What do you think?
Rate this book
The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft
Explore the marvelous complexity of Lovecraft's writing—including his use of literary allusions, biographical details, and obscure references in this rich, in-depth exploration of great horror fiction from the acknowledged master of the weird, including the stories "Herbert West—Reanimator", "Pickman's Model", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Horror at Red Hook" and more.
Did Lovecraft believe in ghosts or paranormal phenomena? In what story does the narrator fear riding the Boston T?
A pathfinder in the literary territory of the macabre, H.P. Lovecraft is one of America's giants of the horror genre. Now, in this second volume of annotated tales, Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon provide another rare opportunity to look into the mind of a genius. Their extensive notes lift the veil between real events in the writer's life—such as the death of his father—and the words that spill out onto the page in magnificent grotesquerie. Mansions, universities, laboratories, and dank New England boneyards appear also as the haunts where Lovecraft's characters confront the fabulous and fantastic, or—like the narrator in "Herbert West—Reanimator"—dig up fresh corpses.
Richly illustrated and scrupulously researched, this extraordinary work adds exciting levels of meaning to Lovecraft's chilling tales . . . and increases our wonder at the magic that transforms life into a great writer's art.
Did Lovecraft believe in ghosts or paranormal phenomena? In what story does the narrator fear riding the Boston T?
A pathfinder in the literary territory of the macabre, H.P. Lovecraft is one of America's giants of the horror genre. Now, in this second volume of annotated tales, Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon provide another rare opportunity to look into the mind of a genius. Their extensive notes lift the veil between real events in the writer's life—such as the death of his father—and the words that spill out onto the page in magnificent grotesquerie. Mansions, universities, laboratories, and dank New England boneyards appear also as the haunts where Lovecraft's characters confront the fabulous and fantastic, or—like the narrator in "Herbert West—Reanimator"—dig up fresh corpses.
Richly illustrated and scrupulously researched, this extraordinary work adds exciting levels of meaning to Lovecraft's chilling tales . . . and increases our wonder at the magic that transforms life into a great writer's art.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
28 people are currently reading
849 people want to read
About the author
H.P. Lovecraft
6,201 books19.3k followersHoward Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
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.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality.
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.
See also Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
— Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
December 26, 2009
Setting aside the text of H. P. Lovecraft's included tales (“The Rats in the Walls,” “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “At the Mountains of Madness”), The Annotated Lovecraft quickly becomes an instance of gratuitous exploitation of Lovecraft's name.
The author of well over fifty horror stories (not to mention essays, noted letters, and weird poetry), a selection of three short stories and one short novel hardly encapsulates even a sampling of the author's work. The Annotated Lovecraft teases the reader with a smattering of quotations culled from Lovecraft's correspondence with fellow authors and editors, and provides some “viewpoints” written by Lovecraft with regards to his own craft as a denouement – but the included material does not warrant an entire volume dedicated to such sparse revelations.
Annotations included feel somewhat intrusive, for the most part. Despite several occasions when a footnote is helpful to a modern-day reader (a description of chemicals mentioned in “The Colour Out of Space,” for example, or the scientific nature of light waves and their impact upon the human eye, are completely unnecessary to the enjoyment of the story but provide further insight as to the author's intent), the notations are excessive. They serve as comparisons to other works not included in the book, including those of other authors. Other notes serve as stickling points to point out perceived errors in Lovecraft's scientific knowledge (despite the fact that such erroneous observations are made by the tale's third-party narrator, and not by Lovecraft himself). These serve as points of interest only to those already well-versed in Lovecraft's work, and then the notations are completely moot anyway.
By far, the most offensive notes are those which serve as definitive sources. A certain word – say, “ichor,” “detritus,” “pustules,” or even “cul de sac” - will be defined by use of a footnote, as if the reader would not be intelligent enough to know the word and would need further clarification in order for the story to proceed. And yet, throughout the introductions of each story, true five-dollar words are strewn throughout the text without such dictionary assistance – as if to express a superior intelligence of the writer over the reader.
Photographs are included throughout the book, but they come with captions centrally located at the beginning of the title as opposed to conveniently beneath the image, as is typical. For a book comprised of annotations, this is a downfalling not to be overlooked.
