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...

Shadow Over Innsmouth (a book review post)

As I've mentioned before, Lovecraft was not very successful in his day. In fact, he was decidedly unsuccessful. Fans of Lovecraft like to say that it's because he was before his time, but, no, really, it was because he was a bad writer. He had interesting ideas, but his writing was mostly shit. No one would know who he was if this other author hadn't come along after he died and had the thought, "Huh. I can do something with this Cthulhu stuff." There's a reason Shadow Over Innsmouth was Lovecraft's only published book.

Part of me wanted to like this one. Lovecraft spent some time and really built this one up. He made it seem as if it was going to be something. Go somewhere other than where Lovecraft usually goes. You've got this student interested in architecture travelling through New England in order to take in the sights and see the buildings. He doesn't have much money, so he's travelling as cheaply as possible and, thus, discovers Innsmouth as a cheap detour to get to where he really wants to go. But he's intrigued because the people of the neighboring towns don't like Innsmouth or the people who live there.

Of course, in true Lovecraft style, this is all flashback. The protagonist is telling a story from his youth that was so horrifying that he hasn't shared it with anyone since it happened... until now. And, this, actually, is what causes the story, ultimately, to fail.

Yes, there will be spoilers. You should be able to tell by this point that I didn't care for Innsmouth which may be all you need to know. If you don't plan to read it, though, you may as well read on.

Lovecraft has a severe issue with logical inconsistencies. I suppose this isn't an issue for people who don't think about what they're reading, but I do, so his inconsistencies tend to stack up for me as I read until his stories lose cohesion. I suppose that's what makes his shorter works somewhat easier to take: They're not long enough for him to contradict himself too much or stick in very much information that just plain doesn't make any sense.

For instance, when the protagonist arrives in Innsmouth, already set against it due to the driver of the bus he arrived on and his reception at the hotel (or whatever it was), he seeks out some non-natives...

Wait a minute; this already doesn't make any sense. Everyone in the surrounding towns hates Innsmouth and there are no people from outside of it who live there. The town is dirt poor with no economy, so there's no plausible explanation for anyone to be commuting into Innsmouth for work... And, yet, there is a boy from one of the neighboring towns who works at a grocery store in Innsmouth. On the flimsiest of reasons. But Lovecraft needs this non-native boy as a plot device so inserts him and tries to brush it off with a lame excuse.

Basically, he needs the boy to up the creepy factor by offering an exposition on what life is like inside the town. Then he has the boy sketch out a very detailed map of the entire town, including all of the street names, in just a moment or two, a map which the protagonist refers back to throughout the story and that Lovecraft uses as a device to give the protagonist an almost clairvoyant knowledge of Innsmouth. You know, something like he would have had if he'd lived there all his life. I was annoyed every time he pulled out that map.

The thing that breaks the story, though, is Lovecraft's insistence on the twist ending. Where did that even come from? Was it Lovecraft? I don't know. I just can't think of anyone who wrote earlier than him that did that shit. Forcing in the twist endings doesn't work out in the long term, just ask Shyamalan.

Anyway, the twist ending in this one is so out-of-context from the events in the rest of the story that it broke the whole thing for me. It makes the rest of the story, basically, a lie -- not on the events themselves but in the frame of mind in the narration -- and made me feel like I'd wasted my time. Oh, wait, I wasted my time! Because I did.

Which is not to say that the whole Lovecraft experiment has been a waste of time, but the experiment itself has been valuable. More on that when I finish the last few stories I have to read. And, boy, am I ready to be through reading them! Like I said, Lovecraft is mostly a shit writer.

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.

"The Unnamable" (a book review post)

Okay, before anyone says anything, I know "unnamable" is "misspelled." It is not misspelled because I am spelling it incorrectly; it is "misspelled" because that's how Lovecraft spelled it, so I can only assume that that was the correct spelling at the time. I'm assuming that because Lovecraft was rather a fascist of grammar, so it would be more than odd for him to have such a glaring mistake.

Now... Does anyone remember that old horror story (it was told by one of the boys in Dead Poets Society) about the person putting together the jigsaw puzzle only to have it reveal a picture of the person in question being murdered, an event which immediately happens upon completion of the puzzle? Yeah, you should just keep that in mind.

