Wake Up Screaming

by H.P. Lovecraft

A collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Fiction, Fantasy, Lovecraftian, Science Fiction, Anthologies

370 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Jason Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book a couple of years ago. Many friends had suggested checking him out due to my affinity for horror. A month ago I was reading a book which proved to be FUBAR due to missing about 50 pages, and had to order a replacement online. I wanted to read something light that I could put back down when the replacement arrived, so I grabbed this. I thought it would be light since it was a bunch of short stories, but I was mistaken. Lovecraft is best enjoyed with a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia standing by if you wish to understand everything he's talking about. I was able to glean the meaning of most unfamiliar words due to the context, but there were a couple I had to look up. This was actually kind of exciting because those words weren't in the regular dictionary, and I had to consult the unabridged. I love going to the unabridged. It's like a half foot thick, and looking in it makes me feel like a powerful sorcerer consulting a spell. (I really need to get a lectern for it).

In order to enjoy Lovecraft properly, one must take him into historical context and realize that he is quite dated. He's considered by some to be one of the fathers of modern horror right alongside Poe. Lovecraft wrote in the 1920s and 30s, and his themes have been so thoroughly explored and packed into books, movies, and television shows since then that one can see the "surprise ending" to the original stories from a mile away. While this didn't detract from my enjoyment of reading them, I was still amazed when considering that not only did someone write this kind of stuff down (a lot of thick demonology [or daemonology as he would've spelled it; he seems to like archaic terms and spellings] in these stories), but he also had the cojones to attempt to get them published in that day and age when such things were hardly mainstream.

I enjoyed the stories in this book, but I must confess that I'm relieved to be done with it. I don't think I'll get another one of his random story books (most of what he wrote was short stories), though I do intend to check out "The Call of Cthulhu" and a story about a painter if I can find it. While the stories are good, sometimes they get really thick, and extremely slow, and I was reminded of the old Dick Tracy comic strip in the newspaper where the man would enter a room in the first panel, walk across the room in the second, and then reach a door at the other end of the room in the third; it took him fucking forever to do anything. This was the case for many of Lovecraft's characters. He would be standing somewhere, then would take a step, consider the terrain and other deep matters, then take another step, pause, look around, consider more deep thoughts, then take another step... Sometimes I wanted to shout to the author "God dammit, man, would you just get his ass down the road? Hemingway would've had him enjoying his retirement by now." The story I have specifically in mind for this observation is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I understand this is a suspense building technique, but I found it to be a bit distracting. However, please don’t think that I didn’t enjoy that story; it was actually one of my favorites in the book, his slow speed escape notwithstanding.

Here are some things I enjoy about Lovecraft: he could occasionally throw out a good turn-o-phrase, which I always love. I'll give a couple of examples further down. He was also extremely racist, and said some things that were awesomely awful. Being a history dude, I love to see this kind of stuff in books and writings for historical purposes. The world really was a different place back then, and nobody batted an eye if horrible things were said about black people. Recall that the second KKK was enjoying its major heyday at the time that Lovecraft was doing most of his writing, and it was nothing for people in full Klan gear to be marching around the streets. In fact, the KKK was never more popular than it was during the 1920s when it was estimated to have six million members, which was just a bit more than 5% of the population, a HUGE percentage comparatively. (In 2008, KKK membership was estimated at 0.002% of the US population).

And there I go again. I tell ya, never get me started on historical stuff. Sorry about that; back to the book. Here's a description of a negro in one story from the “Herbert West – Reanimator” series: “The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination showed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life – but the world holds many ugly things.”

Yeah, try getting that past an editor or publisher today. Oh. My. GOD! One of the stories even had a black cat named Nig, and he goes whole hog in another story (which isn’t in this collection), and names the cat Nigger Man. So, if such things offend you, it’s probably best that you not check out Lovecraft at all, for many of the stories are peppered with unflattering descriptions of persons not Anglo-Saxon.

“The Terrible Old Man” was probably my favorite story in the book, and was also the shortest, totaling three pages to the sentence. You can see the ending coming from about the first couple of paragraphs, so it’s not the surprise factor that does it for me. No, it was the witty way in which most of it was written. Here are a couple of examples, paraphrased: “It was the design of (three names) to call on the Terrible Old Man. (He was) reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. (three names) for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery…. Messrs. (three names) selected the night of April 11th for their call. (two names) were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst (third name waited in the hidden car). Desire to avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.”