Finally, perhaps the most insulting quality of The Annotated Lovecraft is editor S. T. Joshi's frequent exhalation of frustration with erroneous, incomplete, or improperly edited Lovecraftian tales, whether by the original publishers, by subsequent editors of short story collections, or even by H. P. Lovecraft himself (from autograph manuscripts wherein Lovecraft attempted to include details omitted from his original work) – and yet, The Annotated Lovecraft is veritably riddled with typographical errors. These errors are primarily of mistyped words (one correctly-spelled word in place of a similarly-spelled word, which effectively renders the text incomprehensible in its newly erroneous form, or sometimes words which have been omitted completely due to error) which could have been avoided by a careful review of the reprinted text. “Convenient, if textually unsound,” states Joshi of one collection of Lovecraft's work. “Lengthy but insubstantial and occasionally unreliable,” he writes about another book, a memoir of one of Lovecraft's friends. “The editing is at times erratic” and “Previous Arkham House editions [...:] contain many errors” he goes on about other compilations.
He ought to have thrown his own The Annotated Lovecraft on top of that same pile of lightly-dismissed works.
The author of well over fifty horror stories (not to mention essays, noted letters, and weird poetry), a selection of three short stories and one short novel hardly encapsulates even a sampling of the author's work. The Annotated Lovecraft teases the reader with a smattering of quotations culled from Lovecraft's correspondence with fellow authors and editors, and provides some “viewpoints” written by Lovecraft with regards to his own craft as a denouement – but the included material does not warrant an entire volume dedicated to such sparse revelations.
Annotations included feel somewhat intrusive, for the most part. Despite several occasions when a footnote is helpful to a modern-day reader (a description of chemicals mentioned in “The Colour Out of Space,” for example, or the scientific nature of light waves and their impact upon the human eye, are completely unnecessary to the enjoyment of the story but provide further insight as to the author's intent), the notations are excessive. They serve as comparisons to other works not included in the book, including those of other authors. Other notes serve as stickling points to point out perceived errors in Lovecraft's scientific knowledge (despite the fact that such erroneous observations are made by the tale's third-party narrator, and not by Lovecraft himself). These serve as points of interest only to those already well-versed in Lovecraft's work, and then the notations are completely moot anyway.
By far, the most offensive notes are those which serve as definitive sources. A certain word – say, “ichor,” “detritus,” “pustules,” or even “cul de sac” - will be defined by use of a footnote, as if the reader would not be intelligent enough to know the word and would need further clarification in order for the story to proceed. And yet, throughout the introductions of each story, true five-dollar words are strewn throughout the text without such dictionary assistance – as if to express a superior intelligence of the writer over the reader.
Photographs are included throughout the book, but they come with captions centrally located at the beginning of the title as opposed to conveniently beneath the image, as is typical. For a book comprised of annotations, this is a downfalling not to be overlooked.
Finally, perhaps the most insulting quality of The Annotated Lovecraft is editor S. T. Joshi's frequent exhalation of frustration with erroneous, incomplete, or improperly edited Lovecraftian tales, whether by the original publishers, by subsequent editors of short story collections, or even by H. P. Lovecraft himself (from autograph manuscripts wherein Lovecraft attempted to include details omitted from his original work) – and yet, The Annotated Lovecraft is veritably riddled with typographical errors. These errors are primarily of mistyped words (one correctly-spelled word in place of a similarly-spelled word, which effectively renders the text incomprehensible in its newly erroneous form, or sometimes words which have been omitted completely due to error) which could have been avoided by a careful review of the reprinted text. “Convenient, if textually unsound,” states Joshi of one collection of Lovecraft's work. “Lengthy but insubstantial and occasionally unreliable,” he writes about another book, a memoir of one of Lovecraft's friends. “The editing is at times erratic” and “Previous Arkham House editions [...:] contain many errors” he goes on about other compilations.
He ought to have thrown his own The Annotated Lovecraft on top of that same pile of lightly-dismissed works.