This story made me chuckle. It begins as a philosophical discussion between the narrator, who is an author, and his friend, who is a high school principal, about the author's foible of referring to things in his stories as "indescribable" or "unnamable." The principal holds that this is a "puerile device" of the author and is the reason, at least in part, that he has not become more successful. I have to imagine that Lovecraft is here reflecting upon actual comments to him as an author, because it's one of the things that has come to annoy me most about his writing, his constant retreat into saying that something is too horrifying to describe. The narrator, Randolph Carter, attempts to defend himself.

The two men are, of course, sitting on a tomb in a cemetery as they have this conversation. And, of course, something is going to go terribly wrong.

It was a clever set up. Lovecraft offers us pieces of the surroundings as he tells us about the two men talking, the dilapidated house not far away, the tombstone engulfed by a tree, the very tomb they are sitting on. Then, as Carter begins his defense about unnamable things, he relates to his friend a story, and we discover that they are in the very place where the story takes place. If you're paying attention (and, yes, I know I'm ruining this part), it will dawn on you as he tells the story to his friend, but, if not, at the end of the story, his friend says he would really like to see the house from the story. Carter replies that he can, or could have before it got too dark (because it is so dark at that point that the two men can't even see one another), because it's right over there.

And that is when things go to hell.

I liked this one a lot. That Lovecraft was willing to point out and, to a certain extent, even make fun of this failing of his as a writer, even in the midst of defending himself, is interesting to see. The story within the story becoming the setting for what happens in the story was also sufficiently subtle and interesting. I think this is possibly the most sophisticated of the stories I've read by him to date. Even if it does fall back to his favorite style of ending, which is, of course, the point.

"The Rats in the Walls" (a book review post)

When I was a kid, we had squirrels in the attic. At night, sometimes, you could lie awake and listen to them roll pecans around -- we had two big pecan trees in our backyard -- and, whenever anyone needed to go up there -- which wasn't infrequent -- stray pecans could be found littering the attic floor. I actually wrote a short story, "The Squirrel Olympics," based on the whole thing, a short story that won some award or other and was published in an anthology in some local something-or-other. Hmm... I wonder if I still have a copy of that anywhere...

But I digress.

The problem with Lovecraft's story, "The Rats in the Walls," has nothing to do with lying awake and listening to rodents in your house, something I'm sure many people have experienced. The problem with the story is that it has a rather tremendous buildup that drags on and on, which is saying something for a story that's less than 8000 words, that, then, left me with the feeling of "that's all?" To say the least, I was unimpressed with where the story went.

Maybe if the story didn't follow so many of Lovecraft's normal conventions of storytelling, I would have ended up in a different place by the end of it, but it's stereotypically stereotypical Lovecraft. A man goes home to visit his ancestral home to find out there is some deep, dark family secret he knows nothing about. Of course, he is the last of his line, so he has no way of discovering the secret but, whatever it is, it has caused his family to be reviled in the place of their origin.

He sets about restoring his family home, which has fallen into ruin since his family abandoned it to escape their legacy in the new world. Once the restoration is complete and he begins living there, he begins to hear rats in the walls at night. The problem? The walls are stone. Solid stone.

But the cats in "castle" also hear the rats, and it drives them into a frenzy every night. Delapore is the only human who seems to hear the rats, though, so everyone else (the servants) are confounded by the actions of the cats.

Eventually, all of this leads to finding an underground cavern (spoiler alert!) where his family used to raise humans in pens for eating. In his horror at finding this out, Delapore immediately falls upon one of his companions and begins eating him, something Delapore can't remember after the fact.

At any rate, the reveal was not worth the build up, and the sudden cannibalism by the main character was not really believable. Not that it was less believable than a lot of Lovecraft's contrivances, but the blackout suffered by the character made it something too removed to be believed. Plus, the rats scurrying in the walls just wasn't creepy enough to make the story horrifying. Not a Lovecraft story I would recommend.

"Herbert West: Reanimator" (a book review post)

This is by far the longest piece by Lovecraft that I've read so far. Not because I'm avoiding his longer works but because, after reading several of his short stories, I decided to read his works in the order in which he wrote them. I don't know; I guess I just wanted to see the evolution of his writing.

