The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

by H.P. Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi (Editor)

A definitive edition of stories by the master of supernatural fiction

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This Penguin Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master's tales-from his early short stories "Under the Pyramids" (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and "The Music of Erich Zann" (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favorites) through his more fully developed works, "The Dunwich Horror," The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and At the Mountains of Madness.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.


Contains the following tales:
- The Tomb
- Beyond the Wall of Sleep
- The White Ship
- The Temple
- The Quest of Iranon
- The Music of Erich Zann
- Imprisoned with the Pharaohs aka Under the Pyramids
- Pickman's Model
- The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
- The Dunwich Horror
- At the Mountains of Madness
- The Thing on the Doorstep

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Weird Fiction

463 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Howard 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

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the other two Joshi Lovecraft anthologies, this collection is helpfully annotated, expertly introduced, and includes pieces Lovecraft wrote throughout his career. The two earliest--"The Tomb" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"--are crude, but characteristic of their author in the way they assume that true horror is born from the human mind's capacity for transcending space and time and the possibility that entities from beyond space and time can take advantage of this human capacity. The two Dunsanian imitations--"The White Ship" and "The Quest of Iranon"--each have a distinctive Lovecraftian touch. "The Music of Eric Zann" and "Pickman's Model" are both masterpieces of Lovecraft's early maturity, short in length and economical in their effects. By far the worst piece of writing included in this volume is "Under the Pyramids," a fantastic first-person narrative ghost written for Harry Houdini; the prose is so overwrought it often seems like parody, but good parody is far more amusing than this is.

The anthology ends with three of the authors most effective works: "The Dunwich Horror" (a powerful long short story marred by a conventional ending which dissipates that true horror of Wilbur Whateley's death and the revelation of his alien nature), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (a flawed but memorable novel which combines a Lovecraft-like protagonist with a Hawthorneian gothic atmosphere and a host of subterranean horrors), and The Mountains of Madness (an impressionistic and abstract short novel which evokes horror primarily through the suggestive details of an antarctic landscape). All in all, this is a fine representative anthology.

[Gabrielle (Reading Rampage) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spooktober book #10!

Despite the flaws of some stories – not to mention the author’s flaws – I’ll always be a fan of Mr. Lovecraft’s work. I delight in his creepy, ambiguous style of horror, in the existential dread and vague sense of cosmic menace that permeate his stories, like a thick New England fog.

This collection includes some of H.P.’s most famous stories, “At the Mountain of Madness”, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” and “The Dunwich Horror”, but also a few lesser-known yet just as juicy morsels, such as “The White Ship”, and even a clever little retelling of a Harry Houdini story. The Joshi-edited Penguin Modern Classic edition is also very well annotated and the introduction is informative, which makes it well worth the detour for fans of the Father of Weird.

I think that driving through Massachusetts (and the American North East in general) in the fall gave me a new appreciation for Lovecraft that I didn’t have before I saw the landscapes that inspired him with my own eyes. We drive from Montreal to Boston to visit friends every Thanksgiving, and looking at the rolling hills, the isolated little farm houses, the impenetrable-looking woods (and sometimes the cold, grey beaches) had made my reading of his stories more vivid.

This collection gets 3 stars, because while it still packs a lot of awesomeness, some stories do drag a bit longer than they should, and the creepy factor looses some steam.

[nastya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn't planning to write a review for this collection, but now suddenly I have an urge to talk about it, and to talk about it now, even though I am still in the middle of At the Mountains of Madness and have yet to experience the genius of The Thing on the Doorstep, that ranks in the bottom of the most ranking lists of Lovecraft's oeuvre I've encountered.

So, this journey was very disappointing, this is my first encounter with his work and so far they were either Poe wannabe, Dunsany wannabe (and I don't like the original) or some original Lovecraft (at least I am not that well-read in the horror genre, perhaps he's trying to imitate someone else) that is so predictable and repetitive, it's mind-boggling. The gist of those stories is the same: something weird is happening, some incantations to Yorgos-Lanthimos are proclaimed, something very vague and scary is unleashed on the world, there will be a lot of words like "stench" and "blasphemous" used to describe it, and if we get any specifics, the creature will have tentacles and scales. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And I do understand that we have 100 years of horror between us, including 9 seasons of x-files, yet I do not ask it to be original or scary, just be entertaining enough, at least on the level of the Brothers Grimm's tales. Or have some delicious writing as Poe had.