January 17, 2026
S.T. Joshi’s annotations have given me so many new insights into Lovecraft’s tales, and I enjoyed the notes from other authors such as Thomas Ligotti. If only there were more stories included in this collection, it would be perfect. I’ll have to hunt down the “NEW” annotated edition to follow this one.
August 8, 2011
I've always loved H.P. Lovecraft stories, though you have to be in the mood for a slow, creepy tale that gradually gets under your skin, rather than something overtly frightening. This particular edition adds annotations to the stories which I found fascinating -- little tidbits about the locations in the stories, about other mentions of a particular detail in other horror stories by Lovecraft (or other writers), and definitions of words no longer common. Though rarely necessary for the enjoyment of the story, I found them interesting and I would recommend this edition.
June 9, 2011
While Joshi's reconstructed texts of several of Lovecraft's stories are fascinating for the scholar to compare to modern printings, the real jewels are the annotations provided on every page. For those not entirely familiar with Lovecraft, or readers not as schooled in ancient literature, obscure spellings or little known myths, these footnotes are invaluable. Joshi's extensive grasp of all things Lovecraft shines.
October 12, 2011
S. T. Joshi brings his wonderfully detailed study of Lovecraft and his work to annotate a few of Lovecraft's best stories. Don't read this as your first introduction to Lovecraft though - there are so many annotations they will get in the way of actually just enjoying the stories. But grab this to read them through again and gain a new and deeper understanding.
My only criticism here is one of unrequited desire - I want more.
My only criticism here is one of unrequited desire - I want more.
December 21, 2009
Very disappointed in the annotations, some of which were merely definitions of words. I'll stick to the non-annotated versions from now on.
November 3, 2019
A great sampling of four of Lovecraft's stories. This volume contains heavily annotated versions of "The Rats in the Walls," "The Colour out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At the Mountains of Madness."
This is my second time reading this and this time I read it without referring to the annotations. You really have to decide how you want to read this book before going in. The annotations are excellent and incredibly informative, but sometimes it feels there's as much annotation as there is actual text to the stories! This sounds like a knock but the annotations are worth having, just know what you're getting into going in: do you want a scholarly read or do want to soak in the eldritch ooze that is Lovecraft?
The three short stories are excellent and "At the Mountains of Madness" is a good story but felt a little long with a lot of scientific mumbo-jumbo that could (and probably should) have been trimmed. It's essential Lovecraft, but it really highlights why his shorter stories work best.
Overall a well researched and intriguing read. Highly recommended if you have anything beyond a casual interest in Lovecraft.
This is my second time reading this and this time I read it without referring to the annotations. You really have to decide how you want to read this book before going in. The annotations are excellent and incredibly informative, but sometimes it feels there's as much annotation as there is actual text to the stories! This sounds like a knock but the annotations are worth having, just know what you're getting into going in: do you want a scholarly read or do want to soak in the eldritch ooze that is Lovecraft?
The three short stories are excellent and "At the Mountains of Madness" is a good story but felt a little long with a lot of scientific mumbo-jumbo that could (and probably should) have been trimmed. It's essential Lovecraft, but it really highlights why his shorter stories work best.
Overall a well researched and intriguing read. Highly recommended if you have anything beyond a casual interest in Lovecraft.
June 28, 2020
A fantastic selection of H.P Lovecraft's work exhaustively annotated by S.T Joshi.
March 11, 2024
przeczytalem to tylko dla reanimatora i ngl warto bylo, ale inne opowiadania bardzo srednie
March 31, 2024
A selection of Lovecraft's best stories, annotated by S.T. Joshi.
May 24, 2011
I love me some HP Lovecraft! But this fancy annotated edition is lame. The footnotes on every page are more of a distraction than anything else.
For example, if the story says, "and then I looked down and found some vile unnameable fluid had coated the soles of my sturdy canvas footwear" the footnote will give you about 200 words like, "Lovecraft was one of the first to pioneer canvas footwear for men. In a letter to L.L. Bean in March, 1916, Lovecraft writes 'thank you for the awesome footwear bro! I think you should call these new canvas shoes "creepers" because when I wear them I really feel like creeping up on people!"
