Rating: 
Summary: Imaginative
Review: These are the strangest stories. They are less strong than Edgar Allan Poe's stories of a similar vein - almost childlike in some ways. Invariably the expose at the end of the story is tame, rather trivial. And I don't think I have ever read the words 'horrible' or 'horror' so often. To be truthful about it, I don't really like being told something is horrible - I need to be shown. Often Lovecraft absolutely declines to do this. Take for example 'The Statement of Randolph Carter'. This is a engaging yarn but we never know what the horror is, we just have cries of anguish reporting it. Is this carelessness or laziness? Or is it like a sound heard in the distance - peripherally - unrecoverable and disturbing, keeping you on the edge of the seat waiting just in case it sounds again?Despite, for me, the poor structure of the stories and the weakness of their endings, I find it impossible to criticise Lovecraft's imaginativeness. These are very creative stories. It is commonly believed that Poe showed great psychological insight in his stories, but what does Lovecraft use as the trigger for his imagination? Is it a dread of science - an irrational fear? I'm not at all sure that I know and perhaps this adds to the intrigue of these stories. I also enjoyed the notes to these stories with their historic and critical insights. (Although what this statement means puzzled both my wife and I: 'The seemingly straightforward story of an explorer ....... appears more complex than it seems.')
Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This book has a collection of very good stories. They have a way of purking your interesting and they keep you reading for hours. Lovecraft describles things with imagination and fluency. I have to say this is certainly one book that will not be sitting on my shelf for more than a week without me picking it up again.
Rating: 
Summary: Lugubrious Tales of Weird and Haunted Lands
Review: This book is an excellent introduction to H.P. Lovecraft. A sample of his classic tales in an affordable volume. Lovecraft is the finest writer of pulp horror and weird fiction. He can be a bit of a shock for readers whose only exposure to horror is Steven King. His tales are far more intellectual and psychological. This is aristocratic horror, who's protagonist is likely to be a professor of antiquities or a dilettante in search of anchient architecture. Forbiden tomes, such as the infamous Necronomicon, and ancient evil await these adventures. "The Rats in the Walls" has a man victimized by a family curse. His ancestral home goes deeper than he expected, with each sub-basement revealing an older period of architecture. What evil ground was this house built on? "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is a story of a small sea town with a history, and a population with a strange look and strange ways. Horrible things live beneath the surface of the waters. Horrible things live above. "The Call of Cthulhu"....well, you will just have to see what lies around that corner for yourself.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Books Ever!
Review: This is undoubtedly one of the best books of all time. I've gotten little or no sleep the last few nights (but then I'm a nervous, jumpy person to begin with). The stories, in addition to being scary, are interesting! Some are predictable, but never to the pint of being dull. The descriptions are poetic and envoking, and the stories are emotional. This book is great for anyone who can stand the sophisticated writing style and big words.
Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Books Ever!
Review: This is undoubtedly one of the best books of all time. I've gotten little or no sleep the last few nights (but then I'm a nervous, jumpy person to begin with). The stories, in addition to being scary, are interesting! Some are predictable, but never to the pint of being dull. The descriptions are poetic and envoking, and the stories are emotional. This book is great for anyone who can stand the sophisticated writing style and big words.
Rating:
Summary: Nightmare Fuel
Review: This was my first exposure to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, and I enjoyed it so much that half way through, I went out and bought another collection, THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES. Lovecraft's prose is creepy in a way that I really hadn't experienced from other so-called horror writers. A lot of the stories follow the same basic structure, but that didn't distract from the fact that these were some of the wildest and most chilling stories that I have read in a very long time. I had heard a lot about the types of stories that Lovecraft wrote, but I wasn't really prepared for how creepy they would be. A lot of them really shouldn't be as shocking as they are, but somehow Lovecraft gets away with it. He likes to use a lot of frivolous language and has the tendency to take short cuts by saying that the various creatures and entities are too frightening, too complicated, or too alien for the human mind to comprehend. While I'm usually the first person to roll my eyes at this sort of literary cop-out, I was completely enthralled by its use here. Lovecraft's command of language is precise and effective. The monsters and Gods that he describes truly seem fearsome and unnerving. The actual plots of these stories seem to be vaguely repetitive. Since this is the first collection of Lovecraft that I have read, I'm not sure if these is indicative of his work in general, but it is certainly apparent that many of these stories follow the same basic structure. I didn't really find this to be a problem though. There are enough major differences in the stories that they don't all seem to blend together, despite their commonalities. This was helped, no doubt, by the fact that I only read a few stories at a time, managing to absorb the book slowly over a longer period of time. This edition is semi-annotated, though I'd advice against reading them if you've never encountered these stories before. They contain a lot of background detail, but also contain numerous spoilers. I found myself reading a story and then going back and safely reading the notes and references. Each story is also given a short write-up that gives a non-fictional account of the background. Interested readers can see what the circumstances were behind each of the writings, as well as their publishing history. To be honest, it's difficult to review a short story collection. After all, there are eighteen different tales in this book, and the reviewer simply doesn't have enough space to discuss each one individually. The best that I can do is to state that while there were one or two stories that failed to grab, the vast majority of these were spellbinding and genuinely unsettling.
