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Don't get me wrong, taking a stand against an obvious racist is much easier when you don't like any of his stories, and I don't like any of these stories. Not one - even though they're all so similar there might as well just be one. If someone could explain to me what literary merit H.P. Lovecraft has - other than merely serving to inspire Stephen King and other genre writers - I would be grateful. Mysteries of the Heavens Revealed By Astronomy in XIV Parts". Asheville Gazette-News. February 16, 1915. p.4. Archived from the original on May 28, 2021 . Retrieved May 28, 2021– via newspapers.com. The writer is another level that needs to be looked at because it suggests the same infantile and superficial understanding of the world as well. Firstly, there is very limited character development; the attitude of HPL to women is at best ambivalent; exposition is shaky, and HPL had a tin ear for dialogue. The prose is almost exclusively purple--even for his creaky, gothic constructions. No writer or reader will find anything at this level to learn from HPL. The only element of HPL's writing worth the reader's attention is that he may be the first Horror/Science-Fantasy writer to leave the big-bad alive and well and man's position relative to this as tenuous. 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 Call of Cthulhu: BOOM! The unintentional founding of an empire. There were earlier stories that you could say fit into the Cthulhu mythos, but this was the one that laid out all the cards. It's got tremendous energy. It's not subtle; it expressly outs the alienness and its origins, and how it's incompatible with human experience. I loved it! (This is not the first time I've read it.)
The Secret of the Grave" (before 1902; unpublished, nonextant, may simply be "The Mystery of the Grave-Yard") This one's dumb, too. This, like the one before it, has the HUGE CAPS WITH !!!!? at the climax which is I know of the time, but no less hokey. Again, his writing style I enjoy, but like, there's not really even any suspense in this one. Antes de enfrentarme a la reseña de este gran tomo, me parece importante señalar para los que no lo sepan que la prosa de Lovecraft se divide en tres temas fundamentales: están las historias de corte más clásico o macabro, las que se relacionan con el mundo de lo onírico, y las que tratan del terror cósmico o lovecraniano, donde se incluiría el famoso ciclo de los mitos de Cthulhu. The complete works embodies Lovecraft's progression as a writer and fills his mythos well. The only complaint I could find is some earlier works do not stand the test of time or hold well. However having to find other compilations would no longer be needed. For those into noir horror, epic monsters, and the diminished mind seeing the unspeakable terrors and having to rationalize the fear, this is a great book. With some being into lovecraftian lore from gaming, other authors, or even the creepypasta craze, and not reading the original works: buy it now. No other book covers as much. Every other book will have most of the popular selections, not all. At the price you cannot go wrong. The Horror at Red Hook: Often cited as Lovecraft's most racist story, I didn't see that. It was definitely xenophobic, and maybe the broadness of the fear of the other, of all immigrants, diluted that effect for me. The story didn't stand out for me.Y no solo hay repetición en sus protagonistas. Cuando llevas leidas muchas novelas y muchos cuentos ves que la mayor parte son variaciones de otras, sin que cambien muchas cosas, pues, al fin de al cabo, están relacionadas unas con otras. Y para redondear la guindilla el estilo literario de este escritor es muy lento la mayor parte del tiempo, si bien esto tiene su explicación y ha sido lo que menos me ha chocado de todo lo que he dicho anteriormente, ya que al final esto último se le perdona. THE CALL OF CTHULHU. Although not the first Lovecraft story to introduce an element of the Cthulhu mythos (that would be Dagon, also included in this collection), this one is the first to feature the foul-smelling, tentacle-wielding and potbellied deity in all its greasy and nasty glory. Written as an epistolary short story, it gives an account of the discovery of Cthulhu via a series of documents left behind by the great uncle of the narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston. Three words: groundbreaking, masterful, perfect.
There is nothing the tiniest bit scary here (other than the aforementioned racism). When Lovecraft isn't ripping off better writers, like Mary Shelley - whose "Frankenstein" obviously served as inspiration for tales like "Herbert West: Reanimator" - Lovecraft is just writing about the same alien-like creatures who are rarely if ever seen but who cause the male protagonists to faint all the same. Adolphe de Castro (revised from “The Automatic Executioner” by Castro, first published 1891 November 14) H. P. Lovecraft: Lord of a Visible World An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz ( ISBN 0-8214-1333-3)
It seriously took a publisher how much of a century to title a collection of Lovecraft's stories "Necronomicon"? Like seventy years? Did it really just not occur to anyone? Shouldn't the first collected volume of his stories have been called that? I blame August Derleth. In this novella, literature professor Albert A Wilmarth (you’ll notice that many of Lovecraft’s protagonists have such formal names and scholarly professions — likely in homage to the characters of M.R. James) becomes involved in a controversy surrounding strange, seemingly extraterrestrial sightings. A man of logic, Wilmarth naturally sides with skeptics, who claim the “sightings” stem from local legends with no factual basis. But after receiving a letter from one Henry Wentworth Akeley, a fellow academic, Wilmarth opens his mind to the possibilities of extraterrestrial life — only to find that he never should have gotten involved. All but eight of the stories were written before "the Call of Cthulhu" in 1927, but a number of these earlier ones written in typical Lovecraft fashion contain marked foreshadowings of the Cthulhu Mythos in both themes and details. The tie-ins with stories like "Nyarlathotep" and "The Nameless City" are particularly obvious, as are references to the Necronomican, etc. ("History of the Necronomican" was written post-1927; it's simply a pseudo-nonfiction account of the imaginary author and origins of the sinister book, and its translation/printing "history," but adds enjoyable texture to the Mythos for committed fans.) As I've commented before, Lovecraft's own perception of his main fictional corpus was probably much more unified than that of later critics who carve it up into "Mythos" vs. "non-Mythos," and he never coined the term "Cthulhu Mythos" himself; there's a great degree of similarity of conception in many stories on both sides of the supposed divide. One can definitely say, though, that "The Very Old Folk" is certainly a Mythos tale (and as eerie and chilling as any I'd read before), as well as one which reflects HPL's fascination with ancient Rome.
THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK is my third most beloved Lovecraft story and also the last one he ever wrote (that we know of). Eschewing the first person for the third limited, Lovecraft treats us to a chilling account of what the protagonist, Robert Blake, discovers when, driven by his penchant for the occult, he decides to go and explore a haunted church in the town of Providence, RI. Here again the writing is on point as Lovecraft knows better than anyone how to create an atmosphere of claustrophobia and paranoia, playing unashamedly with the fear of the unknown and impending doom. Deeply steeped in the Cthulhu mythos, this story is a prime example of how curiosity can kill a cat.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 I love this collection. It's one of those Barnes & Noble editions they feature in-store. I don't know if later editions were made with the same quality. I bought it at a time when I virtually never bought new books (I raided the library instead) and only because I received a gift card from a workplace holiday exchange and this was the only thing to capture my interest at the time. 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. Some stories I waited too long to add to this review so I don’t have much noteworthy to say:Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (there’s a title for you); Celephaïs (a wonderful dreamlands story); From Beyond (so cheesy, I saw the movie based on this); Nyarlathotep; The Picture in the House; Ex Oblivione.
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