For example, if the story says, "and then I looked down and found some vile unnameable fluid had coated the soles of my sturdy canvas footwear" the footnote will give you about 200 words like, "Lovecraft was one of the first to pioneer canvas footwear for men. In a letter to L.L. Bean in March, 1916, Lovecraft writes 'thank you for the awesome footwear bro! I think you should call these new canvas shoes "creepers" because when I wear them I really feel like creeping up on people!"
July 6, 2008
Not only an excellent collection of Lovecraft, spanning some of his different styles and themes and giving a taste of the Cthulhu Mythos along with other works outside of the Mythos, but also highly informative and helpful. The notes really illuminate a good deal of the text, not only helping with Lovecraft's intentionally arcane vocabulary, but also giving a nice sense of his influences and the context of the world in which he was writing.
January 5, 2008
There's annotation and then there's distraction. This is ridiculously annotated. If you wet your pants at the mention of Lovecraft, then perhaps you want this much information on every little detail. But seriously, it's overkill. I read some of the annotations out loud to other people because they are so ridiculous.
Nonetheless, Lovecraft's weird genius shines through.
Nonetheless, Lovecraft's weird genius shines through.
December 13, 2015
While S.T. Joshi does an excellent job annotating these stories, there were times when I found the notes far too distracting. Alas, this is the problem with annotations since their purpose is more or less academic instead of entertainment.
August 26, 2007
All Lovecraft, all the time. The annotations help explain much of Lovecraft's idiomatic language, in addition to providing cultural contexts for the selections. Don't read it if you have never read Lovecraft before; this should be read by those already familiar with the Lovecraft multiverse.
October 19, 2007
Lovecraft's work changed my life. S.T. Joshi's close annotation made the changes more comprehensible. While the footnotes are occasionally condescending, they are thorough and worth the read.
December 3, 2008
Love annotated works, and Lovecraft's works are wonderful when you understand the minutia of where names and places come from, and whether or not they are real.
December 5, 2008
the novella "at the mountains of madness" is easily a five-star work, but the annotations are so extensive as to be mundane.
July 27, 2025
I'd read a little bit of Lovecraft before. There's definitely something about his weird style that I find appealing, but his writing is also kind of dense. A recurring theme is that there are powerful and terrifying extraterrestrial beings to whom the concerns of humans are insignificant, and there are things about them that just seem wrong compared to what people are used to. It's hard not to connect this kind of thing to modern generative AI creating images that are realistic in some ways but also off in very noticeable aspects that no human would be likely to get wrong. There are a lot of references within his work, inspiration from other writers and folk tales he'd heard, and the stories show a good amount of research having gone into them. Mixing real and invented people and discoveries lends some verisimilitude to the writing. But, maybe especially with the annotations, it's possible to get so caught up in all the details as to lose track of the plot. "The Dunwich Horror" is about a Massachusetts man who comes to realize that he's only part human, his father having been an invisible god-being. This one includes bodily deformity as an indication that there's something unnatural about a person. I do think Joshi sometimes kind of tries to gloss over the racism without avoiding it entirely. Lovecraft is known to have had a black cat he called "[N-word]-Man," and there's one with the same name in "The Rats in the Walls." The editor insists that the term "was not regarded as offensive" at the time, and that's probably true to an extent, but it likely only applied in predominantly white spaces. There's definitely a tendency to blame weird genetics for aberrant behavior, like the guy in "Rats" who turns to cannibalism when he learns his ancestors were in a cannibalistic cult. This story also contains a passage based on Baring-Gould's description of St. Patrick's Purgatory. "The Colour Out of Space" is an attempt to create a truly alien being, an unworldly color that arrived on Earth in a meteorite, causing destruction to the land around it. The phrase "blasted heath," which certainly has a poetic ring to it, had previously been used by both Shakespeare and John Milton. The novella At the Mountains of Madness is about an Antarctic expedition, inspired by the one Poe wrote about in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The explorers discover a mountain range that was home to alien beings ages before humans existed, whose civilization was killed off by an unexplained evil presence. This tale introduces the shoggoths, enormous shapeless amoeba-like beings of extreme strength, who were used as slaves but later revolted. And they eat giant penguins.
