The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror (2024)

One of the most influential writers of all time!
The general rating is an average sum result of the individual ratings given for each short story in the anthology.
The Nameless City
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
The journey and finding of a mythical lost city, so ancient that even its name has been lost, but clearly was not built by men, since its inusual architecture wasn’t fit to harbor human beings.
The Festival
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.
A man comes to a town during Christmas time to visit an old family house and soon discovers that that time of year is ideal for festivities of more than one religion and quite diverse practices.
The Colour Out of Space
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
An investigator is researching about an incident in Arkham, Mass., named “The Blasted Heath” but that none in the town is willing to talk about in specifics, until he is able to make contact with a farmer living way out of the town, along with his family.
The Call of Cthulhu
Rating: **** (4 stars)
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Through a series of “found documents” during three sections in the narrative, it’s slowy revealed how a secret cult, so ancient along with the dawn of men, it was founded to keep memories of some kind of species from the stars who walk the Earth before humankind, and that they retired themselves to the depths of the sea and the core of the planet, but before they pass to the first member of the cult, the promise that Cthulhu, its prophesied priest, someday will born and the cult is waiting, always waiting.
The Dunwich Horror
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
This story is set on the fictional town of Dunwich, Mass., near of the also fictional town of the infamous Arkham, Mass.. This is the sad tale of Wilbur Whateley that since his birth was clear that something was too strange about him, growing up in a scary speed, reaching adulthood in just 10 years, and discharging an awful smell around him. Wilbur’s grandfather is entitled to the education of him, both regular learning about the world as well obscure arcanic one. The Whateley Farm encloses a dark secret that nobody must know about if Dunwich may have any chance to keep existing.
The Whisperer in Darkness
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
This the story about reports of strange things floating in a river, which after that a college professor from Miskatonic University, in Arkham, Mass., started to make a communication through letters with a farmer who claims to know what is happening.
The Dreams in the Witch-House
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
A student from the Miskatonic University, goes to rent an attic room in a house named as “The Witch House” and known to be cursed. He started to have dreams about geometry, colors and sounds that can’t be described or named in human terms, along with interactions with a witch, compelled to participate in unholy rituals.
The Haunter of the Dark
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
This tale is about the Church of Starry Wisdom, where a secret society came into the possession of an old item of impossible angles, which is able to show dark knowledge about places beyond imagination but to a too highly cost to pay.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man who is doing a personal research about the lore and architecture of New England’s towns ending at Innsmouth, feeling it as a kind of calling to go there, soon enough he founds that the town is strangely too deserted and those few inhabitants look just not right.
The Shadow Out of Time
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
This is a novella about a man who doesn’t know if he is becoming mentally ill, since he constantly is having lapses where he watches places and beings totally alien.
At the Mountain of Madness
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A Geology Professor from Miskatonic University, leading an expedition to the Antartica where they will find the astonishing remnants of an ancient alien civilization.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
Charles Dexter Ward, medically certified insane, who escaped from a mental asylum who is obsessed with an ancestor involved in dark practices.
Azathoth
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
In a modern world where society doesn’t believe in the paranormal and magic anymore, a man dreams about the stars until a way to reach them it’s presented before him.
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
An insane murderer, with none school formation, is sentenced to a mental institution, and there he is having violent seizures aloing with weird dreams about places and beings that it’s not likely he should even the capability to imagine about.
Celephais
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man dreams about the “city of his dreams” named “Celephais”, where nothing changes unless he wishes to.
Cool Air
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
This tale is about the peculiar friendship between a cranky person and a medical doctor, shaped up after the latter saved the life of the former.
Dagon
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A sailor after an accident at sea, he ended up in some kind of island where there is a monolith used to worship a “sea-god”.
Ex Oblivione
Rating: * ( 1 star)
A man travels through dreams to find the secrets of life and the universe.
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
This tale is about Jermyn Family and how this family always felt a calling to visit Africa, specifically the mysterious area of the Belgian Congo about the legend of a lost city.