Also to the editor who made the decisions which stories to include: why why why did you put his badly written and plotted novel in the middle, the novel Lovecraft himself thought had bad ideas, never worked on it after the first draft and never tried to publish. Because it was really bad. And very long, killing the energy of the collection. And followed by The Dunwich Horror that was way too similar to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, albeit shorter. At this point the only story I felt was atmospheric enough to be memorable was The Temple. Maybe if Lovecraft was not such a racist and misogynist, the added point of views would've enriched his imagination with something beyond the very basic structure of a lot of his stories and the same main character, it would've added some variety to his stories, I don't know.

The stories in this collection: The Tomb, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The White Ship, The Temple, The Quest of Iranon, The Music of Erich Zann, Imprisoned with the Pharaohs aka Under the Pyramids, Pickman's Model, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, The Thing on the Doorstep.

[Béla Malina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich muss sagen, dass mir in dieser kleinen Sammlung nur „Die Farbe aus Dem All“ und „Der Außenseiter“ wirklich zusagt. „Das Ding auf der Schwelle“ ist auch eine passable Geschichte wenn auch sehr leicht zu durchschauen und weniger effektiv als „Die Farbe“. Dicht gefolgt auf „die Farbe“ ist „Der Außenseiter“. Eine wirklich fantastische Erzählung. Kurz und bündig und hat sehr viel von Poe. „Träume im Hexenhaus“ habe ich tatsächlich als recht fad in Erinnerung und vor allem stilistisch als eine schwächere Nummer.

Und ebenso muss ich sagen, dass „Der Schatten aus der Zeit“ zwar kurios und rein von der Prämisse her interessant, für mich keinesfalls packend war.

Ich kann hier echt nur eine 6/10 geben.

[Dennis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Would have been 2 stars if I had just taken my average rating of the five stories included in this collection. But a short story collection should have at least one story that I enjoy reading. And this one didn't. In the end I really had to fight through this book, which clearly means 1 star for me.

The collection I've read (in German) contains the following stories:

- Das Ding auf der Schwelle (The Thing on the Doorstep)
- Der Außenseiter (The Outsider)
- Die Farbe aus dem All (The Colour Out of Space)
- Träume im Hexenhaus (The Dreams in the Witch-House)
- Der Schatten aus der Zeit (The Shadow Out of Time)

For me The Color Out of Space was the best of the five stories. But even that one I wouldn't have given a 3 star rating.

Maybe H.P. Lovecraft's weird tales are just not my cup of tea.

Also, I have to ask myself, why did I bring this book to Parookaville? Seems like a weird thing to do.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
- H.P. Lovecraft

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories is one of three Penguin Classics omnibuses, which together contain the majority of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction. Though I loved many of the stories in this particular book, I enjoyed the other two volumes a lot more. A lot of the stories in this collection were weaker, like The Quest of Iranon (a Tolkien-esque fantasy story) and The Music of Erich Zann, and one was outright dreadful (Under the Pyramids). That being said, this collection contains one of the greatest works of weird fiction/cosmic horror ever written, the novella At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft himself called this his "best" work of fiction).

One thing that really irritated me over the course of reading these omnibuses, and really I have encountered this in other Penguin Classics books, so I think it is a problem with that particular line in general, is that the introductions at the beginning of the books and some of the explanatory notes ruin parts of the book or, in this case, entire plots of some of the stories. These Lovecraft omnibuses are broken down into these parts:


- Introduction at the beginning of the book, written by S.T. Joshi
- The stories themselves
- Explanatory Notes section at the back of the book containing:
- A one or two page background on each story, written by S.T. Joshi
- Endnotes for each story, written by S.T. Joshi


In both the introduction at the beginning of the books, and in the one or two page background sections for each story, Joshi occasionally drops huge spoilers, in some cases ruining the current story for you, or ruining other Lovecraft stories than the one you're currently reading about, but which you haven't read yet! As such, I recommend you read these Penguin Classics Lovecraft omnibuses in this order:


1. Each story
2. The endnotes for each story as you encounter them while reading each story, in the Explanatory Notes section at the back of the book
3. Only after reading each entire story and all its endnotes, the one or two page background description of the story in the Explanatory Notes section at the back of the book
4. Only after you have read all the stories, all the endnotes, and all the story descriptions, read the introduction at the very beginning of the book


This won't entirely save you, because he even spoils things occasionally in endnotes, but such spoilers are rare and following the above order should spare you the annoyance I had of having several great Lovecraft stories (like Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family) ruined for me before I got a chance to read them (though spoiled, they were still enjoyable to read when I eventually got to them).

