The Collected Stories 1

by H.P. Lovecraft

---- This edition has a linked "Table of Contents" and has been beautifully formatted (searchable and interlinked) to work on your Amazon e-book reade or your iPod e-book reader. ----- From the mind of pulp great, H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien.He's 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 Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Christian humanism. -----48 Stories included in this volume The Beast in the Cave;The Alchemist;The Tomb;Dagon;A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson;Sweet Ermengarde;Polaris;The Green Meadow;Beyond the Wall of Sleep;MemoryOld Bugs;The Transition of Juan Romero;The White Ship;The Doom that Came to Sarnath;The Statement of Randolph Carter;The Terrible Old Man;The Tree;The Cats of Ulthar;The Temple;Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn;The Street;Poetry and the Gods;Celephais;From Beyond;Nyarlathotep;The Picture in the House;The Crawling Chaos;Ex Oblivione;The Nameless City;The Quest of Iranon;The Moon-Bog;The Outsider;The Other Gods;The Music of Erich Zann;Herbet Reanimator;Hypnos;What the Moon Brings;Azathoth;The Horror at Martin's Beach;The Hound;The Lurking Fear;The Rats in the Walls;The Unnamable;The Festival;The Shunned House;The Horror at Red Hook;He;In the Vault ---- Full of intrigue, romance and adventure, this collection is a must for pulp literature fans!

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction

299 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

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

[Roope Kanninen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovecraftin teokset on näissä kokoelmissa laitettu julkaisujärjestykseen ja ainakin moni näistä hänen ensimmäisistä novelleistaan on minusta aika tylsiä. Mukana on kuitenkin myös suosikkejani, kuten "The Temple" ja ilahduin kun opin Lovecraftilla olleen jouluteemainenkin tarina (The Festival).

[Michael Mangold · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Lovecraft, and volume one of his collected stories seemed the best place to start. I wasn't quite sure what to expect but feared I'd be quickly bored and turned off by old-fashioned fancypants writing so I kept my expectations low. My expectations were quickly exceeded, all-around.

The aforementioned fancypants are on full display, their baroque inefficiencies often making it difficult to advance at a respectable pace. The book is just over 300 pages but it took me much longer to read than a typical book of this length. Lovecraft seems to add words for the sole purpose of concealing meaning rather than revealing it. And the word selections, often with odd spellings, make Amazon Kindle's look-up feature a godsend for reading these stories. My Kindle Vocabulary Builder now includes words like "auriferous," "tumuli," and "entablature." I will never use the word "singular" which I now believe to have been superseded in current usage by the word "amazing."

I never wanted to quit reading, though. Lovecraft's imagination is fresh and clever, his stories provocative and wondrous even after a century of having birthed countless derivative works. A favorite from this collection is "From Beyond," a revelation that we are always surrounded by demonic creatures, exposed by an inventor's electronic contraption kept in his attic laboratory. I was instantly reminded of Stephen King's belief that reality is thin, requiring only the slightest tear to unleash always-nearby marvels and horrors.

"Herbert West: Reanimator" is another favorite, itself clearly inspired by Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." One benefit of beginning Lovecraft at volume one is witnessing his writing's improvement as the chronology progresses. "Reanimator" is the first story which has any real touch of suspense, previous stories having a journalist's sense of horrors described rather than experienced. Suspense abounds in "The Hound," a story of graverobbers haunted by frequent bayings from a distant, spectral hound. A fan of hounds myself, this one rang with particular resonance. Here is found Lovecraft's first mention of "The Necronomicon," referenced further in "The Festival," his most suspenseful story in this volume.

Dislikes include "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," "The Crawling Chaos" and "The Shunned House"--all overly-descriptive slogs where little-to-nothing happens. I'll admit that I am not a visual person when reading. In my mind, characters are distinguished by their, well, character--by what they do or by their placement on the antagonist/protagonist spectrum. Settings can be afforded more descriptive latitude but one passage in "The Shunned House" chronicles the house's sidewalk level, garden paraphernalia and geographic placement in more detail than an architect's rendering. I just don't enjoy that.

What I do enjoy is a good scare, especially one surrounded by genuinely spooky atmosphere. This book has plenty of that, albeit not as dense as I'd like, but perhaps foremost this book provides a chronology of one of America's greatest horror writers. Well worth the time and effort invested.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can never rate a short story collection higher than three stars - or almost never - because some stories are always so much more appealing than others. This was an ebook, and my introduction to Lovecraft. It's easy to see his influence in pretty much all the other horror fiction I've read. My favorites of these were the stories of Dr. Herbert West - Reanimator!

[Boar_amour]

The Collected Stories of H. P. Lovecraft: Volume One (48 Classic Horror Books in One Volume!) by H. P. Lovecraft (2008)