Complete Collection of H. P. Lovecraft (a book review post)

Okay... I'm finally finished with this collection...
That doesn't mean I read everything in it; it means I'm finished with it. And finished with Lovecraft.
Probably.
But I'll get to that somewhere towards the end of this.

The book is divided into sections covering different types of Lovecraft's writings. Of course, what I was interested in was his "mainstream" fiction, not that anything Lovecraft wrote could have been considered mainstream, though it would come much closer to that today. Many of these I reviewed individually as I read through the collection, but some were too terrible to bother with, which is saying a lot because I reviewed some pretty horrible stories. However, I felt like if all I had to say about it was, "This story was shit," that I could probably skip saying anything about it. There were a few reviews toward the end that I just didn't get to, though, mostly because I didn't feel like it. Like The Shadow Out of Time, which was essentially the same story as At the Mountains of Madness but set in Australia rather than Antarctica. [The review would be helpful in explaining why they're the same story (because they don't seem so on the surface), but I'm super tired of Lovecraft and am not going to do it.]

My final evaluation of Lovecraft's fiction, if you haven't figured it out yet, is that it's not worth bothering with. Out of the 60+ stories he wrote, he has maybe, maybe, half a dozen worth looking at, and none of them were amazing. Or even great. They just weren't bad. He only had three or four different stories, and, basically, everything he wrote is some variation of one of those. The only story that really stands out amongst his work is "The Unnamable," a semi-autobiographical short story in which he defends his lack of descriptions of the monsters in his stories.

Speaking of which, Lovecraft is a lazy writer, rarely offering any kind of real descriptions for the monsters he imagined. He falls back on things like "unimaginable" and "too horrific for words." Doing that once or twice may have been okay, but it's every fucking story. Not to mention the fact that his descriptions of places and buildings are nearly always the same. If I never see the word "Cyclopean" again (other than in Magic), it will be too soon. Of course, then I look at his race of cone beings from The Shadow Out of Time (possibly the most ridiculous fictional creature ever imagined) and think it's probably better that he didn't try to give his jello monsters form; it would have turned every one of his stories into comedies.

Probably the most disappointing aspect to reading Lovecraft is that his writing never improved. In fact, I would say that the work he did early in his "career" was significantly better than what he did toward the end of his 20-year body of work. I suppose that's what happens when you only have a few stories that you keep recycling.

The collection also contains some his juvenile fiction, meaning things he wrote while he was a juvenile, not things he wrote for juveniles. I tried a few of these and... well... I tried them so that you don't have to. Being someone who has taught creative writing to middle schoolers, there's not one of these I wouldn't have handed back to a young Lovecraft and told him it needed more work.

I tried to read some of his essays, but they were worse then his fiction: long winded, blathering, pieces of trite.
And let's not even talk about the poetry.

Then there's the unexpectedly large body of works that he coauthored. I flipped through some of these and decided I didn't feel up to trying any of them out. These are the pieces I may come back to at some point, just to see how they compare to his own stories. The one I'm most intrigued by is the one that is supposedly coauthored by Houdini. I say supposedly because I find the idea that he co-wrote with Houdini to be somewhat unbelievable and will need to do some research to verify this. Some other time. I just don't feel like I can do any kind of further reading of anything to do with Lovecraft at the moment.

All of which still begs the question: How did such a no-talent, no-account writer have such a huge impact on current popular culture? Intellectually, I understand the string of events that made this possible, but... wow, I just don't get it. Nor do I get his current fan base. Maybe none of them have actually read his larger body of work? I don't know. It's weird... Weirder than fiction.

The Dreams in the Witch House (a book review post)

To say that Lovecraft was obsessed with dreams would be an understatement. I should probably do a count of how many of his stories have dreams as a main component, but I'm not going to do that. Someone else probably already has, anyway, and I'm not even going to look and see. Why? Because I just don't care. Generally speaking, Lovecraft's dream stuff is ludicrous. Yeah, you can probably tell I'm at the end of my patience with Lovecraft and his shit. Because his stuff was, on the whole, shit. And his writing didn't get better as he practiced. If anything, it got worse. Like with this story...

