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Summary: A YUGGOTH, BY ANY OTHER NAME......SMELLS
Review: What can be said? If you have trouble sleeping, this purplish prose will end insomnia, or abet it. Both are good!
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Summary: Stephen Who?
Review: Lovecraft & Poe. Whether you call H.P. Lovecraft's writing horror, science fiction, or speculative fiction, he creates an atmosphere of dread and anxiety like no one except Edgar Allan Poe. This is a marvellous collection of Lovecaft's best work.
Get this book and let your imagination take flight.
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Summary: A Lovecraft Primer for the beginner
Review: Most Lovecraft fans I know think that this book is the best for the beginner. I don't claim to be an expert, but this is the book I was started on and, after reading more of the man's work, I think that it really does give you a good feel for the "Cthulhu Mythos".
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Summary: A Study of "Lovecraftian" Terror...
Review: Now's as good a time as any to revist these wonderfully creepy tales from the master of the macabre. H.P. Lovecraft has always been one of horror's most eccentric writers. His works have inspired a generation of writers, who's works have often been regarded as "lovecraftian".'The Best Of H.P. Lovecraft' is the first in Del Rey's excellent Lovecraft trilogy (followed by 'The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft' and 'The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft'). Needless to say, this is an essential book, however it should really be titled 'The Most Famous Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft'. H.P. Lovecraft is probably the greatest horror author of the last 100 years. He creates vivid and surreal montages of terror by understanding a simple philosophy... the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. By never actually showing a graphic depiction of the horror, Lovecraft creates a suffocating mood of suspense. To put it another way, Lovecraft is the kind of writer that would place his main character hidden inside a crypt, contemplating the unknown horrors, rather that have them face to face with that horrible monstrosity that's waiting just within arms (or tenticles) length... This collection is comprised of 16 of H.P. Lovecraft's most famous tales (with a preceeding introduction by Robert Bloch). The book starts off perfectly with a story called "The Rats In The Walls," a story very reminiscent of "The Lurking Fear". Lovecraft establishes a creepy backstory to make the culminating horrors all the more intense. The next tale is a grotesque little short story called "The Picture In The House." This one is short and sweet, with a abrupt and shocking ending. Lovecraft spins another interesting yarn with "The Outsider". Lovecraft is at his best with "Pickman's Model", an ingaging tale about an artist with a sinister secret. Lovecraft's descriptions of the paintings are so meticulously done that you can almost see the disturbing images flash before your eyes. This grand story is followed by two contrasting stories, the grim "In The Vault" and the beautiful "The Silver Key" (more of H.P. Lovecraft's beautiful fantasy tales can be found in the Dream Cycle collection). "The Music Of Erich Zann" is a surreal horror story that remains haunting after repeated readings. "The Call of Cthulhu" is probably H.P. Lovecraft's most famous tale, and is easily the most imaginative story in the novel. Once you read this tale, you'll never look at the ocean the same way again. "The Dunwich Horror" is another classic story, which is reminiscent of a creepy camp-fire tale (this is my personal favorite). "The Whisperer In The Darkness" and "The Colour Out Of Space" are two tales of cosmic horror that have never been equaled. "The Haunter Of The Dark" is typical Lovecraft, as is the great "The Thing On The Doorstep". "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a favorite amoung Lovecraft enthusiasts and it's not hard to see why. "The Dreams In The Witch-House" is probably the most nightmare-inducing of the stories, and "The Shadow Out Of Time" starts off being an intriguing tale of suspense, and then seeps into the most bizarre science-fiction I've ever read. Summarizing it all, "The Best Of H.P. Lovecraft" is not as good as the other two in the series. "The Dream Cycle" benefits from two of Lovecraft's bests works and amazing fantasy, while "The Transistion Of" consists of the best tales (my favorites being Herbert West--Re-Animator and The Lurking Fear). Still, this is a perfect collection to get started with. So sit back, and relish in the tales of the Great Cthulhu, the terror of Arkham, Dunwich, and Miskatonic, and the unspeakable horrors of the Necronomicon...
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Summary: Move over, Darth!