From Beyond
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A scientist made a machine that allows to people to access to a different plane of existence, but the catch is that it works in both ways.
He
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A man who was original from the New England country moved to New York City and while he isn’t enjoying there, he meets a strange fellow who talks to him about ancient Native American rituals.
Herbert West: Reanimator
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
Herbert West believes that human body is not other than an “organic machine” and therefore, there has to be a way of “re-starting” it when it passed away. Since he was a medical student at Miskatonic University, he allied with the story’s narrator, another fellow medical student, to make secret experiments to make possible the reanimation of a dead person, and those experiments continued once both get their medical degrees and began their private medical practice, and even during their military medical service on World War I. During all those years, having different morbid results on their sinister experiments.
Hypnos
Rating: * ( 1 star )
A man counts his experiences with a stranger that becomes his friend in instant and their travels together in dreams.
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
This is unusual tale about a trip to Egypt where the character was subjected to be kidnapped and imprisoned inside of a pyramid.
In the Vault
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
An undertaker got trapped by accident in the vault assigned to keep the coffins of the deceased ones at winter that due the ground got too hard to cave in, they need to be stored and to wait until spring.
Medusa's Coil
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man is doing some touring in the south of US and ended in a plantation where an old man tells him the sad story of his son and the wife that he brought to there.
Memory
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
This is a tale set in a non disclosed but evident future, of a place known as the Valley of Nis, where two powerful entities, the Genie that haunts the moonbeams and the Daemon of the Valley, are engaged in a conversation about the identity of those who lived there many time ago.
Nyarlathotep
Rating: * ( 1 star )
A powerful pharaoh returns to life in modern world and he’s showing off his paranormal abilities that the populace consider as mere tricks of some kind.
Pickman's Model
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
This tale is about a gifted painter, from Boston, whose paintings possess masterful detailing and astonishing technique, but due the paintings’ topics are about too gruesome and gore scenes, the painter has been expelled from the Boston Art Club, nevertheless a friend of him visit his art studio in lugubrious part of the city.
Poetry of the Gods
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
Marcia dreams about the Greek gods and there she meets many famous writers and where the Greek gods explained to her the revelant role of poets.
The Alchemist
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A family line is cursed by the son of a powerful wizard whom died at hands of an ancestor of that family, since then all member diez when they reached the age of 32 years old, and now the current member of the family is soon to reach that fateful age.
The Beast in the Cave
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A man joined a guided tour into a system of caves in the depths of a montain and in a moment, he got lost, soon his torch extinguished and he is all alone in the pitch black ambiance but isn’t so alone as he’d think.
The Book
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man got a strange book from a strange bookseller, and you can bet that strange things started to happen. The story began quite good but it’s hard to give a better rating to something that it was left unfinished.
The Cats of Ulthar
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
In town of Ulthar, which is found in the alternate dimension of the Dreamlands, it’s forbidden by law to kill any cat, however, the story tells us why.
The Crawling Chaos
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man went deep in a drug-induced trip, having a pseudo-apocalyptical experience with Heaven’s messengers-like included.
The Descendant
Rating: * ( 1 star )
Three intersected stories having London as common scenario where each mentioned place has a secret meaning or intention.
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
At the great land of Mnar, separated by the river Ai, there were two cities. The inhabitants of those two cities couldn’t be more different, and they will get to know that revenge is one that it’s best served cold.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
Randolph Carter and his quest, taking him through the several places in the Dreamlands, for the mythical city of Kadath that nobody else has been there.
The Evil Clergyman
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
A man is exploring an ancient house and his guide warns him of staying after dark or touching anything there.
The Horror at Martin's Beach
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
A fishing boat crew have the battle of their lives against a powerful sea creature, finally killing it. Later, the crucial discovery by marine biologist about the creature will result into something terrible.
The Horror at Red Hook
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A police detective accounts the strange case of Robert Suydam and its connection with the neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The Hound
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
A creepy team of grave robbers customized their own “grave robber exhibit” and they naively think that the missing piece for their “secret morbid museum” was to go over to the cemetery where was supposedly buried a “famous” grave robber of old times.
The Lurking Fear
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