Going back to the contents themselves, I could talk about them and my love for Lovecraft (haha, pun) all day. After now reading most of Lovecraft's body of fiction, I safely place him in my top three favourite authors of all time, and he makes a very strong case for being my favourite. What he was able to accomplish in his short lifetime (he only lived to the age of 47) is truly inspiring. He was sick and poor for much of his life, and didn't even finish high school due to certain psychological issues he faced that involved stress and anxiety. In spite of this, he read countless books on a range of subjects on his own and became an expert in many of them. Using this wealth of knowledge, he then went on to compile a legendary volume of weird and horror fiction that single-handedly defined and redefined entire genres of fiction.

I'm going to change tone a bit here and, in light of recent criticism of him, weigh in a little bit on Lovecraft as a person. Was H.P. Lovecraft flawed as an individual? Yes he was. He was deeply racist (this is made quite obvious in the story The Horror at Red Hook, which is not contained in this volume, and in some of his other stories) and at times throughout his life (this is quite obvious in the story The Thing on the Doorstep, though his views on women improved later in his life) a misogynist. In spite of this, I am a big believer that you need to be able to separate the art from the artist.

The fact is, in the early 1900s when Lovecraft was writing, a lot of people were racists and misogynists. Does that make it right? No, it doesn't. It was wrong then; it's still wrong now. It will always be wrong. Keeping that in mind, I believe you can't take what were really quite ordinary views for a man living in the early 1900s and use those to try to bury the enormous impact and literary contributions someone like him has made. It's simply not fair to do so. I disagree that they removed his face from the award statue given out for the World Fantasy Award, and I always will. H.P. Lovecraft is undeniably one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century, and contributed more to the horror, cosmic horror, and weird fiction genres than perhaps any other writer. He deserves better.

Think what you will about H.P. Lovecraft the person, but if you are a fan of horror, science fiction, or weird fiction, you owe it to yourself to read his work. He is truly, and possibly more than any other author I've ever read, an absolute pleasure to read. Highly recommended.

[Mauoijenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovecraft is most definitely one of the BEST<\b>!

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don’t get any points for treating pulp as serious literature, especially not with Lovecraft. And even if you did, disputations about genre are not a hill that anyone should want to die on. That being said I want to shout at the clouds about science fiction & horror for a minute. Fans of the lowbrow often come off as defensive, ensconced in a slightly delusional persecution complex; these days, there are far more defenders of popular art forms than there are snobs pillorying them. So this is not another bellicose salvo in a tedious & irrelevant debate, I'd just like to make some observations about the mechanics of the books themselves. I think the question of genre is one of the more interesting endemic to Lovecraft’s work and legacy. And I think it has become vexed in recent times.

The gothic is the pulp arm of romanticism; Lovecraft’s own genre, the Weird, is the pulp arm of modernism (and of surrealism to whatever extent it has a separate identity), but it is not modern or anti-modern so much as metamodern. Both the modernist genre products meant for mass consumption & the highbrow, avant garde or countercultural niches are dynamic conceptual poles & most novels, stories, poems & whatever else, exist somewhere on a spectrum between them; and at the risk of sounding like a dilettantish Deleuzo-Derridean, this is a continuum of variously assembled protocols, each with its own hybrid atomic structure which determines the thematic or narratological coordinates the work itself receives.

So the genre categories I’m referring to are by way of reference diachronic or etiological, a historicized family tree sutured together by influence & inheritance rather than an overdetermined natural essence. I tilt toward lowbrow genre pulp, an aspecific but pragmatic pattern for the combination of these tropes, because I instinctively feel that there’s more room for creativity and vision within their loose (but instantaneously recognizable) structuration. And, well, literary theory is mostly ex post facto rationalization for intuitive claims. Or so my intuition tells me. But lately I'm not sure what the point of it is, except as a rubric for periodization.