It is in some ways disingenuous to say that this is a longer work. It is in actuality six short stories about the same two characters, Herbert West and his narrator assistant. Each story begins with a somewhat distracting recap of events which is meant to string the events of each episode together into a coherent whole. This is only partially successful as there is no need to have read any of the stories to be able to read any of the other stories except for the last one, "The Tomb-Legions," which requires that you have read all of the other pieces.

I have to say that this... I don't know, let's call it an experiment... was unsuccessful. Lovecraft called the story a parody of Frankenstein, but I don't think it succeeds even at that. It's too clumsy, both copying the novel and being unrelated to it at the same time. And, in the end, Lovecraft pulls in some of his unexplainable otherworldly esoterica to draw the story to an unsatisfying conclusion which is so unrelated to anything in Frankenstein that it manages to undermine any claim that this is a parody.
 It turns it into a poor attempt at stealing this particular story idea, that of bringing the dead back to life.

Lovecraft has some stylistic choices which specifically don't work in Herbert West:
1. Lovecraft is a "teller," not a "show-er." This robs his stories of immediacy and works against them being true horror. They might leave you feeling creepy, but it's difficult to ever feel any real fear for the characters since everything is told from some far removed point to the actual action.
2. He almost never uses dialogue, resorting, instead, to just telling us what was talked about. This follows point 1.
3. He cheats on descriptions (CONSTANTLY!) by telling us it's too unspeakable for words. Sorry, as a pattern (which it is), that's just deficient writing skills. Every once in a while, that can work to heighten just how horrible something is, but, when that's your go-to descriptive phrase, it shows that you just can't come up with anything.

The above points don't cause problems in any individual short story, but they cause longer works to drag and become uninteresting. Thankfully, even as a longer work, Herbert West wasn't all that long, and I was able to finish it, but I was glad when I did. I kept thinking as I was reading, "Geez! Just get to the point!" Unfortunately, the point wasn't really worth getting to.

"The Quest of Iranon" (a book review post)

"The Quest of Iranon" is the most interesting of the Lovecraft stories I've read so far (I'm somewhere in the two dozen range). I'm not saying it's the best, but it's the only one that has give me a "huh, that was interesting" reaction. [Ignore the image. This is in no way a horror story.]

This will be full of spoilers and, actually, I'm going to ruin the ending, so you should go read it before going on with my review.

To put it simply, Iranon is a dreamer. He's a singer of songs and a teller of stories. And he's on a quest for his homeland, a land he remembers from his infancy, a land in which he was a prince. But he was for whatever reason left to be raised by another family, and he now seeks home.

During his journey, he acquires a travelling companion, a youth who wants to move on to a better place than where he lives, another dreamer, though not one who dreams as deeply as Iranon. They travel together for years, until the youth passes Iranon by in age and, eventually, dies, all the while Iranon ages not a day. There's no explanation as to why Iranon doesn't age, so it's to be assumed that it is because he is of a people of another place, a superior people.

This is the bit that's interesting to me (and here comes the real spoiler), because, at the end, Iranon, still on his quest, stays with an old man, an old man with whom it turns out he was friends with during his childhood. The old man only has distant memories of the boy, Iranon, who used to tell fantastic tales, tales about being a prince from a far off land, but tales that couldn't be true because he and everyone had known Iranon since birth,

Hearing the truth deprives Iranon of his eternal youth, and he becomes the old man that he really ought to be. The general interpretation of this is that Iranon had stayed eternally youthful because he was a dreamer, and that it is the death of his dream that causes him to grow old. I suppose this is a logical interpretation and it is what it presented in the story.

However, if you look deeper, it's possible to see that Iranon was only youthful in his own eyes. He was, for a while, a famous and popular entertainer in the city Oonai, but, eventually, the people turn to a new group of entertainers. It is pointed out in the story that these are young people. Iranon, no longer feeling appreciated, leaves the city. But, maybe, he's just grown old and he's the only one who doesn't see it. It's an interesting question.

"From Beyond" (a book review post)

First, yes, I am still working my way through these; I just haven't read any in a couple of months. The one thing I'm discovering about Lovecraft is that all of his stories are only of a few varieties. Over time, it makes them all blur together. The break was not purposeful; it was because every time I opened the book I found I didn't feel like reading Lovecraft at that moment, knowing exactly what to expect. I don't know if it was having had a break from him or if this was a better story than the average, but I enjoyed this one more than the last few that I read (ones I didn't bother to review individually because of a lack of things to say about them).