A journalist/monster hunter is doing a research about the infamous Martense Family and the rumours about a “lurking fear” in the mountain terrains around the property of the said family.
The Moon-Bog
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
An Irish-American man goes over Ireland since he inherited an old house in the fictional town of Kilderry. The property includes a mysterious bog.
The Music of Erich Zann
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A college student rents an apartment in a strange and creepy part of the city. There, he befriends with Erich Zann, a mute musician, who works in a local orchestra. Each night, Zann plays his strange and quite unique music.
The Other Gods
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
A prophet, in the company of his apprentice, makes a difficult journey scaling a mountain where is said that the gods of Earth live at the peak of it, however they aren’t alone.
The Outsider
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
Tthe main character has been living all alone, once he decides to venture into the outer world, soon enough he is face to face with the most hideous monster.
The Picture in the House
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
A man looks for refuge from an incoming storm in what it seems a deserted house, but it’s indeed inhabited by an old man.
The Quest of Iranon
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
This is a surreal tale about Iranon, who is a prince looking for his native city of Aira. This is an interesting excercise of mind over matter and the limitless power of the will of believing.
The Rats in the Walls
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
This a very creepy tale where the last man of the De la Poer Family goes back to England to inherit their ancestral home, Exham Priory, and his bad decision to try to repair it.
The Shunned House
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
A man and his uncle, are doing a paranormal research of a house with a very long history of unexplained deaths and illness for the unlucky inhabitants of that house. After doing all the paperwork about the incidents, they are left with no other path than actually go there and pass the night over there.
The Silver Key
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
Randolph Carter is realizing how while he is growing old, he is beginning to lose his skill to access to the Dreamlands as easy as was before on his youth.
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
Once again, Randolph Carter appears in this other story, now with the companionship of Harley Warren, an occultist who seems to have a copy of the infamous Necronomicon. They are investigating the location of paranormal gates supposed to be used by demons to access other dimensions.
The Strange High House in the Mist
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
There is a strange house at Kingsport, Mass., and while it’s quite difficult to access since it was built in a very high and steep place and the townsfolk are affraid of the house.
The Street
Rating: * ( 1 star )
In this openly racist and paranoid tale, it’s described the fall of certain street of, most likely, Boston, that it was a crucial path for centuries since the foundation of the United States until after World War I where hosted several Russian inmigrant families.
The Temple
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
This is a tale about an Imperial German Navy U-boat in WWI when its captain and crew meet with the unlucky situation of finding an arcane item.
The Terrible Old Man
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
The Terrible Old Man is a man so old that nobody remembers him how he looked like when he was young or even what his name is, but everybody at Kingsport know that it’s better to leave him alone. However, a trio of robbers thought that it could be profitable to assault the house.
The Thing on the Doorstep
Rating: ***** ( 5 stars )
Daniel Upton and Edward Derby were best friends, but Upton will have to make hard call for saving Derby.
The Tomb
Rating: * ( 1 star )
An odd tale about a man who becomes obssessed with the mausoleum of a nearby property, where dreams and reality intersect into an uncertain scenario.
The Transition of Juan Romero
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
Two men, an anonymous narrator and a Mexican named Juan Romero, find an abyss in the depths of a mine where they work.
The Tree
Rating: * ( 1 star )
An odd tale set many centuries in the past at Arcadia, Greece, where the Tyrant of Syracuse organized a contest between two famous sculptors of the región.
The Unnamable
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
Two men, Carter and Manton are discussing about an entity called “The Unnamable” which is supposed to be impossible to describe, therefore the name, however, they chose poorly to engage into this discussion in a cemetery.
The White Ship
Rating: **** ( 4 stars )
Basil Elton, a lighthouse keeper, engages into a surreal experience where he aboards a white ship, captained by a mysterious bearded man in robes, and following a mysterious bird.
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
Rating: *** ( 3 stars )
It’s organized a meeting to discuss what to do with the estate of Randolph Carter since he dissapeared since quite a while ago. In the middle of the meeting, a mysterious man arrives to inform in detail about the astonishing whereabouts of Randolph Carter.
What the Moon Brings
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
An unnamed narrator describes his feverish and surreal walk through his garden leading him to impossible places and terrifying creatures.
Polaris
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
A man, who lives in a swamp, has a recurring dream about a mysterious city where the Polaris star shines above it, but after a while of having the same dream, he begins to wonder about all of it.
The Very Old Folk
Rating: ** ( 2 stars )
Two civilizations, Romans and “The Hill People” have a conflict that involves several deaths around the Sabbath.

Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
– 'Celephais' (562)

So far my only familiarity with H.P. Lovecraft had been via the two Metallica numbers: The Call of Ktulu, & The Thing That Should Not Be. Ktulu & Led Zep's Kashmir had often provided background music to our long summer nights ghost stories sessions back in Calcutta, so I really looked forward to that particular story-- impressive in how convincingly Lovecraft created this mythical world without sounding cheesy/over-the-top! There are here other impressive stories too, 'The Colour Out of Space', for instance; gave me goosebumps with its chilling fatalism & despair. 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'The Strange High House in the Mist', & 'The Dunwich Horror', etc, are some of the outstanding stories here involving myths & dreamscapes.

This collection is for a very specific type of readership: the one hooked on horror & that too classic horror. Familiarity with Poe would help--(Poe was a huge influence on Lovecraft both in terms of style & thematic concerns & is name dropped in the famous 'At the Mountain of Madness', inspired by his only novel Arthur Gordon Pym, in fact, many stories here read like they were written by the earlier master which is not to belittle Lovecraft rather to emphasise the refined nature of his writing - horror enjoying a very low status in terms of genre literature.
Like Poe, Lovecraft's manic energy gives that tightly wound tension that slowly uncoils towards horror & madness & there's the melancholic lyricism & love of the fantastical far off places to carry you through, what's missing is the sexual tension. There's a total absence of sexual content here (no wonder people don't read him!), the stories are so chaste as if they were written by a monk. I looked up his biography--a really sad life.
Lovecraft's fiction is demanding in that the horror is not often spelt out in clear cut terms—it's amorphous & threatening & often emanating from the natural world & the extraterrestrial entities, and the readers are required to bring forth their imagination for filling the gaps. His myth-making is exhaustive ( & exhausting!). The imagery is very striking & would look great in a visual medium. His characters shrink away from "emptiness and horror of reality", & seek refuge in the fantastical. The protagonists are almost always intellectuals: professors, writers, & artists keenly interested in the occult & the paranormal & though I'm no expert on horror & sci-fi, I can confidently say that popular notions of aliens & primeval cults are hugely derivative of Lovecraftian mythos & if they seem beaten to death it's 'cause they are now part & parcel of the regular horror machinery.

My advice to prospective readers is to read these stories really slowly because Lovecraft mainly focuses on mood building & atmospherics, all of which should be savoured in slow doses. I overdosed on them in nearly 11 days but they really need to be read weeks if not months apart. Also, I noticed a recycling of a certain New England setting & a preoccupation with certain themes that is common to many stories here so leads to a sense of déjà vu - spacing the read would help in avoiding that.
This is a fat book - 1113 pages in my reader! At times I wondered should I really continue! but Lovecraft's name frequently came up wrt Vollmann's Last Stories so then I had to check him out.

Here's the breakdown :
Out of the 67 stories, I could only finish reading 57 so far & most of them managed to get 4/3.5/3 stars from me, very few got 2.5 stars. Not a bad average!
Earlier stories are long, sometimes even novella length. From the midpoint, short stories make their appearance - they are good for sampling.
Well then, don't wait till next Halloween to read Lovecraft!
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Worth a look:
Fear of the Unknown: Lovecraft Documentary
http://youtu.be/Spoz_1KyZiA

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as a seminal force in the horror genre—an inspiration for thousands of authors and spinner of nightmares for many more thousands of readers. Every so often, popular culture rediscovers him, and we’re inundated with novels and movies adapted from his mythos—not to mention roleplaying games and plush toys. Horrors from beyond space, demon-spawn, malign antiquarian gods, unspeakable mutations, mad science, lost civilizations (best kept lost), and forbidden tomes of mind-twisting arcana all find their place within Lovecraft’s nightmares. There are slime, gore, and odors most foul, but the well of terror he taps is driven by an overwhelming sense of foreboding—the ponderous weight of doom, the certainty that something awful is about to happen. He’s a master of immersive stage-setting and mood-weaving.

