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Note: In the summer of 2013, students in Brown's Public Humanities program developed an augmented reality tour of Lovecraft's Providence for NecronomiCon Providence. Further information is available at: calloflovecraft.com These errors are clearly not resulting of sloppy OCR-scanning which are issues based on similar letter forms, but actual human errors like missing an "h" in "hair": somebody has indeed been typing them in, line by line, creating the most mistake-ridden HPL collection of all time. Barnes & Noble don't impress in this sense, as it was hardly their first book. Excellent collection of Lovecraft's stories, you've got most of his best ones in this collection; but it's such a big and somewhat cumbersome book. I don’t think I’d call this Lovecraft’s most iconic story – that one must be Call of Cthulu – but I might consider it his most prototypical. Many consider it his best. You have an otherworldly visitor. In this case, it’s a comet or meteor with an, umm, let’s say a chromatic passenger (Dexter reference...). It strikes in a rural New England locale. And it’s largely told by proxy. That is, the (outer) narrator himself didn’t experience the primary events of the story. Even the (inner) narrator can only offer a first-hand account of SOME aspects. So the story is actually a frame-within-a-frame! This second-hand, third-hand approach just drains the tension from the story. That said, I had great fun because it’s dripping with horrific wonder, a uniquely Lovecraftian emotion.
Empecé a leer el libro en enero de este año y no ha sido hasta hoy, junio, que por fin lo he terminado. Me creo que haya gente que pueda leerse las casi 2000 páginas que lo componen todas seguidas, pero yo tengo que reconocer que no hubiera podido así. Para mí la mejor forma de enfrentarme a Lovecraft ha sido ir leyendo sus cuentos poco a poco, cada mes ir leyendo 2,3 o 4 historias, intercaladas con otras lecturas. Si no, no veo cómo hubiera sido posible poder acabarlo, sinceramente. No quiere esto decir que no me haya gustado Lovecraft, ni mucho menos. Solo que es un autor que ha tenido cosas que me han gustado y fascinado mucho junto con otras que han logrado que sus historias se me hayan hecho, a veces, muy cuesta arriba. Leerle ha sido toda una montaña rusa, de momentos de disfrute absoluto junto a otros en que veía muy fatigoso acabar lo que había empezado. The Other Gods: Short and meh, but builds a “‘Craftverse” by referencing The Cats of Ulthar. We like continuity. Adolphe de Castro (revised from “The Automatic Executioner” by Castro, first published 1891 November 14) The Music of Erich Zann: Now this is the type of mythos tale I remember best, with a nightmarish realm adjacent to our own, always threatening, and barely held at bay by brilliantly insane and esoteric means. Missing only one Story which was "In the walls of Eryx" co-written by Lovecraft and Kenneth J. Sterling.Y además, como escritor su estilo tiene cosas también bastante positivas. Como he dicho antes es muy lento, sí, pero al mismo tiempo cuando coge carrerilla crea escenas que dejan al lector en tensión constante y le impiden parar de leer, haciendo de la lectura una montaña rusa de emociones. Y gracias a sus minuciosas descripciones uno no necesita mucha imaginación para sentirse en los escenarios que nos presenta y poder introducirse en la historia y en su contexto. Por todo ello es capaz de componer momentos en los que al lector se le acelera el pulso y nota como la piel se le pone de gallina y los escalofríos le suben por la espalda. Es, sin duda alguna, un autor del genero del miedo en todas sus variantes, del miedo tal y como podemos imaginarlo con criaturas terroríficas y escenas sangrientas, pero también trata el terror más sutil y psicológico.
