a reclusive loner type with an intellectual curious side to themselves that happen upon some sort of oddity. They snoop around a bit and happen upon supernatural otherworldly horrors that they never imagined existed. Then it goes from there more often than not with the narrator being driven insane or permanently traumatized in one way or another

These stories he wrote are good and some of them are flat out great though. Lovecraft had a gift for creating a certain unique creepy atmosphere in his stories and his influence on the horror genre in both book and film/tv is massive of course too so with hindsight you can't say he's overrated but when I read these I took all of them for what they are to me. Which is good stories with a handful of great stories in the mix but like I said there is a very repetitious formula to most of them.

[tiago. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This very long compilation of all of Lovecraft's work starts with the short stories he wrote when he was just 7 years of age. Comprehensively, not all are masterpieces; and as you progress in the reading, it becomes evident that this is not something to be said just of those earlier works. Soon it begins to dawn on you that most of these tales sound like filler, and that the gripping, haunting tales that have made Lovecraft famous are more the exception than the rule. Some are notoriously bad - Under the Pyramids, in particular, comes to mind, for its sheer ridiculousness. I can't say I find Lovecraft to be a master of his craft, but he certainly was a creative, passionate writer, who sometimes, by design or by accident, managed to strike gold.

His first stories are curiously more about ghosts and a certain fascination with a lost past than with the Cthulhu mithology he became most famous for; but from his early beginnings a certain fascination for the darkest, most out-of-reach depths in the world is evident - something that will come with full force in his later work. If his later work is more consistent, it must be said it is also more formulaic: always the adventurous individual, in a quest of curiosity, that steps on some otherwordly indescribable secret and becomes traumatized or mad as a result.

It must also be said that - much as I tried to ignore it - all of these tales are a reflection of Lovecraft's views which, I must say, don't speak very favorably of him; and to see them colour otherwise perfectly digestible stories is extremely annoying. He hates contemporary art and despises the so-called analycticism and individualism of modern literature, which speaks only of his bad taste and his uttter NEED to divulge it; but it is most of all his white supremacist views that get under my skin the most. His very badly disguised tirades make stories like The Mound unbearable. By the end of his short stories and poems I was beyond tired of it; and I didn't even attempt to read his essays, which kick off with a tirade on how contemporary poetry sucks.

Yeah, this was a hard read. Sometimes pleasant, sure, but more often than not forced and tedious.