Great stuff!

I also thoroughly enjoyed “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “From Beyond” due to their intensely cerebral foci, and the first one did have an ending that caught me a tad off guard. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” was probably my favorite, and it’s actually more of a novella (about 140 pages). Since I don’t want to mark this review as containing spoilers, I’m going to leave it at that, and let you read it yourself to find out what’s so great about it.

So: three stars for Mr. Lovecraft. Good stories but a bit weighty at times. I didn’t wake up screaming while reading it, and in fact I occasionally fell asleep yawning from time to time. (This is due to no fault of the author; it’s just something I do when reading late at night). Also, I’m not a major fan of short stories to begin with, so that alone drops it by one star. If you do like short stories, horror, and bizarre weirdness, then you should definitely check him out.

[Bre · Rating 5 out of 5]

My intro to the old school master of terror. This is a great place to start HPL school, where Cthculu presides, ready to whip you into shape. Sadly, no ctchulu in this one just intense tales of madness and the like. You know...uh...just your typical book. My fav from this was Beyond the walls of sleep. LOTS of new words in here for ye young uns that you can haul out the Websters for. Or...well, you could just google it but that sucks out the fun, doesn't it?

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every reader should read a tiny bit of Lovecraft to get exposed to his distinct style. He is well known for his stories of dread that invoke terrors by describing them as indescribable. I found myself thinking it was a shame that he got stuck in his own little sub-genre, because he had a powerful gift of discernment and vocabulary that worked just as well when he creates a scene of a New England town who's fishing industry has collapsed as when he creates a scene of the Indescribable Horrors of the Unknown.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being Providence: An Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft, by Poppy Z. Brite - 4 Stars
Cool Air - 4 Stars
The Hound - 5 Stars
The Lurking Fear - 5 Stars
The Terrible Old Man - 4 Stars
The Unnamable - 3 Stars
Beyond the Wall of Sleep - 5 Stars
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - 5 Stars
The White Ship - 3.5 Stars
The Outsider - 4 Stars
Herbert West—Reanimator - 5 Stars
Arthur Jermyn - 4 Stars
The Moon-Bog -4 Stars
The Temple - 4.5 Stars
Dagon - 5 Stars
From Beyond - 4.25 Stars
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - 5 Stars

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So Lovecraft's definitely the man in terms of influencing modern horror... I can appreciate that. Something about his writing kind of keeps me at a distance, if that makes any sense, so I find it hard to really FEEL when reading these stories. That's a big part of what makes or breaks a story for me.

Overall, I think he's at his best doing short, atmospheric stuff, the longer stories just don't hold my attention as well - "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" especially dragged for me. Spooky stuff, though, and it's good to know your history. I'll be reading more, since I know this was only a tiny selection of the Lovecraft mythos.

Plus now I can buy a Hello Cthulhu doll and not feel like a total poser :)

[Daniel Willers · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion, the best collection of Lovecraft's short stories. These are the stories that didn't deal with dreams or much of the Cthulhu Mythos. They are still vintage Lovecraft, but they are dealing with some of the other stuff in his universe. Mad scientists, evil wizards, and cultists are the fare for this book. Well written, mostly approachable, and overall well done. The only one I thought was sub-par was Dagon, which was merely mediocre. But 1 out of 16 is pretty good.

If you are into horror and haven't read much of HP Lovecraft, this is a great book to start with. If you have read a lot of Lovecraft, you will still get a lot of enjoyment from some of the references to other stories you may have read. Good stuff all around.

[Rob Marquess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, I'm basking in the warm ambiance of adjective-laden, comma bespeckled, well-written language. Granted, there's the living-dead doctor, bored grave robbers and such. But, this is nice.

[Franchescanado · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gets 4 stars as a H.P. Lovecraft collection, and 3 stars as a personal reading experience.

If someone were to ask for an introductory Lovecraft collection, this seems like the best one-stop shop. It's missing some of his best stories (Pickman's Model, Dreams in the Witch House, for examples), but it provides one of the clearest experiences of "What is a Lovecraft story?"

Lovecraft is maybe the most misrepresented author in all of horror. We give him all the credit for two things: 1) big, ancient bizarre monsters, usually with tentacles, that are so scary that 2) a character is presented with a horror so unimaginable, they go insane.