Granted, his career was cut short by his early death but after... some way too large amount of stories, you'd expect them to start improving. You'd expect some sort of variation or evolution or... SOMETHING! But, no, as with Tim Burton and his inability to quit putting Edward Scissorhands into every fucking movie he makes, Lovecraft seemed to have gotten stuck on one idea and just kept revolving around it and around it and around it. Not to mention the fact that "Cyclopean" is probably a word you never need to use more than once in your lifetime (unless you play Magic, because some the cards make use of the word), and Lovecraft used it ALL THE FUCKING TIME!

And, sheesh! Yes, I know that Edward Scissorhands is not literally in every one of Burton's movies, but, if you watch Burton end to end, I think you'll find he mostly keeps making that same movie over and over again. Mostly.
But I digress...

So, yeah, this book... Young man obsessed with oculty things moves into a house that was previously owned by a woman accused of being a witch. He starts having strange dreams... until all the evidence begins to show that they are not dreams at all, but he keeps telling himself they are. Basically, he ignores all the evidence and refuses to really do anything to stop what's happening, choosing to live in la-la land instead, until it's too late and people end up dead. Pretty typical Lovecraft.
Sounds kind of like Republicans, actually...

At the Mountains of Madness (a book review post)

Yes, I'm still working my way through Lovecraft. No, I wouldn't recommend him to anyone else, not in general. There are a few, just a few, stories I'd suggest for anyone wanting to try him out. This is not one of them. Especially not at its length.

Funnily enough, when Lovecraft wrote this story, it was considered a novella but, by today's standards, it's novel length. It's more than 12,000 words longer than his next longest story and, I'm pretty sure, he could have cut all of them out. All of them. No, Lovecraft is not an author who gets better with length; he just gets more repetitive. I mean, it's possible that all 12,000 of those words are instances of "cyclopean" (one of Lovecraft's favorite words) and "decadent" (a new favorite for this story (seriously, if I ever again hear the term "decadent statue," it will be too soon (What even is a "decadent statue"? Lovecraft never says. He just tosses in the descriptor at some point to differentiate between the earlier statues))).

I did have hopes for this story when it started out. For one thing, it has a new setting. A new setting for Lovecraft, at any rate, though it's not really a common setting: the Antarctic. And it starts out well enough as Lovecraft goes into the scientific mission of the team and setting up the base camp and all of that but, of course, there's an unexpected discovery and everything goes horribly wrong.

Also, of course, the narrator isn't present for any of the action. That's how Lovecraft do. But what that does is forces the author to only tell you what happened, never to show it. It just gets boring after a while. Even when Lovecraft puts the narrator into the action, it ends up being passive. The narrator gets scared and runs away and never even sees what he's running from. His companion does, but that thing, whatever it was, is never revealed. You just have to trust that it's something really scary. So scary that the narrator's companion can't speak of it, another trick of Lovecraft's: the nameless terror.

It's so old, Man! Get a new trick.
Oh, no, wait, this is one of Lovecraft's last pieces, so it's not likely that he's going to find any new tricks.

The real problem with the story, though, is a thing a lot (maybe most?) of sci-fi authors have a problem with: I came up with a really cool idea and I want to tell you all about it even though it has nothing to do with the story and my character has no reason to know anything about it. Like a Joe Shmoe explaining how warp drive works or something. Of course, Lovecraft has to surpass everyone else and spend half of his book explaining something that his character shouldn't know, the back story of an alien race.

Sure, Lovecraft tries to make it plausible for his protagonist (I use that term loosely since the character does nothing more than walk around then run away) to know what he knows, but it's a ridiculous supposition, and you have to have severe cognitive dissonance to believe that his character could decipher and read the entire history of this race in the short amount of time allotted to him to do so by Lovecraft. It hurt my head, actually, trying to pretend that I could go along with the idea long enough to finish this "book."

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (a book review post)

You want to know how you can tell how good or bad a book is? By how willing I am to spoil it. If it's good, I'm going to do my best to keep as much of the book to myself so that you can have full enjoyment of it but, if it's bad, I'm going to give you every reason not read it, which is going to include giving away anything about it that I think will help you to understand why you shouldn't read it. So, yes, there will be spoilers. And... now, I feel bad for even warning you about that because what if you decide to stop right here and not read the review? Seriously, you don't want to waste your time on this one, and I'm going to tell you why.

The first thing you should know, though, is that when an author says about a story, "It's not very good," you should probably believe him. Not that I knew he'd said that before I read it, nor would it have kept me from reading it since I'm doing this whole "complete works of Lovecraft" thing, but at least I would have known going in. Actually, I think Lovecraft was being generous when he said "not very good."

Mostly, the story is just boring. Mind-numbingly boring. And long. Especially for Lovecraft. And, since I'm reading this on my Kindle and it's part of a collection, I didn't know how long it was when I started it, and it kept going on and on and nothing was happening and I couldn't read it without my mind wandering or falling asleep which meant I had to go back and re-read parts of it, not that those parts mattered because none of it ultimately mattered.

More interesting, though, is the fact that Randolph Carter, the protagonist, is a character based more than a little on Lovecraft himself. You'd think that if you were writing a story with you in it that it would be a tad more exciting and interesting. Or that the character would do something. Anything. Other than get captured and have to be continually rescued, passively, by others. Including an army of cats because Carter had happened to have been nice to a cat at some point prior to needing to be rescued.

So the idea here is that Carter has had a dream of a place he calls the Sunset City -- Randolph Carter is an expert at dreaming, evidently -- but, each time he dreams of it, the dream gets snatched away from him. Carter decides it is the gods of Earth doing this -- they live in the land of dream -- and, so, he decides he is going to seek them out in their city of Kadath, a place where no man has ever been.

The bulk of Dream-Quest is Carter travelling through the land of dream and descriptions of the places he's seeing. There is no dialogue in the entire novella. That can be okay in a short story, but it's difficult in a novella. There is a monologue near the end and, when the character began speaking, I got excited for a moment, only to realize that the character was just going to be monologuing. It was sad.

One of the things Lovecraft says about the story is that he worried whether there was so much creepy stuff in it that it all blended together and made everything mundane. He was right to worry. Especially since Lovecraft relies so heavily on not actually describing his monsters. You can only tell me so many times that something is nightmare-inducing before I quit believing you. Especially if you tell me that same basic thing about every creature you come across. All of which is made worse when Lovecraft introduces you to some deadly horror that wants to eat you on one page but, then, becomes your ally a few pages later because you happened to learn a bit of its language.

You might be wondering at this point why I finished this story at all, which would be an entirely fair question. The easy answer is that I'm doing this whole "complete works of Lovecraft" thing, and you can hardly claim to have read the complete works if you dump stories here or there because they bore your eyeballs out (take that however you want to), but, also, I did genuinely become curious as to whether the story was going to go anywhere.

And it did. Sort of. I mean, Carter does eventually make it to Kadath. Very eventually. But that's the only interesting part of the story. See, when Carter FINALLY arrives in Kadath, the unknown city of the gods, to demand that they allow him into his Sunset City, he finds them... not there. The city is abandoned. And, as it turns out, as we find out through the monologue of the -- well, I suppose he's the antagonist, but I hesitate to go as far as to call him that -- "bad" guy, the gods loved Carter's dreamed city so much that they have taken it for themselves, abandoning their positions as gods of the Earth so that they can hang out in Carter's dream city. However, the one little interesting bit is not worth the whole story.

And there's not much after that. Carter escaping again through virtually no action of his own, though it is the only time he's responsible for his own safety. The payoff, which is very small, is definitely not worth the length of the story. And I haven't even mentioned how many times the word "Cyclopean" is used.