"From Beyond" has a slight twist on most of the stories I've read by Lovecraft so far while still having the same basic foundation. It's a story about a man, Crawford Tillinghast, who has developed a way to see the hidden worlds all around us. In this, it is very similar to most other Lovecraft stories but, in execution, it is most like "The Terrible Old Man."

This is not a new thought for me, but it's one I don't believe I've stated before in any of the Lovecraft reviews I've done:
Lovecraft seems to owe a lot to Robert Louis Stevenson and his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Not that I know that Lovecraft read Stevenson, but I find it difficult to imagine that he would not have considering the similarities between the two authors in their physical conditions (both sickly) and the similarity in style of most of Lovecraft's short stories to Jekyll & Hyde. That style being an unnamed narrator telling a story about a friend suffering the consequences of, usually, some sort of insatiable curiosity. This one, "From Beyond," is closer to Jekyll & Hyde than most.

Back in the early 90s, there was a comic book, Dark Dominion, which dealt with the idea that there was a world of demons that overlapped our own. One man, Michael Alexander, was able to see these demons as they coexisted with us. It was a darkly interesting idea that ended way too soon. I don't know if Jim Shooter, the creator of the series, read Lovecraft, but you can see those same ideas in "From Beyond." I don't know of anyone earlier than Lovecraft writing about these kinds of things in this kind of way. This is not the only of Lovecraft's stories dealing with this idea, but this is the most direct, at least so far. It's short enough that I'm willing to say you should just read it.

"The Terrible Old Man" (a book review post)

"The Terrible Old Man" might be the most normal of Lovecraft's stories, the most "normal" one I've read, anyway. Which is not to say that it's not a horror story, but it's not a weird, tentacled monster horror story.

This is going to be all spoilery, by the way, because the short story is quite short, and there's no way to talk about what I want to talk about without giving it away. But you should still read it because 1. it's short, and 2. it's that good.

I'm not saying that Lovecraft invented this type of story, but this is certainly the earliest example that I know I've read of this type, the type where the perpetrators become the victims.

So...

There's an old man, an ex-sea captain, who lives alone and is rumored to have vast stores of treasures. Or something. No one really knows because the old guy keeps to himself and everyone is afraid of him. But, then, three new guys arrive into town, hear about the guy, and decide that they will rob the old man. They'll torture the location of the hidden treasure out of him if they have to.

Except one of the guys, the driver, isn't too keen on the torture part, so he tells his two buddies to go easy on the old guy. And that's the last he sees of them as they head to the house and he waits in the car. Not long after, he hears screams coming from inside the house and assumes it's the old guy... until he finds the old guy staring at him from the gate with a wicked grin on his face.

Seriously, go read it.

Now, one of the things I read about this story is that it's a prime example of Lovecraft's racism... wait! What?
I'm sorry; I just don't see it.
Yes, the men from out of town are "foreigners" in that they are not from the small town where everyone knows about the terrible old man. You have to outsiders come in who don't know any better. I think you have to read awfully deep between the lines to turn this into some kind of warning to outsiders to stay out.

Or maybe I just don't know enough about Lovecraft.
However, not knowing more than I do, I say this is a really great read.

"Dagon" (a book review post)

Having already read "Call of Cthulhu," it's easy to see that this story, "Dagon," is an earlier iteration of Lovecraft's most famous story. In many ways, "Dagon" reads as an early draft, just an early draft that ended up published. Clearly, this idea of a massive body of land rising from the depths of the ocean floor was not one Lovecraft could get out of his mind.

Even with the similarities, there are things about this earlier story that I think work better. "Dagon" is about a man lost at sea. He's drifting alone in a little boat in the middle of the ocean and certain that he's going to die. Upon waking one day, he finds that his boat is no longer drifting but has struck land. Except that it hasn't "struck" land, because, when he sits up and looks around, he finds that the land has risen up under him and his boat is stranded, land bound.

Lovecraft's description of the risen continent is exquisitely detailed with sensory information. The smell of rotting fish and other sea... things... that are equally stranded upon the new rocky plain. The lack of anything to block out the sun. The desolate waste of the sea floor suddenly exposed to light. And our lone man tramping across it to find out if there's any way off.