Before picking up this book, I’d read bits and pieces of H.P. Lovecraft’s work, but had never delved into his portfolio of stories in any depth. It took a few months to traverse the serpentine path through the haunted alleyways of Arkham, past shadowed Innsmouth, across the desolate plateau of Leng, into the cursed city of R’yleh and back again, with all manner of strange interludes along the way, but it was well worth it.

There are plenty of Lovecraft compendiums available for bargain prices, but I thought this one, simple and unadorned, was fine, and it was one of the largest collections available in a single volume. 67 stories, nothing but the text, straight to my e-reader, with everything else supplied by the author’s ornate prose and my imagination. Believe me, that was more than enough.

Halcyon Classics e-book for Nook, published June, 2009. 1096 pages.

I'll give three stars to the stories themselves, which range in quality from very boring to eerie and frightening. Lovecraft clearly works best in the short story format. Once a story starts exceeding 50 pages or so, he waxes masturbatory, describing things in such florid detail that it becomes boring to read. Nobody wants to read 30 straight pages of someone deciphering murals. On the other hand, his extremely short fiction (some stories run only 2-3 pages) really showcases the deficit in character, dialogue, and plot that most of his stories suffer from.

In all of these stories, I never once felt personally connected to any of the characters. They're all very flat, static people with almost no personality. They could all be Lovecraft himself, as far as I'm concerned. And so I don't particularly care when they get mauled by monsters. The monsters are less scary for this.

Still, it's clear to see where other (better) horror writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker get some of their inspiration. King's small towns read a lot like fleshed out versions of Lovecraft's New England hamlets. Barker's monsters feel like more manifest versions of Lovecraft's horrors from the infinite.

Lovecraft's mythos is still pretty great, and he even offers us as close to a scientific explanation as we'll ever get for it at the tail end of his Randolph Carter tract, the story "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". Despite not exactly loving this material, I can definitely understand the inspiration to build other things out of this mythos. In addition to the writings of those so inspired, there's also a tabletop roleplaying game, "Call of Cthulu," that revolves around investigators discovering the secrets of the occult, and this is just about the perfect application of Lovecraft's work.

I could have done without the rampant racism, which goes a bit beyond what you could cover with an excuse like "It was a different time..." It's just not cool with me, and he rather frequently exposed his own white nationalism through his writings in very blatant, jarring ways.

In the end, I also have to take a point away because this collection itself and the ebook format of it is really poorly done. I suspect this book was thrown together to try and make a quick buck off Lovecraft's public domain works. The stories are mostly in alphabetical order, which is not the right way to present this kind of material that builds on itself. "The Silver Key" absolutely should be presented before "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" since they center around the same protagonist, but "Dream Quest" assumes you're familiar with the Randolph Carter character who is described better in "Key". "Key" also establishes the notion of dream travel, which "Dream Quest" also assumes you've got some understanding of. Furthermore, the table of contents is incomplete, not listing about 15 or so stories, and there are a number of apparent OCR errors. Sometimes hyphens are used to offset narrative interjections, and sometimes it's a double-dash. Sometimes double-dashes are used mid--word where a hyphen would be appropriate. Misspellings abound. Really poor, cheap production.

I’ve often contemplated that science fiction and horror struck me as being sides of the same coin. Both ask a question, the same question, when confronting the unknown.

What is that?

Science fiction asks it with a voice hushed with wonder. Horror cries it in a tone trembling with terror.

H.P. Lovecraft falls into the latter, although the reader can detect traces of the wonder (in some stories more than others) Fear dominates 99% of his tales. This fear increases with the madness of the source of the narrator’s fear coming closer and closer.

99% of the time this narrator is male. Only was she female and she stood out in being one of the few who discovered wonder rather than terror in her narrative.

In this collection of Lovecraft’s works, readers will find the mythos which made him famous, spawning a roleplaying game and other forms of entertainment. You can also find a dark anti-romance which Lovecrafts tells in varied forms, Boy Meets House.