Which isn't entirely true. But everyone gets mad when I try to correct them.

Lovecraft does explore these ideas in his stories, but that is not a representation of what it's like reading his stories. He's obsessed with first-person narratives, usually epistolatory, so it's oftentimes like listening to or reading a letter from a pretentious blow-hard who can't shut up about how totally sane he was. (There isn't much fun in applying unreliable narrators to the stories, either.) Most of his characters feel like lightly veiled projections of himself as the protagonist. His narrators are obsessed with elements to ground the story in mundanities (like taxonomies, geometry, biology, genealogy, and especially geography) so that the terror at the end of the story hits harder. Again, it often feels like you are trapped in conversation with a talkative weirdo at a pary, and he won't stop telling you about his hobby.

The stories aren't action-oriented, which is what most modern fiction is obsessed with. Not much happens in these stories. So if someone hears Bloodborne, a videogame that is mostly action-oriented and the narrative links are obscure, is inspired by Lovecraft, and then they sit down to read Lovecraft, they are probably expecting the characters to do something, which they often don't do. Which is why I suspect that most people that claim Lovecraft is their favorite author, or that they love reading him, or he's a literary hero of theirs, are full of shit and haven't actually read him. I like reading stories or novels where there isn't much literal action, and I find Lovecraft usually boring, but that's mostly from his prose and how he structures the stories.

I say all these criticisms at Lovecraft to praise this collection, because it manages to provide what a theoretical reader of Lovecraft is looking for (The Unnamable, The Lurking Fear, From Beyond), but also provides examples of where Lovecraft excelled (Cool Air, The Hound, The White Ship) and also his most notorious, but heavily flawed stories (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Herbert West -- Reanimator).

It's not a perfect collection. I think there are glaring omissions, I think some of the stories are a waste of time, I would resequence the stories. Nonetheless, if someone said "I want to read Lovecraft, where do I begin?", this book is an excellent introduction, interesting, and affordable.

[Elmer Foster · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a horror fan, I admit that most of my early horror enjoyment was produced by writers heavily influenced by Howard P. Lovecraft. I don't need to name them because they make up the Who's Who of Horror. And perhaps through them Lovecraft is immortal.

H.P.'s legacy is within the affect that his stories had on my favorite writers in their formative years. His stories for me, however, were mundane, rudimentary, clearly indicative of his time and generation. Most were glacially moving observations of a boringly uneventful era with regards to being scared. The technology of today alone would cower anyone from that era into a stupor.

As compiled, the tales had a vibe of sameness, perhaps intentionally, especially in the Moon -Bog / Temple/ Dagon segment of the book. Few stood out for me: Cool Air, the Terrible Old Man, Reanimator, From Beyond, and Charles Dexter Ward(only because of the book-size nature of the story.) I had provided a stars out of 5 insight (if you are so inclined to know). Be forewarned, at no time did I feel haunted nor wake up screaming, as these tales made for a better sleep aid than anything else.

Cool Air - 4 Stars
The Hound - 2 Stars, The Lurking Fear - 2 Stars,
The Terrible Old Man - 3 Stars, The Unnamable - 2 Stars,
Beyond the Wall of Sleep - 3 Stars,
The Shadow Over Innsmouth - 3 Stars,
The White Ship - 3 Stars, The Outsider - 2.5 Stars
Herbert West—Reanimator - 3.5 Stars
Arthur Jermyn - 2 Stars, The Moon-Bog -2 Stars, The Temple - 2 Stars, Dagon - 2 Stars
From Beyond - 4 Stars
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - 3.5 Stars

The themes are recurring and repetitive, the racism is prevalent throughout his descriptors and implications, and the language reflects a different time of uneducated masses that seemed to populate the Nor'Easter regions. Taken(read) with a grain of salt and nearly a century's worth of advancement in humanity, these tales probably wouldn't make print in the mainstream today.

They were engaging enough as a collection-for a fan of the horror genre.
Decide wisely, but for yourself.
Thanks for reading.