Some of the better postmodern writers, at least the ones with an interest in pulp like Thomas Pynchon & JG Ballard, worked to blur these distinctions, to show that high and low art existed symbiotically, that they are never fully independent of one another. And comics, horror movies & science fiction have become raw ore for post-postmodernist, lyrical realist, ‘new sincere’ and slipstream attempts to eclipse the logic of postmodernism. They are fully integrated into the deep grammar of self-styled serious art. I think the problem with many of these approaches is that an internal condition of postmodernism is the occlusion of broad consensus, so its lineage is necessarily multifarious. But these nascent pretenders-to-the-throne are still beholden to the grand narrative structure of modernism, usually replete with their own manifestos, that odd hangover from industrial age organizing credos. A friend sent me the manifesto for the #AltWoke movement the other day and despite the freshness of its declarations, I couldn't believe how outdated it felt. How can you have a manifesto after Derrida and Baudrillard? These thinkers can and (in my opinion) should be supplanted, but their accomplishments still call for new forms of resistance. More to the point, returning to an inflexible binary of high and low art (or any kind of strict genre demarcation) is a pointless and reactionary move.

Here’s something to think on; when did the inclusion of ghosts, monsters, battles, etc. become the Master Signifiers of genre work, irreconcilable with serious literature except via irony or pastiche? And why is the horror genre until WWII, which is usually about the neurosis of the emergent petit bourgeois professional class (a subject universal to novels of every stripe since medievalism), suddenly warded off as a lowbrow deviation from literary canonicity? Shelley, Radcliffe, Poe, De Fanu, Machen, Blackwood & many, many others were at least as gifted as their contemporaries in the realist traditions.

But lapsing into relativism is callow and uninteresting, so how do we prosecute a 21st century cartography of genre? That is, without writing a manifesto. I don't actually know the answer to this question but I'm sure that it must be done & the enduring vitality of certain genre works is a good place to start.

I think I’ve rambled headlong into H.P. Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft’s abilities as a writer were immense. Even his worst stories contain all the quality of the novelistic tradition in style, composition and structure. And his best work approaches the classics, both in merit and longterm cultural resonance. But as with any artist broadly imitated, his lineage of influence has not always been positive. Not everyone learned the right lessons from Lovecraft.

Modern authors of horror are too character focused, I think. You can probably blame this on the popularity of someone like Stephen King, who pilfered cosmic abominations from Lovecraft but left at the doorway the context which made them horrifying in the first place. Creating sympathetic characters in cozy domestic settings only to maim & kill them is a cheap bit. But it has proven endlessly popular & was enthusiastically picked up by the mostly unimpressive horror movie machine in hollywood. The only reason for authors of horror to forge a sympathetic character is to evoke a gratuitous or sadistic libidinal thrill from violence done to them. Thematically speaking, it shouldn’t matter if the victims of Pennywise or Cthulhu are well wrought representations of the human psyche. It’s not really the point. As Thomas Ligotti puts it,“…the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.” Jump scares have a limited shelf life & Lovecraft’s ability to shock has long expired, but there is something in his stories which still rises to Ligotti’s challenge. This component piece of Lovecraft is ageing well and is more acutely pertinent today than it was when I first read him as a teenager. It has comfortably assumed a new precedence in the stories.

Call Lovecraft’s characters one-dimensional if you must, I’ll concede at least that the rotating dramatis personae of antiquarians, scientists and academics are indistinguishable from one another. But he’s a more patient & meticulous writer than anyone working in the immense ambit of his legacy. New England architecture, arctic geography, alien biology, family histories, fossil patterns, etc. are lovingly, sometimes appallingly, detailed. This can be a slog to read through but it creates the sense of a lived in world. This is very important for the meaning & effect of his stories. The minutiae of the world, which Lovecraft archives very well, is exactly as meaningful as it helps people navigate their busy little lives. But implanted in an even slightly broadened perspective, it becomes the subject of cosmic horror stories with power that reaches undiminished across the long & varied century since they were written.