A boy or a young man of peculiar and/or melancholy temperament finds himself drawn to an ancient, sinister dwelling. Often he has a family or some mysterious connection to the place. The young man finds himself consumed by a fearful fascination for the dwelling in question, which is equal parts revulsion. The young man can sense the house is evil, yet he cannot stay away. He comes back to the building, again and again, its mystery and horror consuming his entire existence. Eventually, he confronts the source of the mystery, the heart of the house. The young man reaches the climax of his terror. He goes mad, hanging to the scraps of his sanity as best he can. How much of an escape he makes varies. He never gets away completely. He’s never completely sane again (not that he was usually completely sane to begin with) He lives in a violated state of knowing what’s waiting for him in that dwelling, not knowing when it will catch him or someone else again.

This particular story played out again and again in varied tales by Lovecraft. I now find myself looking for it in other people’s stories, elements of this particular theme. One of the reasons I find Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot so fascinating is the Lovecraftian element of Boy Meets House in Ben Mears’s relationship with the Marsten House. Take a look at David Soul’s face at the beginning of the 1970s movie version of ‘Salem’s Lot. You can see the emotions of the many Lovecraftian narrators playing across his face when he looks up at Marsten House in the scene right after the credits roll.

Lovecraft created a horror archetype in Boy Meets House along with his own mythos. He channeled these into many of the compelling stories gather here, allowing us to peer into the nightmare landscapes of his narrator’s minds or those close to them.

It can be a narrow, limited picture. Diverse segments of humanity are neglected, misunderstood, or kept at a distance from this picture. When they’re mentioned, the way in which they were addressed often bothered me. At the same time, these narratives were highly focused perspectives into the mental state of those who related them. Telling words were frequently used, muddying the picture readers might have formed of what was happening. The same telling words, however, increased the mystery, allowing the readers’s own imaginations to supply whatever terror they wished to fill the blanks.

For breaking new ground in horror, creating a mythos, and pouring countless narratives into an archetype which took different shapes, checked by the limitations which sometimes held these stories back, this gets four stars.

About once a year, I take a reading tour through the "founders" of the genres I write in. For Fantasy I tend to re-read The Lord of the Rings. For Science Fiction I will work my way through a few works by Heinlein or Asimov. (Though I will occasionally read Anne McCaffery's "Pern" novels in place of either Fantasy or Sci-Fi.)

And, for Horror, I read H.P. Lovecraft.

I tended to avoid horror when I was younger, simply because I had no taste for "splatter" - descriptive violence in place of thoughtful writing. Then, in my Junior year in High School, I was introduced to a short story by an English Teacher. I read "The Rats In The Walls" for the first time, and my whole outlook on horror was changed forever.

After that, (and every year since) I devoured every piece of fiction that Lovecraft created. Here there were no chainsaw massacres, no knife-fingered demons, no hockey-mask-clad mass murderers. Instead, these were stories of normal human minds being slowly deconstructed as they were exposed to horrible truths about themselves and their place in the cosmos. It was from Lovecraft that I first learned the inklings of mental atmosphere as a valid component of horror writing.

One did not require a haunted house or a foggy abandoned moor to be terrified. One could be terrified by the perceptions of things that no one else could perceive ("The Thing On The Doorstep" is a perfect example.)

But Lovecraft could also create a terrifying physical atmosphere as well. From the crumbling farmlands of "The Colour Out of Space" to the all-time creepiest-cities-ever of Innsmouth and Arkham, his characters were not waiting for something to jump out from behind the bushes or between the buildings to frighten them. No, the bushes and buildings themselves were terrifying: vistas of wrongness, harboring ancient dark secrets leading only to madness. The Universe was a dark and forbidding place, not to be explored by frail and tiny minds such as our own.

Though literary analysis has not been kind to Lovecraft's personal racist and misogynist beliefs, his writing still remains beyond par for those who have any interest in Horror, and his "Cthulhu Mythos" generates excellent stories by world-class authors to this day. Anyone with the slightest interest in psychological horror, or curious about one of the founding fathers of the field of Horror writing, should take the time to read this compendium of Lovecraft's best works.

Just be prepared to sleep poorly, with the lights on, after putting the book down.