[Blogul · Rating 3 out of 5]

gems of literary mastercraft, they still are, and pure joy to read as poetry of the words.
scary, though? Not at all, the 1920's terrors are ridiculous and not horrifying at all to the modern reader.
Also, the excessive use of "indescribable, unnameable, words cannot describe, unspeakable" and so on is annoying and boring; it was probably necessary to not outrage the prudish readers of its age, but today it feels like the author was too lazy to imagine the monsters himself, leaving that to the reader.
Mediocre. Maybe they are not his best, or maybe simply the real world got too dark to be impressed by Lovecraft's. I actually enjoyed Poppy Z Brite way more (she's a modern Lovecraftian).

[Farid Medleg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bailed on this with 60 pages left. It's just not my thing. I got into Lovecraft thinking I could peel back the curtains to examine one of the fathers of fantasy, but I got someone whose style is not for me. The casual racism is also hard to digest.

I can't dispute his place in the history books of fantasy and horror literature, but this will be it for me.

[Adrian Gazaway · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate to say it, but I thought "Cool Air" was kind of lame with a ridiculous twist ending. The rest range from weird and confusing but fine (The Moon-Bog and Reanimator) to excellent (The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Outsider). The novel at the end, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is also very good if you can get past the huge exposition dump at the beginning.

[Caitie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great for anyone who wants to get introduced to the magnificence of Lovecraft's writing. Offers a variety of short stories that creep you out more with each one. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is probably my favorite(of course).

[Brett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably 3.5 stars. Phrasing is a bit long-winded for me, I just wanted Mr. Lovecraft to get to the point. But, I get it, you need to set the mood and create the atmosphere for a story. I am a patient reader, however I felt my mind wandering away. Overall, I’m glad to have read this.

[Peter Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fun. The stories were pretty predictable, but I wonder if they would have been if I read them in the 1930s. For a fan of horror fiction, this is the infancy, the inspiration.

[Cate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wasn't sure I would like HP Lovecraft, as I am not a huge horror fan, at all. I actually really loved the stories. 5⭐

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why the racism dude? Seriously.

[Tillie Sefel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book! Completed to understand but really good once you get what's going on.

[Bill Borre]

The Temple is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
The Terrible Old Man is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
The White Ship is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

You inquire about my immunity to trivial social problems, the cure of which, according to my social interactions and compounded by steady hands, I appear to be the author of? The truth is, I carry a weight of drama upon my back heretofore unseen by the likes of typical men and women. You ask me if I ever tire of the inflexible circumstances presented to me on behalf of my so-called brothers. And I reply, nay. For it is the outside forces of others' unrelenting evil that keep my darkest days at bay.

But, friend, you say, all is not lost. Surely the entirety of the world is a brighter painting than the ink and oil you have chosen to contribute to it. I find I cannot answer in any satisfactory manner.

Spare me the righteous speak of pits in pears and clouds with silver lining. I know your type- young and naive to think the world so malleable as to be changed by free will alone. You have witnessed wind change direction by the work of man, and water swell above its natural desires, and thus you view the capacity of man in similar light. Well, I have seen what men are capable of, and justice is not one of them.

They come to me in droves, troubled souls, hell in hand, and ask that I may dispell their woes with my powerful words and “borrowed” virtues. But this is not the tongue of a god. Mine are the army of demons. To send away the pain and suffering, I extract the very essence of humanity capable of such vivid passions. Leaving behind a bleak and empty heart, they are well. They do not feel again until such travesties as greed and lust force a savage and brutal residence in this newly evacuated host.

I recall, for wanton use of the term nightmare, a memory of the most haunted of these procedures. He arrived at my estate on a night thunderously vigor. His fear of collapsing skies subsided to the lurking evil that had irrevocably assumed his companionship. Unrestricted by the tardiness of the night, he propositioned to me a request for salvation. Salvation not of any such simple natured things as harm or theological sins. This was a man beset by fear in it’s most depraved form.

In years before, laying eyes upon his dearest love had consumed all forms of aberration; much to the point that his well being had become dependent on the sight of this loved one. It was in this sense that his wife had become a potent and crudely effective medicine keeping this man from insanity. But exactly twenty days earlier, and indeed on this very night, the spitting image of his beloved had become infused with that of another man. Tonight was to be the last night his eyes would lay upon the bereft image of his almighty love in the arms of another man. So to me he came, the side effect of his altered medication causing a massive tremble in his hands.

I spoke with marionetted cadence. Each word gilded by the presumption of my apparent stability. In what way could I save this man from his torment? I knew the answer long before I reasoned with myself to hide from it. This was the horror I have rejected from myself and in turn deflected into others.