As Ray Brassier said of our species, we ‘crafty apes with opposable thumbs’ have catalogued and indexed an almost unbelievable scope of the cosmos, an extraordinary accomplishment which Lovecraft duly reveres. In his stories, the sincerity & nobility of scientific enterprise is never stymied by romantic or sentimental conceitedness. But this earnestness and courage in science is always inevitably humiliated by the literally unthinkable vastness of its address. Astronomers and geologists are doing the best and most important work humanly possible; it’s just, in proportion to its context, human possibility is unimportant and insignificant.

I cracked open this collection because it contained several stories I hadn’t read. Unfortunately they were mostly inessential juvenalia, a sequence of Lovecraft’s Dunsany-inspired dreamscape stories. These stories are...fine but somewhat forgettable, and indistinct upon recollection. The real draw to ‘The Thing on the Doorstep & other Weird Stories’ are 3 of Lovecraft’s best known & longest works, all of which are full-throated in his own voice; Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror & At the Mountains of Madness. Together they span more than half the collection & especially read in succession, they seem to go on forever. Despite their seemingly interminable aggregate length & unified representation of Lovecraft’s artistic maturity, there’s a sea change between each text and they have bold & discreet identities. That said, if I were editing these collections, I wouldn’t have stacked them all atop one another.

Incidentally, I think Nick Land is the only inheritor of Lovecraft worthy of the name. And not just because they’re both deranged eugenicists with skeletal bodies made from angles & elbows. I didn’t touch on this enough in my, shall we say, expansive review of Fanged Noumena, but Land’s earnest attempt to represent a cosmic materialism unvarnished by human self esteem is more Lovecraftian than the thousand year reich of b-movie tentacle monsters. In Land, as in Lovecraft, the quest for meaning is portrayed as embarrassing & slightly hysterical. But a splenetic angst always arises in rebellion against the cleaving toward ahuman perspectives & if the dark Promethean act survives amidst this opprobrium, it is obviated by our biological limitations.

(actually Thomas Ligotti is good for this too, but I’ve written about that elsewhere)

What does Science Fiction mean when the day-to-day life of your average first-world reader contains more technological marvels than the wildest speculation of books released just several decades prior? What does Horror mean when the population of earth lives in a constant state of emergency? What kind of realism would not deal with these vectors? Does the genre just refer to a narrative emphasis on the excitations of spectacle rather than the mindful pleasures of serious literature? In that case, Lovecraft is not a science fiction writer, and despite his own suspiciously overstated protestations to the contrary, he has far more in common with Eliot and Pound than comic books and alien invasion films. ‘Realism’ can’t possibly keep up with reality anymore; in the time that it takes to write a novel its cultural-technological paradigm for (post)((post))(((meta?)))modernity will be obsolete. Whatever the fate of realism & fantasy as storytelling devices, Lovecraft seems more true to life than ever in 2018.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five stars for how influential Lovecraft has been and for his amazing imagination. I give it one star for ease of readability. Somehow that equals out to be four stars. :)

I enjoyed some of these way more than others. I'm too lazy to go and get the actual book to see the title names, though, so it will remain a mystery, but some are better than others.

Another read-aloud with my husband. Lovecraft is not easy to read aloud.

[Quirkyreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good introduction to Lovecraft's stories if you haven't read any.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains some of the best short stories I've ever read, despite a few of them feeling unfinished. One of the best is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the story of a man seeking out the truth about his great-great-great grandfather, and the terrible secrets that he uncovered in this search.

My favorite story of all, though, is At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft masterfully built suspense page after page until the reader feels overwhelmed by the horrible realities that an antarctic expedition has uncovered.

I highly recommend this book, and I'm not ever a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos, which Lovecraft is probably most widely known for. Don't make the mistake of passing this one up thinking that's all he has to offer.

[Olga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fictional scary stories for a while help us to forget real-life "scary stories" in the news.

[lauraღ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

My first adult experience with Lovecraft, and because I was prepared for all of his nonsense (read: racism) I didn't have as bad of a time with this as I could have. But I mean, I didn't have a great time either. I'm pretty sure I read some abridged versions of his stories when I was a teen, but none of these were familiar to me. There were only about six stories in this version of the collection, and they were all a version of the weird eldritch horror that I expected. I have to say, there were several times when a terrible thing happened or was seen, and all the narrator would say about it was that it was too horrible or gruesome to be spoken of or described? That kinda felt like a cop-out. Some interesting lines here and there, but otherwise the writing kinda bored me. The titular story did make me think a lot (mostly because I anticipate reading some queer horror based on it, not because of any merit of its own). The last line of "The Festival" was metal.