August 20, 2025
I would not necessarily recommend this to any other first-time Lovecraft readers, but it was ultimately very illuminating. And, unfortunately, very hard to rate as well, considering my opinions varied quite widely on each of the stories (not to mention my thoughts on the editor), but logging them individually as well as this volume as a whole felt disingenuous. I agree with Lovecraft himself in that The Colour Out of Space is a tale that truly seems to capture the kind of weird fiction he aimed for, making it my favorite story in this collection. It is both the best crafted as well as by far the scariest. At the Mountains of Madness was perhaps a step below that, but still quite good. At some points it suffers mildly from the cosmic horror "it was a thing... but somehow not right..." trap but really only when it comes to the descriptions of the buildings. The actual Old Ones and Shoggoths are used to great effect, and I would certainly cancel another expedition if informed of this account. On the other end of the quality spectrum... The Rats in the Walls was just okay for the majority of its page count, but really nails the landing with a truly horrific final sequence, while in contrast I thought The Dunwich Horror did a good job creating a spooky atmosphere and building dread, but petered out after Wilbur Whateley's death into a largely unsatisfying final battle to conclude. I don't regret reading any of these stories, and I certainly understand nos why so many people look to Lovecraft for inspiration, but certainly not all of them would be worth reading again.
As for the "Annotated" part, it is very clear that S.T. Joshi is very knowledgeable on Lovecraft. The introductory essay as well as some of the annotations contained quality commentary and information. I did find it overwhelmingly hard to believe a certain note about the cat's name in The Rats in the Walls but that's neither here nor there. Some notes, especially the ones just giving the definition for certain words, seemed superfluous, but I suppose it's hard to judge what any given reader may or may not already know. The last section on Lovecraft adaptations gave me plenty of new films for my watchlist, so cheers to that.
As for the "Annotated" part, it is very clear that S.T. Joshi is very knowledgeable on Lovecraft. The introductory essay as well as some of the annotations contained quality commentary and information. I did find it overwhelmingly hard to believe a certain note about the cat's name in The Rats in the Walls but that's neither here nor there. Some notes, especially the ones just giving the definition for certain words, seemed superfluous, but I suppose it's hard to judge what any given reader may or may not already know. The last section on Lovecraft adaptations gave me plenty of new films for my watchlist, so cheers to that.
August 17, 2021
This is a mixed bag for me. There's a handful of stories by Lovecraft in here, and most of them weren't that good. The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness have interesting elements but don't rise to likeable. The high point here was The Colour Out of Space, which I thought was excellent. It tried its damnedest to drag the rest of the anthology up to three stars by main strength, but one good story compared to three indifferent (and one of those indifferent being a short novel) just isn't enough to compensate for the rest, or the letter fragments in which Lovecraft expounded on weird fiction in a way that made me think he must have been a terrible bore at parties. I think the best word I can use to describe the collection as a whole, bar that one excellent story, is "overwrought." Still, I read it and I gave it a good shot.
The whole volume is introduced and annotated by S.T. Joshi, and I don't know why he didn't bother with a table of contents or captions for the various illustrations, but I wish he had. His short introductory essay was clear and interesting, however, as were some of the notes, but others seemed a bit like filler. A number of them were just definitions for not-very-unusual words. Is it really necessary to have footnotes explaining words like "pustules," "puerile," and "plethora"? If so, that might just be more terrifying than anything else in here...
The whole volume is introduced and annotated by S.T. Joshi, and I don't know why he didn't bother with a table of contents or captions for the various illustrations, but I wish he had. His short introductory essay was clear and interesting, however, as were some of the notes, but others seemed a bit like filler. A number of them were just definitions for not-very-unusual words. Is it really necessary to have footnotes explaining words like "pustules," "puerile," and "plethora"? If so, that might just be more terrifying than anything else in here...