Of course, in true Lovecraft style, all of this is told in flashback style to explain why the man feels as if his death is imminent. And this is the part of the story that doesn't work for me. While the part on the island is interesting in its landscape and the thing that happens, once he escapes, there is no reason given within the story that there should be anything to worry about after.

I understand that the tension in the story is the man's fear about dying because of what he saw, but doesn't ring true. Especially so considering what happens at the very end. How does it relate to the rest of the story?

It's an interesting story, and the part with the risen continent is well worth the read, but I wasn't impressed with the story overall. I think there could have been much more tension without it being done as a flashback.

"The Tomb" (a book review post)

"The Tomb" is Lovecraft's first published fiction. It's also the earliest written of all of his published works. It shows. Lovecraft has a tendency toward wordiness as it is, which works well in most of the stories I've read so far. His words, his many words, set the tone and give his stories a certain weight they wouldn't otherwise carry. However, he's not able to pull that off with "The Tomb."

"The Tomb" opens more as preachy than descriptive. It's Lovecraft giving us a philosophy of life that I have to believe is his and that, to some extent, this particular character is his representation of himself. He's a character obsessed from childhood with a tomb on the property on which he lives. The tomb is locked with a huge chain, but the door isn't quite closed, which taunts him because he can almost see in, but he can't get in.

The rest of this will have spoilers. You've been warned.

The kid grows up with a habit of sneaking out of the house at night and sleeping outside of the tomb door and dreaming strange and weird dreams. Which lasts until he gets old enough to suddenly know where the key to the lock is hidden. Yes, one day, he just knows.

From that point forward, he goes down into the crypt each night and sleeps in a special, empty coffin and gains all kinds of secret knowledge that cause him to become even more estranged from his family and the people in the town.

Skipping some of the details, here, eventually the protagonist is put into an asylum. This raises the question: Was what the protagonist was experiencing real? Did it happen or did he just think it happened? I think we're supposed to side with the protagonist, but there are too many gaps for me to buy into the story the protagonist is telling us. Without that buy in, the story falls flat and is kind of shrug worthy.

Still, if you want to get the full Lovecraft experience, I think it's instructive to see his progression, so the first story he wrote is essential to that. Otherwise, even though I've still only read a handful of his stories, there are certainly better ones out there and this one can be skipped.

"The Call of Cthulhu" (a book review post)

More than anything else, Lovecraft is known for Cthulhu. That, in and of itself, is extremely interesting because, other than a few other mentionings of the... creature, "The Call of Cthulhu" is the only story he ever wrote about the monstrous deity from the far reaches of space. I would say it's because of the 80s RPG except that that game only came about because "Cthulhu" was already a thing. Even TSR tried to use the character as a deity of some sort in one of their D&D publications.

In fact, I think all of the popular culture reference to Cthulhu have led to a misconception about who or what Cthulhu is or was. Not that I'm going to tell you, because you should read it. Just know that Cthulhu is not just some demon from Hell. It's more complicated than that. "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

The story itself seems to be typical of Lovecraft's style, meaning the action happens to characters other than the protagonist, who is only researching events that have already happened. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Call of Cthulhu," this raises the tension and suspense. Why? Because, as we find out early in the story, our protagonist is expecting to be murdered, and his research into his uncle's supposed accidental death tells us why.

So here's the thing: I don't quite get why "The Call of Cthulhu" has taken on such a mythic quality. It was good, but I wouldn't say it's great. It's certainly apparent that there is a huge tapestry of mythos that this one story was pulled from and, evidently, Lovecraft had some of that worked out. Of course, I'm not very far into my reading of Lovecraft, yet (I've only read about half a dozen stories, so far), so, maybe, it's the other mentions in other stories that really build up the "legend" of Cthulhu and have made so many other people want to build on it. That said, even Lovecraft said this particular story was only "middling."

At any rate, it's certainly worth a read if, for nothing else, just to see where all the Cthulhu stuff came from. And, honestly, I think the whole cult of Cthulhu aspect is much more frightening than Cthulhu itself. Who, after all, is going to kill the protagonist? Assuming that happens, of course.