Listened to the audiobook as read by William Roberts, and it was actually pretty good. He went hard on those bits where he had to perform any sort of emotion. This isn't something that I would recommend, but I'm content to read it myself and get a taste of Lovecraft's oeuvre. I might have given this a 2.5, but the fucking cat is in one of these stories. You know the one.

ETA 19/11/2023: I also read "The Dunwich Horror", and since it's a short story that's included in most editions of this anthology (but wasn't included in this edition) I decided to just tack on my review here. And my review is... it basically reads like the rest of the stories. This one was more explicitly paranormal and otherworldly, and the concept of a fast-growing monster child eager to unleash his father onto the world is a cool one? I probably liked this one better than the others. But not enough to change my rating.

[Arkskier · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review refers to the penguin horror edition.

About the Author

Lovecraft is considered by many as a great 20th century horror story writer. Stephen King considers him the “single largest influence” on his writing. And the Mexican Director Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth fame, considers Lovecraft his favorite writer of all. Even the Argentine fabulist Jorge Borges was influenced by Lovecraft.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He was an only child born to a jewelry salesman. His father and mother would later both, separately, be committed to a mental institution. Lovecraft was precocious as a child, writing poems from the age of six. He was also a voracious reader, especially of chemistry and astronomy, although he struggled with the requisite mathematics. Because of nervous ill health, he left high school without a diploma and spent his years as a recluse with his overprotective mother until her death. He published his first story “The Alchemist” in 1916 in United Amateur, when he was 26.

In 1921, his mother died, which devastated him. At age 34, he left for New York in 1924 to marry Sonia Greene, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Around that time, he became a star writer for the pulp magazine “Weird Tales”, even ghost writing a story for Harry Houdini. When Sonia’s hat shop collapsed, Lovecraft tried applying for a job – salesman, lamp-tester; he tried applying to publishing companies, advertising agencies, but they all rejected him. Sonia soon took a job in the Midwest, and Lovecraft lived alone in Brooklyn Heights. Soon they separated and he returned to Providence in 1926 (after 2 years of marriage) where he became more social and travelled more. This return caused a surge in his creative output. But he still had no steady occupation, and the money he received as a writer was measly. He often went without food to save money for mailing letters. In 1936, he was diagnosed with cancer of the small intestines, and lived in pain until his death in 1937. He died in poverty. Lovecraft was virtually unknown during his lifetime, and only achieved fame after his death.

Review

This 500-page collection contains what Lovecraft considers his “best work” of fiction, in particular 10 short stories and two short novels. It covers a wide span, from his earliest short stories written in his 20s (“The Tomb”) to his novellas written in his 30s and 40s (“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, “At the Mountains of Madness”). Lovecraft was heavily influenced by Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Poe, among others, and these influences can be seen in his work. The penguin edition is helpful in this regard: It includes many helpful scholarly notes at the end, which shows us that many characters and places in Lovecraft’s tales are based on real people and real places in his life. Many of the mythical, historical, and fictional allusions in his work can also be traced back to books which he’d read and kept in his personal library. In some cases, he invents nonexistent books like the “Necronomicon” and mentions them again and again in several of his stories as if they really existed in history.

Pros and Cons

I find Lovecraft strange. This is his greatest merit. His brain seems to work very differently from the rest of us. Reading him is like slowly realizing that you are reading the diary of a madman who is pretending to be sane. I get the same feeling when I read Lautreamont, Michaux, and Bataille. In “The Tomb,” for example, a boy leaves his house every night to enter a sepulcher and sleep inside a tomb. In “Pickman’s Model,” the narrator slowly begins to realize that the demon paintings by his artist friend were not drawn from imagination but from real-life demons. “At the Mountains of Madness” is about aliens who lived on Earth during the time of the dinosaurs.

My absolute favorite story in the collection is “The Quest of Iranon,” a story written by Lovecraft when he was 31. It’s a very beautifully written story about our search for the perfect place in the world, with a nice twist in the end.

Lovecraft works best with short stories. His themes are usually some unknown, something that is too horrible to describe in full. His stories are about strange, intelligent, solitary characters with strange obsessions that cause their ultimate downfall. Another thing I like in Lovecraft is that he is very well-read. His stories include references to historical events, scientific discoveries, old books, and works by other authors.