April 22, 2018
Considering how much Lovecraft wrote, this is really just a sampling of 4 stories. Whether or not this is a good representation of his fiction I'm not well read enough to say. But I did really like these stories. I like the rich writing, and his fusion of horror with an eerie kind of science fiction I found to be very unsettling and unique. Of course, as Joshi points out, The Dunwich Horror is an exception to this; with its spells and the supernatural rather than simply dealing with the natural. Lovecraft really has a thing with hideous beings consisting of eyes, mouths, tentacles and other assorted animal body parts. You see this with the Dunwich Horror as well as At The Mountains of Madness, along with other stories not in this volume. The rats in the Wall was more of a good ole psychological horror dealing with madness; although it did have some interesting biological de-evolution. The Color Out of Space had some ghoulish figures, but (Spoiler Alert),the out of world entities were left to the imagination. My mind is not completely made up when it comes to Lovecraft: is he great, or is he rather redundant? I don't know, but I want to read more. He is a writer that I find can really make me feel uncomfortable, rather than simply scaring me...and I find that to be a gift!
February 18, 2018
Lovecraft’s style can be a bit too purple for my taste—particularly in “At the Mountains of Madness,” which occasionally lapsed into tiresome chunks—but his underlying philosophy has always captivated me. “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Dunwich Horror” are prime examples of how his ‘eldritch’ imaginings can wreak havoc into ordinariness.
The two stories are also strong showcases of Lovecraft’s belief that weird fiction should be utterly inhuman and alien, with imaginings that are unfathomable by human knowledge.
Some excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters are more helpful than some of the annotations in the stories (which can be intrusive at times). Although the annotations about Lovecraft’s inspirations — such as the paintings of Fuseli and Roerich — help visualize his ideas of the macabre.
I had to read the book in in fragments, since spending too much time with Lovecraft can be too overwhelming given his dense prose style and the probably nightmares you can get from his stories.
The two stories are also strong showcases of Lovecraft’s belief that weird fiction should be utterly inhuman and alien, with imaginings that are unfathomable by human knowledge.
Some excerpts from Lovecraft’s letters are more helpful than some of the annotations in the stories (which can be intrusive at times). Although the annotations about Lovecraft’s inspirations — such as the paintings of Fuseli and Roerich — help visualize his ideas of the macabre.
I had to read the book in in fragments, since spending too much time with Lovecraft can be too overwhelming given his dense prose style and the probably nightmares you can get from his stories.
March 22, 2024
Excellent volume. Confession: I've begun to skip Rats in the Walls, as it creeps me out. Excellent information in the annotations, though the use of dictionary definitions seems a little juvenile. In lieu of an e-book, these seem spurious, as they offer less commentary than the editors convey in other footnotes. Incorrectly identified on Goodreads as available on Kindle, this volume exists only as a physical copy, though there are similar versions of the Annotated Lovecraft available as an e-book. Perhaps best taken as a Lovecraft sampler, there are relatively few stories compared to the author's full output in this short volume.
March 12, 2017
This, and the Complete Lovecraft if I recall correctly (it's in one of twenty boxes of books in my closet at my parent's house, doesn't seem to have the books that Lovecraft collaborated on with others so I'm reading them on kindle and listening to them on youtube in the dark of night. The Electric Executioner is alright, but pretty racist which annoys me. The Walls of Elyx was better, it was almost anti-racist.
I'm about to read some Arthur Machen who was a big influence on him.
I'm about to read some Arthur Machen who was a big influence on him.
September 19, 2018
My first H.P. Lovecraft book, but not the last. The annotated version by S.T. Joshi helped me with the author’s use of antiquated words and explained throughly the background of the stories settings and people. Lovecraft wrote with a fluid style that read with ease and he was a master at pulling the reader into the story.
November 2, 2023
this particular edition suffers from an editor a little too keen to annotate when having a dictionary handy would suffice (and also being unwilling to admit that lovecraft is not perfect lmao), but i think the four stories chosen were an excellent introduction to the cthulu mythos, and i did enjoy them all.
May 26, 2017
This book is a fantastic read, perfect story telling cover to cover. Lovecraft has a way of spinning a tale that sends chills up and down the body as well as stimulating the imagination. His writing brings to life the towering Mountains of Madness as well as the evil lurking within.
Read
July 1, 2020Tengo esta edición. Es buena, pero hay mejores anotadas.
July 21, 2020
Excellent introduction.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews