The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

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Summary: I would recommend Call of Cthuhlu.
Review: I like this story because this is one that truely stands the test of time -- I listen to Metallica and I heard their instrumental version of Call of Kthuhlu. I started to read this story and all I heard for weeks is Kthuhlu Mythos -- I suggest reading this while listening to Metallica. It will give you more of a feel to the story. Everything I learned about writing dark horror revolved around this writer

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Summary: Ten years of love for HP!
Review: I bought this book when it first came out in 1987. I was curious about HP Lovecraft, and thought a general overview would be a good place to start. Ten years later, I still own that dog-eared, yellowed, well-thumbed book, and reread it often! Lovecraft's style combines the descriptive, chilling language of Poe with the shocking horror of Stephen King--the reader finds herself sucked into his narration all the way to the always creepy endings. I *highly* recommend this book

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Summary: Can never get too much...squid???
Review: Lovecraft was one of the most amazing and creative writers of horror, and his legacy continues today. This collection features some of his best pieces, and should be considered a "must read" for fans just becoming aquainted with this master of psychological horror.

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Summary: Buy This Book Now
Review: If you don't know about HP Lovecraft or aren't all that familiar with his work, immediately click the add to cart button at the top right of your screen.
The man was one of the most creative and influential writers to effect Western Popular Fiction in the last 150 years. If you care at all about fiction or literature (and why would you possibly be reading this if you didn't), then this is a body of work that you should have, at the least, a working knowledge of and this is, excluding At The Mouth of Madness, a great compilation of that body of work.
The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and the Shadow Out of Time are well worth the cover price alone. Everything else is just a happy conciliation prize.

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Summary: Creeperific!!!
Review: After purchasing The Doom that Came to Sarnath and At the Mountains of Madness, I decided I couldn't wait and purchased The Best of... so that I could read Call of Cthulhu. This book was sooooooo good, I could not read it fast enough. And, when it was finished, I wanted more!! (I'm currently back to At the Mountains of Madness and loving it!). The selected stories are excellent. My favorites were Call of Cthulhu and Whisperer in the Dark(ness?). Every story was freaky. A must have for every Lovecraft library. Chilling to the bone. Warning- do not read alone at night!

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Summary: The Best Horror Book I've Ever Read
Review: Although I'm not completely done reading this anthology, I have read many of the stories, six to be exact, and believe that from that I have adequate knowledge of his work to write a review for it.

The first time I was exposed to H.P.L. was in school, reading "The Hound." I absolutely loved that story and craved for more from the same author, so I asked my parents for an H.P.L book for x-mas. I am glad to say that they complied.

After recieving the book, I promptly put it in my room as to play my new guitar. But that night I decided to give it a try and, hearing that "The Rats In The Walls" was sortof boring for the first 2/3 of the story, I skipped it and procedeed to "The Picture in the House." After reading that I was hooked and continued to read the next five stories over the period of the next day.

"The Picture in the House": This story had a basic plot idea, but I really enjoyed the way he wrote it. Its about a guy who's trying to bike to Arkham but is caught in a storm so he goes to what appears to be an abandoned house. The image of the book opening to the same picture plate, the way he described the blood dripping down, and the creepy thoughts which the old man's dialogue evoked were enough to make this story somewhat scary.

"The Outsider": This one, despite being really easy to predict and not scary at all, was very enjoyable. I liked the adventure aspect of it and the overall plot, although it did get kinda boring. The plot basicly is that there is this guy who lives alone in a castle who wants to reach the outside world and see the sun and moon, which can't be seen through the thick tree foilage that covers the land.

"Pickman's Model": When first reading this I was sort of confused by the writing style. H.P.L. wrote it as a one sided conversation from the protagonists point of view. He talks about his art teacher and a time when his teacher brought him to his workplace to look at some disturbing art. Attached to one of those pieces of art is a photograph, which Pickman (the teacher) says he used to help draw the setting for some of his paintings. This one was also quite easy to figure out the truth long before its explained, but I was on the edge of my seat when reading the part where they go to the house. It wasn't exactly a scary story in the sense that we think of today, but nowdays gore rules the horror genre and true horror and terror, as defined by stephen king, are rarely seen.

"In the Vault": Another quite basic horror story, yet with an interesting reason behind it. All summed up under the Old Testament lifestyle saying "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This story is about the undertaker of a graveyard who gets locked up in a tomb with several caskets and has to make his way out.

"The Silver Key": This story was really interesting, although I do think it got a bit boring sometimes. The story isn't scary, but its worth a read, as it contains a lot of great writing.Its more of a fantasy story (or science fiction, I'm not the greatest at determining the difference) than it is horror, but don't let that stop you from reading it, its a great story none the less. It took me a few moments to actually realize what had happened to Randolph in the end, which to me is a great ending. It gives you enough information to piece the story together, you just have to think a bit about it. The story is basicly about a man who likes to live in dream worlds, and when he finds that his age is stopping him from accessing the worlds he searches for a key to reopen the gate.