"The Colour Out of Space" (a book review post)

[Note: I am working my way through a complete collection of H. P. Lovecraft's works. Although I will give my thoughts about Lovecraft in a more general sense when I've finished the collection, I think it's worthwhile to look at the individual stories (or at least some of them) as I'm going through.]

"The Colour Out of Space" is what I'm coming to recognize as classic Lovecraft. A regular guy comes across something strange and starts investigating it and discovers some -- look, I'm just going to put it in the vernacular -- "weird ass shit." Weird ass shit that freaks the protagonist out and affects him for the rest of his life, the length of which doesn't always extend beyond the length of the story. So it is with "The Colour Out of Space."

"The Colour Out of Space" opens with a land surveyor out doing what land surveyors do because a reservoir is being built. Before going, he's warned about "the blasted heath" and how evil it is, but he put it down to local superstition. At one time, there had been a road going through it, but so evil did they believe it that that road had fallen into disuse, and a new one had been built that circled far around the evil place. Even with that, the surveyor thought nothing of the place... until he came upon it, at which point a great reluctance came upon him to enter it. But he had no choice and, so, traveled through the place on his business.

So fearsome was the place, and because he had not, yet, finished his surveying work, he asked the locals about it, but all he could get was half stories about strange days. Until he finally finds the person who can tell him the horrible story.

Because the story is being told about something that happened decades before, we never need to worry about the protagonist; however, that doesn't make the story any less horrifying. All we really know is that the locals are greatly looking forward to the reservoir and that "the blasted heath" will finally be consumed by the deep waters. We also know that after hearing the story, our protagonist vows that he will never drink of the waters that will come from that place.

Beyond that, you'll have to read for yourself.

"The Festival" (a book review post)

[Note: I am working my way through a complete collection of H. P. Lovecraft's works. Although I will give my thoughts about Lovecraft in a more general sense when I've finished the collection, I think it's worthwhile to look at the individual stories (or at least some of them) as I'm going through.]


So let's play pretend for a moment.

It's Christmas. Now, I don't know who you are or how you celebrate Christmas or the yule season, but, yet, that's what it is. You're descended from an ancient, reclusive people who live in a small fishing town in the northeast. Not many of them ever leave. Yet, somehow, whether it was your grandfather or your mother or whoever, one of your more immediate ancestors left that village. All you know is that once a century, your people, your family, are commanded to keep the Festival. You are the only one of any of the scattered ones of your people who return to keep the tradition.

And what you find there in that village of your people, that village that you have never before visited, is far from... normal.

Would you go back? Knowing that your parents or your grandparents, whoever it was who "escaped," is ignoring the call. All of your immediate family is ignoring the call of upholding the tradition. Would you go back?

"The Festival," by Lovecraft, is the story of a man who did go back. A man who finds stranger and stranger things the more he allows himself to be pulled along with the happenings of the Festival. A man who, in the end, is left to question... everything. Even his sanity.

The real power in this one, apart from Lovecraft's imagery, is the blending of the mundane with the fantastic. Everything is just normal enough for the protagonist to think that he's imagining things or that he's the one who's crazy.

All I know is if I ever get called to some out-of-the-way location for some ancient family tradition that I am going to do some major amounts of research before I go.

"The Nameless City" (a book review post)

[Note: I am working my way through a complete collection of H. P. Lovecraft's works. Although I will give my thoughts about Lovecraft in a more general sense when I've finished the collection, I think it's worthwhile to look at the individual stories (or at least some of them) as I'm going through.]

"The Nameless City" is a city so horrible and horrifying that it doesn't even have a name, hence the title. It's only spoken about in whispers and as threats to children and its facts have long been lost in antiquity. It's the murmurings that draw the unnamed protagonist to find it, but just its skeleton in the desert causes such fear in the man, he says that no other has even known fear like him.

So, of course, he goes in.

But he does wait till morning.

Lovecraft's writing is very atmospheric, and the city he describes is truly creepy. Not just because it's abandoned but because it's... alien. All of the proportions are wrong, not to mention the strange winds and noises.

And anything else I say about it would be getting into spoiler territory. I'll say this, though: I was not satisfied with the ending. Everything else was great. Lovecraft's language and imagery make it a story well worth reading despite the ending, and, I think, other people may not have the issue with the ending that I had. Which I can't talk about without giving it away. If you like stuff like this:

"...afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave."

then you will like "The Nameless City."