Review: For anyone just getting into H. P. Lovecraft, this book is a treasure trove. Nearly all of the Cthulhu mythos stories are here, and I defy anyone to read these dark and provocative tales without shuddering, and casting an occasional glance into cobwebbed corners. In "Supernatural Horror in Literature," Lovecraft stated that, "the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown...." Lovecraft's stories are a consummation of this belief. Having read Poe and Hawthorne, Verne and Wells, it is my firm conviction that H. P. Lovecraft's work has yet to garner the acclaim it merits. This is H. P. Lovecraft at his purple, florid, hideous best. Enjoy!
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Summary: The only author in the horror genre that I've ever liked...
Review: This book is absorbing reading. The first part of the book has some general horror fiction, but then the stories in the second half of the book are part of Lovecraft's works known as the "Cthulu Mythos". Very very scary stuff. Not scary in a shocking way, but rather in a creepy, get-under-your-skin, eerie kind of way. This may have something to do with the fact that many of the demons and entities in his book were borrowed from mythology and occult sources. Creepy scary stuff. I couldn't put it down. This is neat stuff to read every year around Halloween (while listening to Metallica's "The Thing That Should Not Be") when you feel the urge to scare yourself silly.
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Summary: Best Lovecraft Collection Available
Review: This book is the best in the series of short story collections issued by DelRey books, and probably contains the best collection of classic HPL stories available today. Here you have the best and most revered stories from Lovecraft's prime period of creativity. You can clearly see how influential this work has been for all horror fiction that has been written since. Clive Barker and Stephen King are definitely fans, and even movies like "Poltergeist" and "Ghostbusters" are clearly inspired by Lovecraft. As usual with Lovecraft stories, it is often difficult to get through the heavy prose and obscure references, and reading the tales will take a lot of patience. But your patience will be rewarded by many classic short stories that will really get under your skin. Highlights of this book include "The Rats in the Walls" which really reminded me of the Poltergeist movie; the all-time occult masterpiece "The Call of Cthulhu"; the intriguiging "The Music of Erich Zann" which is surprisingly artistic and offbeat for Lovecraft; and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which covers not just the evil of supernatural creatures but also of small-town humans - a motif that is seen in many Stephen King stories.
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Summary: Most of the best work of the master of cosmic horror
Review: Horror fiction usually derives its power from the presentation of entities which can be defined as "unnatural": vampires and zombies returning from the dead, the spirits of the deceased, werewolves and other creatures which break down the barrier between human and animal. Conversely, much of the best science fiction begins with a scientific fact or theory about the physical world and develops it beyond what is currently possible or known, and explores possible versions of our evolutionary future, life on other planets, and our place in the cosmos. Lovecraft's greatness is that the horror in his best fiction arises from what is known about the natural world, and our place in it. His is an existential horror, a "cosmic horror," arising out of our reaction to the vast reaches of empty space and our insignificance. Humanity is but a small part of the universe, our efforts are doomed to failure, and our civilization, the end result of thousands of years of learning facts and recording history, is doomed. Indeed, science and history are often the cause of our demise in Lovecraft's work: too often, researchers stumble across some fact that drives its discoverers mad, because of what it demonstrates about our frailty. Lovecraft was not content with writing "mere" stories of invasion by alien forces, however: his extraterrestrials are subject to the same forces as ourselves, and we often have much in common with them. Certainly many of Lovecraft's alien species are terrible to us, but often they are just as pathetic as we are, since they are subject, as we are, to the fickle forces of natural selection, to pride, and to blindness. The Great Race from "The Shadow Out of Time" and the Old Ones of "At the Mountains of Madness" (not, alas, in this collection) have a need for the pursuit of intellectual knowledge and an ignorance of real-world affairs which make them more similar to Shakespeare's Prospero than to Caliban. Unlike Shakespeare's play, in these narratives it is Caliban, not Prospero, who generally wins the struggle. Lovecraft applied the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest to Spenglerian notions of the rise and fall of civilization, thus providing a double blow to the idea of evolution as progress: even the most advanced and intelligent cultures are doomed, according to this notion of history. Not even physical or intellectual superiority can preserve a society against inevitable decline, especially when this decline combines with the random forces of natural selection. This inevitable senescence is only part of the horror of Lovecraft's fictions. His other theme is the smallness and unimportance of our species in the grand scheme of things. Even those protagonists who survive the horrors described in these tales are ever after unfit for civilized life, knowing as they could not have before that human life is insignificant, subject to random forces and loathsome creatures from outside this world who dissect us like lab rats, devour us like cattle, or somehow convince our species to commingle sexually with theirs. It is rare that a Lovecraftian protagonist, once he looks into the dark, can bear the light again. In this, his heroes are like Marlow of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or Prendick of Well's _Island of Dr. Moreau_: their experiences make them almost unfit for life in civilization, and Lovecraft's protagonists generally go mad because they have shone the light of science too far into the darkness. This anthology, then, is a very good collection of some of Lovecraft's finest work; there are a few weak pieces, but his best tales, except the aforementioned "At the Mountains of Madness," are all represented here (had this novella been included, I would have given this collection five stars). Every time I read these stories, I shiver not only because the aliens represented herein might lurk in some dark corner of the house, but because they remind us of the greater darkness which surrounds us, and of our insignificant place in the cosmos.