Rating:
Summary: A splendid introduction to Lovecraft.
Review: This was the first Lovecraft book I ever read. In keeping with Penguin's tradition of scholarly presentations of literary masterpieces, this volume begins with an essay by Joshi on Lovecraft's life and works. The stories themselves are fairly heavily laden with endnotes, which, while initially distracting, eventually lead the reader to discover richness in Lovecraft's work which would not be evident at first blush. Prominent among the annotations are explanations of geographical places and names which appear in the stories, together with allusions to works by other authors (most prominently Poe and Bierce) which echo Lovecraft's. This book is highly recommended for anyone wishing a good first glimpse of the masterful mind of Lovecraft.
Rating:
Summary: A splendid introduction to Lovecraft.
Review: This was the first Lovecraft book I ever read. In keeping with Penguin's tradition of scholarly presentations of literary masterpieces, this volume begins with an essay by Joshi on Lovecraft's life and works. The stories themselves are fairly heavily laden with endnotes, which, while initially distracting, eventually lead the reader to discover richness in Lovecraft's work which would not be evident at first blush. Prominent among the annotations are explanations of geographical places and names which appear in the stories, together with allusions to works by other authors (most prominently Poe and Bierce) which echo Lovecraft's. This book is highly recommended for anyone wishing a good first glimpse of the masterful mind of Lovecraft.
Rating:
Summary: Often imitated, NEVER equalled - the original master
Review: Well, I never thought I'd see the day when Lovecraft would be issued in a Penguin Classic edition. Neglected for years, sneered at by snobs and pop-psychoanalyzed to pieces by phonies, it seems that Lovecraft is finally coming in to his own. For years, all we had were the Arkham House editions - we all owe a debt to August Derleth for never letting Lovecraft go out of print, but these weren't exactly on the shelves of your local book store. Lovecraft's influence reaches to this day - I can't imagine any of the "Alien" movies without Lovecrat's effect on H.R. Giger's conception. The "Blair Witch Project" could have been taken directly from a Lovecraft story (except for the language). Influenced himself by Poe, Lord Dunsany, Robert Chambers, and many others, Lovecraft managed to distill his own immediately identifiable style and capture the imaginations of generations of writers in the field. Long after Stephen King and Clive Barker have been relegated to the dustbin, readers AND writers will still find inspiration in the dark prose of the gentleman from Providence. This collection is easily the best single volume available of Lovecraft's work, and a steal at this price. If you aren't familiar with the 20th Century's greatest writer of horror fiction, I can not urge you strongly enough to sample this book - I am certain that you will NOT regret it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Thing In Rockwell's Attic
Review: What do Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Norman Rockwell have in common in 2002? Both artists are being newly appraised and embraced by the same establishments that officially shunned them for decades, which is interesting, as Lovecraft was the anti Rockwell, a writer who saw deep shadows, howling monsters, and degenerate humanity in the same New England landscapes where the painter saw loving families and neighbors living happily in homey comfort. There was a period in the 1970s when Lovecraft's books were kept in the Classics section in chain bookstores across America, an apparent mistake which was roundly corrected in the 1980s, when his fiction was regulated to the fantasy, horror, and science fiction section, presumably for good. The rapid changes in American life and culture today have scholars and critics taking a second look back at both Lovecraft and Rockwell, and finding something precious where they formerly found only the trite, obvious, and artistically dismissible. With the Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, Lovecraft has been officially canonized with this, and a second, Penguin edition. Lovecraft at last has earned his pedestal. This compilation is a mish mash of Lovecraft that includes some of his best work, like 'The Colour Out Of Space' and 'The Outsider' as well as an unhealthy portion of his weakest material, such as 'He' and a famous story Lovecraft himself thought too poor to publish, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth.' Editor Joshi's introduction and biography of his subject is comprehensive and informative, as are the wealth of footnotes that accompany each story. Lovers of the work of Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Montague Rhodes James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen or Shirley Jackson who might be oddly unfamiliar with Lovecraft's work, however, can start here. A lesser writer than all of those listed, Lovecraft, who started his career as a writer in the pulp magazines of the 1920s, has actually benefited posthumously from his status as an ultimately third rate talent, since his tales and ideas are unchallenging, and thus accessible to even light readers, many of whom, historically, have taken up and carried on the Cthulhu cudgel. Lovecraft excelled at creating mood, and in developing his themes to the point of constriction, but, unfortunately, was a poor dramatist. Most of his stories, like 'The Whisperer In Darkness,' are simply too blatant: 'Whisperer' compromises its mystery from its second page when the author drops a giant, dead crustacean in a New England river after an autumn flood. A better writer could still make something worthwhile from this unsubtle maneuver; Lovecraft can not. In many cases, such as in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth,' the writing is simply too weak to allow the reader to suspend disbelief. 'He' opens brilliantly with several acute, timeless observations about life in New York City, but quickly slides into 10 confused, badly executed pages comprised of Indian curses, time travel, immortality, mysterious mansions, and slithering eye covered masses of protoplasm. Lovecraft's "bloated fungoid moons," "mighty beetle civilizations," and "reptile people of fabled Valusia" are hackneyed, coarse, silly, and impossible to take seriously, if still fun for right audience. A typical Lovecraft piece begins with a narrator hesitantly reporting 'a story too horrible to tell,' ends with the same party found unconscious and semi-amnesiac by well meaning strangers far from the climatic scene of trauma, and features the appearance, usually towards the middle, of at least one group of degenerate 'natives' babbling in an alien tongue and leaping semi naked about a fire. Lovecraft wrote parodies of his own work, but he just as often parodied himself and the genre even when this was not his intention. The sexless, reclusive, and xenophobic Lovecraft came, not surprisingly, from the dying line of an old New England family. Since decadence and degeneracy coupled with some element of 'super nature' is the essence of the horror story, Lovecraft's work and imagination fit his character and history like a glove. Readers of the Call of Cthulhu will wonder what sort of person could walk through the beautiful hills, valleys, and woods of New England and imagine cosmic monsters and forgotten, tentacled deities hiding beneath the quiet towns, farms, and autumn foliage of Vermont and New Hampshire, or rocky shorelines of Massachusetts. Lovecraft's father died of syphilis when Howard was eight years old, and, after a physical and mental breakdown, his domineering mother passed away when he was 21. Lovecraft himself was sickly as a boy, and left high school early due to an undiagnosed breakdown of his own. Readers will find potent evidence of the bad blood and the genuine social and psychological decadence that surrounded Lovecraft and manifested darkly in all of his work. Himself a product of repression and decay, readers will not be surprised to find Lovecraft's narrators obsessed with almost laughably phallic "Cyclopean" towers and monoliths, or with the pulpy, regenerate masses, globsters and blobs that comprise his otherworldly hierarchy. This hierarchy is crowned by Cthulhu, an ambiguously sexed creature who symbolically blends both male and female elements: like Melville's fleshy squid, Cthulhu has a face full of dancing, probing, and erect tentacles resting on a soft, amorphous body. Cthulhu is Lovecraft's 20th century Gorgon who freezes all of earthly existence in its stare. Readers will notice that atavistic and incestuous themes abound; Lovecraft's mankind is continually slipping backward, via inbreeding and alien contamination, into cannibalistic rat and ape ('The Lurking Fear,' 'Arthur Jermyn,' 'Rats In The Walls'), or into gilled and web limbed fish men ('Dagon,' 'The Call of Cthulhu,' 'Shadow Over Innsmouth'). Lovecraft, who was casually married and casually divorced within a few years, lived a short, grim, childless existence as far from one of Rockwell's cheery scenarios as it was possible to get. After completing the Call of Cthulhu, most readers will not be surprised that Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer at the age of 47; for what were Lovecraft's oozing terrors but masses of uncontrollably reproducing cells, and concrete materializations of a tragic, disturbed, and victimizing unconscious?
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