Papers and columns have henceforth read of a man who, upon stumbling upon his wife making love with a stranger killed both in an exorbitance of passion. In those same words, I recognize rested souls and deserved outcomes. For you, I hope your queries of both my doppleganger disposition and reading preferences are settled.*

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this book is a combination of the already-reviewed The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, so I’m not going to bother re-reviewing all those stories. However, the reason I picked this up when I found it is because it had three stories that so far as I know had never been included in any of the 1970s Del Rey collections I devoured as an adolescent, so I was eager to finally read them. I don’t know for certain why they had originally been omitted, although in each case they have aspects that might make them “objectionable” to modern audiences, so I will mention those in their separate paragraphs below:

“The Cool Air” is one of the stories I bought this book for, and it is an effectively chilly (heh) story about a doctor who has achieved a tenuous kind of immortality, evidently through killing himself and reanimating his imperfectly-preserved corpse. He has to stay within low-temperatures in order to prevent rot, and inevitably the air conditioning breaks down. Lovecraft’s narrator is fairly transparently auto-biograpical – a young, impoverished writer of good breeding who moves in to the flat below the doctor. Lovecraft’s racism is somewhat exposed through his depiction of the Hispanic landlady, and especially his clumsy attempts to render her accent, but overall this is an enjoyable story.

“The Terrible Old Man” appeared in none of the books I reviewed so far, although I think I had read it before this came out. It is a very short story in which a group of would-be thieves get their comeuppance at the hands of an aged sailor who may be a wizard. There is a scent of xenophobia about it, as the thieves all have foreign names and it appears to be implied that their origin is explanation enough for their profession. The story works well enough, but is so short that there is little chance for development of characters or situation.

“Herbert West – Reanimator” was the other story I bought this volume for. I had never read it, although the movie came out years before and I had wanted to since then. It is the story of a pair of medical students who discover a formula for bringing the dead back to life, but learn the hard way how hard it is to reunite the body with the soul after the fact. The structure is interesting. Each of the “chapters” appears to have been meant to run in series, printed once a month or every other month in a magazine. Because people might start in the middle, the beginning of each chapter re-caps the previous ones, which tends to be a bit awkward when it is read all at once. It can be seen as a predecessor to “Night of the Living Dead” and the current cannibalistic zombie craze. It includes some rather extreme descriptions of an African American victim of West’s, making frequent comparisons with gorillas and other primates, possibly some of the crudest of Lovecraft’s racist descriptions, but these make up a relatively small part of the story.

[Ben Arzate · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have vague memories of reading a Lovecraft book back in high school. If I did, I don't remember anything about it, even the title. So for all practical purposes this was my introduction to Lovecraft.

He's just as good as they say he is. For the most part. There are two stories in here I really didn't like.

The first was "Herbert West--Reanimator". The story was fine but I hated the way it was written. I know the story was originally serialized in a magazine, so the recaps at the beginning of each "chapter" made sense there. Reading it all at once, it becomes incredibly grating to read summaries of what you just read every few pages. This probably could have been edited into a much better read, but Lovecraft apparently didn't like this story so he probably wasn't interested.

Lovecraft apparently also didn't like THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD. I didn't either. It picked up towards the middle, but for the most part I thought this novella was very tedious and had far too weak a payoff for its length.

These are, respectively, the 3rd longest and the longest stories and together they make up close to half the book. That's why I gave this collection 3 stars. They were both especially disappointing since THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH, the 2nd longest story, was really good (though it did drag a bit during the exposition).

I don't have much to say about the rest of the stories other than I really liked them. Even ones where I saw the ending coming from miles away still sucked me in.

So yeah. Lovecraft. He's awesome. For the most part.

[Shannon Ibarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't usually read horror or the macabre but Lovecraft's writing style allows the reader to fill in the gaps with their own imagination and made me enjoy a little darkness that I could illuminate on my own. His ease with language and timing really drew me in to a world of untold creepiness. It is a shame that his writings weren't noticed until many years after his death but it is probably better that way since it probably would have tainted his work with commercialism.