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Summary: Don't make the mistake I did, children...
Review: Maybe you grew up on Stephen King, shuddered along with the rest of us as he showed you moments of psychological breakdown. Maybe you read along with us, were quaintly amused at the gothic beauty of the fall of Usher's house - but not horrified, no; not really. Perhaps, on coming of age, you looked into Stoker's 'Dracula'; even nipped your lover's neck the next midnight abed with her, enlightened to this aspect of the dark side of human sexuality. What has come before will not prepare you for this. Don't do as I did; sick; half-frozen; feverish in a brick dormitory over winter break, in earshot of the justly-famous Widener Library; as the mists float in densely over the rime-laden ground. Don't open this dread tome, this gruesome mad ramble into what should not be comprehended. Don't fire your fever dreams with these wormy logs. You'll hear the rats chittering behind those ancient walls. You'll be afraid to lift your hand to turn the page as you track "The Colour Out of Space" to its miscegenated conclusion. You'll fall asleep and dream of the shadowed streets of Innsmouth - and recognize them, later, where your friends just see a run-down wharf and a maze of alleys. And should you learn of the Great Race and the Shadow Out of Time - no! Dreams are for purifying, healthful rest; not for - this! That is, unless you want to read the best, scariest horror stories ever written, in which case, order this book immediately. The cover art's campy but one night you'll see that skull looking back at you from your bedside table...
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Summary: HP Lovecraft: political activist disguised as a nerd
Review: This is a 1000 words summary due to this site's restrictions. The complete text (many times longer and more articulate and more clear) is available for discussion at (website). Over the past few weeks I have read most of Lovecraft's works, and some essays about him, and here are my first margin notes. To summarise it all: Lovecraft is another nice piece of old, nasty anti-rationalist, anticapitalist and antiscientific ideology smuggled through vaguely 'new science' references. Lovecraft stories are unbelievably tedious. They are made up of few, recurring metaphors and boring repetition of patterns: 1) No plot other than the gradual (=pedagogic) discovery of a mysterious, hidden, static and pre-existing truth by one character. The main character in Lovecraft's stories doesn't ever DO anything: occasionally he will kill somebody (or eat him), but most of the time the only business or art in which Lovecraft's human characters are involved in is: GOING MAD; 2) "Horror", "terror"; "terror", "horror"; "undefinable terror" and "unthinkable horror"; "horrific unspeakable" and "terror with no name"; no metaphor, no synonyms, no images; total literary monotony and the lack of development; see later for the philosophical implications; 3) no plot, but a 'logical' coup-de-theatre: 'I finally realised' or 'I suddenly understood something that is better not known'. And the guy will never tell what it is! He will never name 'the thing' ("name" in proper terms. Calling it "Zhulhuhtathothep" is not naming). Suspect: he has no way of telling what "it" is, not because the author has 'too much' of a "feverish" imagination, but because he has none. He lacks 'imagination' because his 'imagination' is really escape from mind (not a great way to create ideas and things). The refusal to create is indeed one of Lovecraft's explicit premises: the author doesn't really imagine anything: he dreams his stories: one hell of a devolution of responsibility to 'another' mind, of which the author is the servant and the mere instrument ("master" mind versus "servant" mind: hu-ho: Plato, starting to show his ugly head). Lovecraft is in fact the translation into images of a stale philosophy. Lovecraft is: somebody who learned Plato through comic books, the "spirit of the times" and lazy teachers. Isn't it cheap 'Plato-cliffnotes-for-dummies' (something