"The Music of Erich Zann": Im not really sure what I felt about this one. I just finished reading it about 30 minutes ago, and im not really sure if I understood the plot right. It was very interesting to read, but either I'm missing the catch, or there isn't a catch; you just never do find out what those papers would have on them, or what happened that night, or why he played like he did.

One thing I was really disappointed about was that this anthology doesn't have "The Hound" in it, which I thought to be a masterpiece writing of supreme level. I don't know why they wouldn't put it in either, because while I enjoyed the six stories I read in here so far, none of them measure up to my love for "The Hound." Maybe Im just weird and everyone else thinks these stories are way better than "The Hound", but whatever it is that was a major drawback.

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Summary: Essential horror
Review: I found this tome at my university library. I was a bit worried when I borrowed it, since it is always dangerous to reread the stories you enjoyed as a child - maybe they have paled, and the memory is better than the original story?
I am glad to say that the stories are just as good as they were! I think that that is a trademark of a really good tale: to enjoy it both when you are young, and when are older.
All the major tales are here, inluding the seminal Call of Cthulhu and Pickman's Model, and the mindbogglingly shocking The Rats in the Walls, In the Wault, and The Picture in the House. It also comes with a learnt foreword by Robert Bloch, explaining Lovecraft's metaphysics and his legacy.
There are some notable exclusions, like The Tomb, The Statement of Randolph Carter, The Horror at Red Hook, and The Hound. It is difficult to draw a line between the 'good' stories and the 'bad' stories though, so it is no oversight by the editors.
Lovecraft really broke with traditional horror in his stories. Absent are the vampires, werewolves , and ghost. Absent is the belief in God and the belief in the ultimate victory of good. Absent is any hope of redemption, and, indeed, hope itself. The horror, instead, lies in the futility of our endevours. Even out belief in science as our salvation is taken away from us: The more mighty our science gets, the more it can be used as a tool for our destruction. The more we know, the closer we get to revelation and insanity. The heroes/narrators/victims in these stories are always seekers of knowledge. Sometimes they straddle the divide between science and magic and unleash horrors beyond their understanding, sometimes they look into strange happenings, and unearth knowledge that should have stayed hidden. In Lovecraft, the enlightment is closely linked to madness. Our very search for knowledge condemns us to our destruction.

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Summary: A unique and haunting vision
Review: Like Poe, Lovecraft is best judged by his complete body of work rather than any one masterpiece. This collection contains his best-known stories and is a good place for newcomers to his work to start. Personally, I think his full-length novel "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" is the best thing he wrote and I would recommend you read that if you find you enjoy the stories here.

Thematically, his range is rather narrow; he developed a mythos involving primordial beings that lurk in Earth's depths and occasionally intrude into the present world. Almost all his work is a variation on that. Oddly (and ironically, given his name) erotic or romantic elements are entirely absent from his writing. It is as if he were asexual. His great strength is in his style, which is unfailingly elegant and has a musical quality to it. He was a great Anglophile and often employs British English spellings and usages. He is a pleasure to read, and has a unique voice and vision. All lovers of fantasy or horror fiction, or of fine writing, should sample Lovecraft.


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Summary: This book is the reason I am a writer...
Review: I can say a lot for H.P. Lovecraft's work. Lovecraft is the reason I am a horror writer to begin with and the story that is a personal favorite out of the collection is "Shadow Out of Time," but each story in this collection is strong and influenced writers in one form or another. I write in the Cthulhu Mythos because of H.P. Lovecraft. My copy of this book is one that I had now since 1996, and one if you want a real introduction to Robert Bloch, this is a book that does that as well. Bloch is a master at what he did; though he is no longer around -- this collection is one that really defines what Lovecraft was set out to do as a horror writer. This is the collection that inspired Metallica on Master of Puppets and Ride The Lightning. I learned of HPL when I was 20, but when my first exposure to him was when I was ten when I saw The Re-Aminator.

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Summary: Lovecraft's Truffles
Review: H.P. Lovecraft is the Baudelaire of American short prose. His short stories are luridly gothic tidbits, the dark chocolates of early 20th century American literature. The punchlines of his stories are the mutterings of madness, the shrieks of tortured souls, the rasping whispers of a last, dying breath. They are delightfully melodramatic, the eerie and expert concoctions of a master of the ghost story, told amid shadowy ruins and in sinister, deserted alleyways. They are about things that creep and lurk in the darkness and the damp, the things of gruesome nightmare imagination.

This particular collection of short stories is an assortment of Lovecraft's best--the truffles, so to speak.