Took me years to get through it, bought it in 2014 (crazy I know) but obviously that wasn't continuous reading, I'd read a story from it and leave it for ages with the bookmark in; he can be difficult to read sometimes due to his writing style - it's slow-paced and sometimes difficult for me to interpret because sometimes it seems to me like he starts rambling and I'm like..what's going on? The final novella is often regarded as Lovecraft's best and most devastating tale, and is one of the primary stories of the third category of his work, the Cthulhu Mythos. "At The Mountains Of Madness" follows a scientific expedition to Antarctica that meets disaster and uncovers evidence of a fully sentient, advanced, societal race of beings that inhabited earth before and during the genesis of the scientifically accepted chain of evolutionary life on Earth. It is this, more than any of the other Cthulhu tales, that references and amends the mythology of all of Lovecraft's previous work, Dream Cycle and necromancy cycle included, recasting everything not as supernatural but as part of a vast, multi-faceted, and purely natural universe in which the "gods" of humanity's religions are merely ancient and powerful creatures from far reaches of our universe, mischaracterized and largely indifferent to us. And again, this novella most of all was most like the sort of sci-fi thrillers we read today, with very competent writing depicting the harsh Antarctic wild and the piece-by-piece revelation of ancient knowledge and terror by human scientists who are only following their instincts and their desire to discover and understand. I found myself surprised by the ultimately sympathetic view the story gives to the Elder Things, the aliens that came before all known earth life, since nearly all other instances of alien encounters in Lovecraft's world casts them as amoral animals to be feared and avoided, at best. Other notable stories in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle are "The Dunwich Horror", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out Of Time", and, of course, "The Call of Cthulhu". Note that many of the earlier Cthulhu Mythos tales put a supernatural/deity spin on the alien beings encountered, prior to Lovecraft's "retcon" in this novella.All of the stories within being placed chronologically, it is apparent that Lovecraft improved upon both his writing abilities and his cosmological mythos, which is not to say that some of his early stories, in their simplicity, don't hit home just as powerfully. The tales gradually grow longer as one reads through the book, with Lovecraft's three novellas appearing in the middle and end of the book. It was these tales that I found to be the most enjoyable, the most thorough in their ability to draw me in and engage me in the alternate universe that Lovecraft structured. It is also these three short novels that one can use to divide Lovecraft's entire collection of fiction into three categories of theme: men stumbling through the realm of dreams, men meddling in necromancy and dark arts, and men confronting the godless, Darwinian truths of the universe, hints of which lie hidden in obscure corners of the earth. J. Chapman Miske. Note: scholar S.T. Joshi considers this a spurious Lovecraft story. It was an account of a dream extracted from one of Lovecraft's letters by editor Miske (cf. " The Evil Clergyman", and " The Very Old Folk"), and published under a title given it by Miske. The last element of HPL that should be looked at is his myth. Here is the one place where HPL shines. His creation of an ante-diluvian world of races not human on earth and others that came from off of earth is fascinating and worthy of study. Given the amount of fiction and 'fan-fiction' which his 'Cthulian' mythos has generated HPL remains a significant presence in the world of genre fiction--and, yes, there is a difference between genre and literature. For this reason, and this reason alone, HPL remains a writer worth revisiting. Najpre, želim da pohvalim izdavačku kuću Orfelin na divnoj knjizi, predivnim ilustracijama, kvalitetu papira i same knjige kao i za izgled korica. Ovo je knjiga koji bi svaki ljubitelj horora trebalo da ima u svojoj kolekciji, iako jeste malo skuplja od ostalih ali isto tako ovde se pokazuje kako cena jeste kvalitet. Naime, čitalac se (pričam o Orfelinovom izdanju knjige) najpre suočava sa kratkom biografijom autora, odnosno Lavkrafta, zatim se prelazi na Istoriju Nekronomikona, veoma retke ali poznate mračne knjige koja igra ključnu ulogu u većini odabranih priča, nakon toga sledi 25 divno prevedenih horor priča autora Lavkrafta, i tek na kraju susrećemo se sa napomenama i čudnim pojmovima koje je upravo Lavkraft pominjao kroz priče, koje potpomažu čitaocu duboko shvatanje priče.
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH is yet another effective horror story set waist-deep in the Cthulhu mythos, and from what I’ve heard, a favorite of many Lovecraft aficionados. Told once again in the first person, the story is about a student (whose name is never revealed) who goes to the ruined seaside town of Innsmouth, Mass., for what he thinks will be a one-day trip. Lovecraft spares no words in describing the cursed town, and we soon understand that the nature of the curse boils down to an invasion of Innsmouth many years ago by the Deep Ones, an ancient people that came ashore from the bottom of the sea. From the town drunk with whom the narrator has a long (perhaps overlong?) conversation, we learn that the Deep Ones used to practice human sacrifices in Innsmouth and also did not hesitate to mate with local women, hence the fishy appearance of many of the inhabitants. The whole thing ends up with a big reveal, which for once isn’t as bad as one might expect for a Lovecraft story, and the author even gives us a long, very-well-written action scene toward the end, which is something rare enough to be mentioned and relished.
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Now, on to the fiction itself. Lovecraft is regarded as one of the best authors of supernatural horror and weird fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, and is credited with turning the concept of horror in literature at that time on its head, casting the gaze of the reader out into the endless cold beyond our atmosphere while his precursors and many of his contemporaries dealt with far more terrestrial and comparatively homely methods of inspiring dread and fright. The Shadow over Innsmouth - creepy, creepy, creepy. The tension and dread is built and sustained for the majority of this one, and it also has one of my favourite endings. THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE is my second favorite and the only one that actually gave me goosebumps while reading it for the first time in bed at night. This story of a math student who decides to rent a room in a cursed house in which a witch and her hellish amalgam of a familiar are said to have lived is downright disturbing and creepy and just too well written for comfort. Which makes it yet another masterpiece in the Lovecraft canon. As far as Lovecraft's obvious (let's not kid ourselves) racism, it's my belief that it is possible to separate the art from the artist. I still watch Roman Polanski films decades after Polanski was accused and pled guilty to rape, I don't avoid Tom Cruise films because he's the foremost member of a psychotic cult (just because the films are usually supposed to be good), and the same with regard to other unsavory figures like Woody Allen and Mel Gibson.
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