like the Nietzsche-for-Soldiers of Nazi memory), to go on for two decades writing about 'another reality', 'otherworldly', which "is not perceptible" through earthly, human, knowledge? And to rant about this knowledge belonging to "pre-human Gods" who speak in tongues or through hieroglyphs? Gods who interfere with human minds only through priests (demons, Nyarlathoteps, you name them), or through dreams, intoxication or mystic experiences? Isn't this the oldest and cheapest way of bankrupting reason in the history of the Western thought: i.e., Plato's creation of a world forever beyond this world as a model for this world (as later updated in anti-enlightenment form by Kant and his followers)? * LOVECRAFT AND HORROR The most interesting issue is the relation between Lovecraft's adolescent Platonism and his easy recourse to 'terror'. Lovecraft writes in the '20s and '30s. Not the most banal decades in recent history, as far as the coexistence of horror, terror and magnificent advancements in science and technology is concerned. For all his adolescent self-pity, Lovecraft was never an outsider: he is one hundred per cent mainstream, he is a perfect example of the worst cultural tendencies of the decades in which he wrote his stories: irrationalism, mysticism, cult of evil, belief in the necessity of evil, hence therapeutic indulgence, intoxication, fascination for primitive art and cults. Well, after those two decades this cultural debacle certainly helped the reaction of better-trained, less whiny, more muscular and more focused irrationalists: Hitler and Stalin. Whose irrationalism and Platonic political dream thrived on the damage caused by the cultural 'climate' of the second and third decade of the XX century. Which our academia still consider a Golden Era of Western thought. While it was actually a resurgence of the Middle Ages. Those decades indeed left behind them a legacy of 'terror', 'horror', 'bestiality' and 'non-human nightmares'. The horror and bestiality, which Lovecraft so morbidly describes, are not 'from other universes'. They were human, all too human. They were the concrete products of human thought, following the old, old, old philosophical paths that Lovecraft chose to follow too. The horror and terror of the XX Century were the products of the most complete application ever of Platonism to economics and politics. Man had never been so completely subject to (using Lovecraft's terms) 'perfect' and 'perfectly abstract', "disembodied", "otherworldly" ideas; man's will had never been so thoroughly sacrificed to "another mind's" "omniscient" and arbitrary planning. Man's body had never been so massively starved and burnt in sacrifice to higher ideals and to the 'common destiny of humanity before evil'. Read everywhere from Arendt to Wiesel to Bettelheim about daily "life" in the "concentrationary universe": you'll find the same accounts of a universe of 'guilt without crime', of 'terror without reason or cause', of 'absence of a reason for good and evil", of "arbitrary punishment for no sin", of 'reduction of men to non-human, beastly status by the arbitrary whims of beastly, omnipotent Gods'. Well, Lovecraft thought that 'horror which is unintelligible to the victim' (quote from Arendt on the camps) is the perpetual condition of the universe; that cannibalism pre-exists humanity; that hatred of man pre-exists humanity, the mind of man and his reason. And he thought that the "omnipotent, evil, cannibal, beastly" but "omniscient" Gods are "eternal", and that they are there to stay forever. Beyond life. Lovecraft's books describe, and the XX Century totalitarians created, a universe made of power+irrationality. Or better: power+'another reason'; 'absolute, godly authority' plus a 'superior non-human reason'. That was called "Plato's Republic' 2400 years ago, and 'ideological war' in the XX Century. In this sense, Lovecraft was one of most active intellectual militants of the XX Century. 'Lonely writer' my foot: he was the worst kind of collectivist militant: a metaphysical one.
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