Lovecraft: Tales

by H.P. Lovecraft

edited by Peter Straub

(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2005)

Hardcover, 838 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: 9781931082723, US$35.00

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

From the Cover: A 20th-century successor to Edgar Allan Poe as the master of “weird fiction,” Howard Phillips Lovecraft once wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is far of the unknown.” In the novellas and stories that he published in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories—and in the work that remained unpublished until after his death, including some of his best writing—Lovecraft adapted the conventions of horror stories and science fiction to express an intensely personal vision, cosmic in its ramifications and fearsome in its pessimistic view of human destiny. This volume brings together 22 tales, the very best of his fiction. Early stories such as “The Outsider,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” Herbert West—Reanimator,” and “The Lurking Fear” demonstrate Lovecraft’s uncanny ability to blur the distinction between reality and nightmare, sanity and madness, the human and the non-human. “The Horror at Red Hook” and “He” reveal the fascination and revulsion Lovecraft felt for New York City; “Pickman’s Model” uncovers the frightening secret behind an artist’s work; “The Rats in the Walls” is a terrifying descent into atavistic horror; and “The Colour Out of Space” explores the eerie impact of a meteorite on a remote Massachusetts valley. In such later works as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Whisperer in the Dark,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Shadow Out of Time,” Lovecraft developed his own nightmarish mythology in which encounters with ancient, pitiless extraterrestrial intelligences wreck havoc on hapless humans who only gradually begin to glimpse “terrifying vistas of reality, and out frightful position therein.” Moving from old New England towns haunted by occult pasts to Antarctic wastes that disclose appalling secrets, Lovecraft’s tales continue to exert dreadful fascination.

This collection contains the following stories: “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “The Outsider,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” “Herbert West—Reanimator,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Rats in the Wall,” “The Shunned House,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “He,” “Cool Air,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “The Haunter of the Dark.”

My Review: H.P. Lovecraft is one of the icons of the horror genre. He stands as a bridge between such greats as Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. His work stands as one of the lasting testaments of Weird Fiction and if Poe is the Patron and Stoker is the playwright, then Lovecraft is the Master of Ceremonies at the Grand Guignol that is the horror genre. However, I didn’t have to tell you any of that now did I?

I have read a number of Lovecraft’s short stories in the past in various anthologies and for various classes, but I have never sat down and made a concerted study of what the man had to offer. So, when I had a little bit of reading time on my hands between Quarters here, I picked up a collection of his stories from my local library (choosing this one in particular over others due to the fact that it contained the story “Herbert West—Reanimator” which is one I had not read previously and in which I was particularly interested). Little did I know what I was in for…

To say that Lovecraft is an “interesting” man is an understatement. He is a study in contradictions. His stories are thoroughly modern and yet are written in a way that evokes a language and a time before his own. They are bloody and horrific in the extreme, and yet so thoroughly Puritanical as to be written by Cotton Mather himself. They are extraordinarily otherworldly and yet so rooted in our own world. What this all comes to are some of the most striking and disturbing pieces of fiction written in English.

My personal favorites were “Herbert West—Reanimator,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “Pickman’s Model,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “The Thing on the Doorstep.” In these stories, I feel, Lovecraft is at his best. He is working fast and tight in these stories, and in spite of the natural verbosity of Lovecraft’s language, he is using a real sense of economy in presenting his Reader with the horrors that await them. The devotee of HPL will notice that I skipped over such über-Lovecraftian-classics as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror” and “At the Mountains of Madness” and this is because while I enjoyed these stories and they are the colossi of Lovecraftian horror, I feel that their reputation overshadows their actual impact and Lovecraft is at his best when he is working in a more intimate setting than the non-Euclidian geometry of R’lyeh or the abandoned stone city of the Elder Things and Shoggoths in Antarctica. Though I have to say that Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” is a better Antarctic adventure tale than Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket … but perhaps that is because it is shorter. Both Lovecraft and Poe work best in a shorter format. (The one “novel” of Lovecraft’s career, included here and titled The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is a lumbering, cumbersome creation that perhaps should have been left alone. (It was published posthumously by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.))

All-in-all, this is a great collection of Lovecraft’s work and one that I would recommend to the serious Reader because, after all, 838 pages of dense prose is not something one undertakes lightly.