Many times I felt like I was reading the beginnings of what could easily have been long lost X-files cases. His story "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" (the last in this series of short stories) was my favorite and filled me with a strong sense of dread and foreboding. Toward the end of the story their as a faint feeling of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, only more sinister. It really was the best of the lot and the most full bodied story. Having played the Lovecraft inspired board game Eldritch Horror, many times, I have grown to have a deeper appreciation for the literary world he created.

[Brandon Cardona · Rating 5 out of 5]

I forgot just how good Lovecraft was. When people think of horror writers, the first name that usually comes to mind is Stephen King. After that, they would probably name Poe. Lovecraft fell in between the two. I first discovered his writing back in my first year of Junior High, and then they put out a movie version of his short story (which is included in this collection) Herbert West - Reanimator. The movie did not do his story justice at all, but seemed to want to go more for shock value than actual terror. The movie came out as Rated X for all the gore, but the short story was not that graphic. Lovecraft never actually saw his work collected in a book during his lifetime. Instead they were published one at a time in the pulp magazines of the era. It was only after his death, that he first started getting the recognition that he actually deserved in life. If you love the King's or Poe's of the writing world, do yourself a favor and check out Lovecraft.

[Lisa]

As a whole this collection of horror stories was disturbing and a lot less scary than I imagined they would be. Lovecraft had a way of describing a scene that made the story feel real, which in the case of horror is uncomfortable.
In one story a man stares death in the face. After reading "The Lurking Fear" I dare you to ever think of a thunderstorm the same way again! My favorite was a sort of historical fiction meets psychological thriller with a twist at the end which might explain the mythical lost city of Atlantis.
My problem with the book became that I had to read slowly because too much time spent with disturbing story after disturbing story started to make me dread reading. This would have been better read over the course of a month or more reading one story at a time with other books between.

[janne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some short stories I really enjoyed. Others weren't that interesting. Mostly, this book put me to sleep. A lot. But I powered through it. The last short story, the Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and the second longest short story in the book were both pretty good. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was maybe the best story in the book, despite the first two thirds constantly putting me to sleep with the details, exposition, and lack of dialogue. But the last third really picked up and was so captivating that I didn't want to put the book down. It'd make for an excellent adaptation. While I'm glad I finished this book, I also look forward to never reading it again.

Demoting this from 3 to 2 stars because I really didn't like the majority of this book and I never want to look at it again. Wouldn't recommend. Absolute snooze fest.

[Thomas Gaffney · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are 16 "short" stories from H.P. Lovecraft. Well, 15 short stories and one 120+ page story that I just couldn't get through, no matter how much I tried.

What I liked:
Cool Air
The Terrible Old Man
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Herbert West - Reanimator
Arthur Jermyn
The Moon-Bog
Dagon

What I didn't like:
The Hound, The Lurking Fear, and The Unnameable were all basically the same "monster" story told in three different ways.

The White Ship was just a simple morality story. I totally wasn't expecting that.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the aforementioned 120+ page snoozer. WAY too much time on the ancestor of CDW, with absolutely nothing going on.

[Sassbot5000 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a collection of some of H.P. Lovecraft's best stories (like The Shadow of Innsmouth). I enjoyed many of them it just took me forever to get through because I do much of my reading at night and I couldn't do that with this book, it brought on too many weird dreams. I also would only read one or two stories at a time and then think on them. It is very hard to put down in the middle of a story though. I really enjoyed The Shadow of Innsmouth and The Unnameable. I enjoyed parts of the largest story in the book, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, but felt there was a great deal of unnecessary detail. It was one of the only stories I only read in segments instead of all at once.

[Aprille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book#9, 2008: I have to be honest. Lovecraft had been so hyped as a master of terror, that I felt I must be horribly jaded as I read most of this book. Creepy, gross things, yes. Terrifying, no. In most stories, I figured out the deal early on, so all of his work building suspense was just in the way. That said, I did really enjoy "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" - the novella at the close of this collection. I didn't have it totally right at the start and I enjoyed the history of Providence it wrapped in.

[Marten Hoyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine collection of short stories by the master of 20th century horror. It contained some old favorites (the best, in my opinion, being "The Outsider") I had forgotten just how frightening Lovecraft was. "Cool Air" er...chilled me..."The Hound" scared the Hell out of me and every tale contained a certain power which absorbed my mind. I however do not think this book would be a good introduction to Lovecraft's body of work. If you are reading this, I recommend The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre as a good place to start.