The H. P. Lovecraft Collection

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Originally written for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, H. P. Lovecraft's astonishing tales blend elements of horror, science fiction, and cosmology that are as powerful today as they were when first published. THE OUTSIDER is my favorite Lovecraft story bar none. It is also one of his shortest. Written in the first-person narrative (as is often the case in his fiction), it tells of a man (or is it?) who, after having lived as a recluse for what seems like a very long time in his darkened and lifeless castle (or is it?), decides one day to go out into the world and explore. There ensues a series of discoveries––with a devastating although somewhat anticipated reveal––which will seal the narrator’s fate forever. As said, this story is super short but masterfully executed, woven around the themes of loneliness, abnormality and the afterlife. The prose is as it should given the genre––divinely gothic, deliciously verbose and darkly purple. All in all, a masterpiece. However, the reader needs to be prepared for the moral vacuity and hate which they will encounter in the work of HPL. Not to mention, the horrific writing, which is often responsible for some of the worst published writing I have ever come across.

The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (Volume 2) (Chartwell The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft (Volume 2) (Chartwell

Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. I stole the following from /r/lovecraft: "One time, this guy went to a place, and it was SO spooky. But, being a man of science, and of an inquisitive mind, he continued going to the spooky place, and damn was it spooky. As for the monsters themselves, like I said, they're barely, BARELY present. Lovecraft's imagination is strong enough to dream up so many fantastic terrors, yet he seems more keen on keeping them to himself. Even his protagonists are stingy with details; their accounts of the horrors they witnessed are usually along the lines of: "And then I saw something that was so frightening that I can't even describe how frightening it was because its frightening-quotient was utterly indescribable but trust me, it was really frightening, so you should totally faint now." This collection contains most of Lovecraft's better known stories, focusing largely on his Cthulhu mythos cycle, so there is lots of squamous horror here. All the familiar names are here: Cthulhu, Hastur, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Dagon, etc. Monsters of all shapes and sizes, and degenerate inbred New England townsfolk who usually have nasty things in their barns, wells, attics, and woods.Ellis, Philip A. (August 2007). "Unity in Diversity: Fungi from Yuggoth as a Unified Setting". Lovecraft Annual (1): 88–89. ISSN 1935-6102. JSTOR 26868357. The Crawling Chaos and Others: The Annotated Revisions and Collaborations of H.P. Lovecraft, Volume 1 ( ISBN 978-1-935006-15-2) When I was a teenage wannabe Satanist, I shoplifted this and was very disappointed that this was all I got for my petty theft.

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales by H.P. Lovecraft | Goodreads Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales by H.P. Lovecraft | Goodreads

Joshi, S. T. (2009). H.P. Lovecraft: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press. ISBN 9781597320689. 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. 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.

This is a complete list of works by H. P. Lovecraft. Dates for the fiction, collaborations and juvenilia are in the format: composition date / first publication date, taken from An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by S. T. Joshi and D. E. Schultz, Hippocampus Press, New York, 2001. For other sections, dates are the time of composition, not publication. Many of these works can be found on Wikisource. All right, with this one under my belt, I think I can safely say that I’ve read everything Lovecraft has ever written in his life. I will then skip introducing the author––who doesn’t need any introduction, anyway––and go through a rundown of some of my most beloved horror stories of his, which you can find in this collection.