Lovecraft’s weakness is novels. His novels are really only very long short stories that drag on and on. Lovecraft’s fascination for landscape and architecture also causes him to write overlong descriptions of places that to my mind can be shortened by at least 50%. His prose in these cases becomes unwieldy, repetitive, and lumbering. With novels, Lovecraft tends to be long-winded. Thus, they can be tedious to read. Lovecraft works best with short stories. There, his weirdness can be received in small, delicious gulps.

[Ben Truong · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories is an anthology of twelve short stories written by H.P. Lovecraft collected and edited by S.T. Joshi. It continues the wonderfully weird and creepy celebrations of horrific and unusual literature in this second volume.

For the most part, this collection of short stories was written rather well. Lovecraft's imagination is delightful in the aspects of horror and oddness, as most of these stories is simply haunting. The narrative is creepy and unsettling and very imaginative exploring the darker nature of humanity. As with the first volume, Lovecraft's writing is quite heavy, wordy, and very heavy on description with entries ranges in length. My particular favourites are: "The Music of Eric Zann", "Pickman's Model", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "The Dunwich Horror", "At the Mountain of Madness", and the titular "The Thing on the Doorstep".

Like most anthologies there are weaker contributions and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories is not an exception. There were a couple of stories that were cruder than the rest ("The Tomb" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"), but it seems like his earlier works. However, "Under the Pyramids" while good, was overwrought and overwritten. Like in the previous anthology, Lovecraft's prejudices and racism bleeds into the text.

This particular edition features an exemplary introduction by S.T. Joshi, which discusses the history and evolution of weird fiction and supernatural horror in literature. Joshi also provides introduction to each story, albeit spoilers revealing at times, plenty of notes, and reference extremely well with a list of further reading and explanatory notes.

All in all, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories is a wonderful collection of horror short stories from the acclaimed writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction.

[Elizabeth R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

By what benign grace I clawed my slow, grimacing way through seemingly endless wastes of adjectives and repetition I may never know -- possibly the protective spectre of my younger self, a blithely voracious reader apparently immune to such trappings of the patriarchy...

At any rate the title story, placed last, was pretty good, but the Gothic horror flavour of the rest was tainted with incessant racism and a singular lack of good female characters (a few evil and/or stupid ones exist). Skinny single white professional males abound, with little or no interest in romance, etc.

I recommend this volume nonetheless because of the notes and commentary.

HPL does not stand up well to rereading... Remember your youthful Cthulhu forays with fondness, but return at your peril.

[Alex (ReadingBetweenTheNotes) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rarely rate short story collections higher than 3 stars but this was brilliant! There wasn't a single story in this collection that I didn't like. Obviously, some were better than others and some were a bit long and waffling, with others a bit short for my liking and feeling underdeveloped - but most were fabulous. Lovecraft certainly knows how to write a monster! I liked that there were recurring themes within the stories and Lovecraft's whole invented mythology of the Old Ones was amazing and creepy. The nods to Edgar Allen Poe were nice too.

I think my favourite stories in this collection were The Dunwich Horror, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and Under the Pyramids - all were awesomely weird and superbly well developed. Under the Pyramids was particularly great and had me wondering why I've never read anything like it before?! The concept was brilliant and the Egyptian setting worked brilliantly.

Overall conclusion: yes to Lovecraft!

[char · Rating 3 out of 5]

there was definitely something on the doorstep

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first introduction to H.P. Lovecraft. I've been wait listed for Stephen King's new story collection You Like It Darker and it finally became available. It was going to be my Halloween read, but I chose HPL as a sub and it was worth it. I read 8 of 12 stories in this collection; without a doubt, HPL was an excellent and prolific writer. I will return to HPL in the future.

[Spencer Paw · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished this! Had to skip the explanatory notes at the end.. What a chore to read.

[Kevin S · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF'd around 20% in because Lovecraft is a pretty big racist and I just can't look past that! I guess I'll never know what Call of Cthulu has to offer and honestly I'm okay with that.

[Shepard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovecraft is odd. Freaking nuts. Psychadelic.

But holy crap can he write good stories! Not gonna lie, if you don't like the paranormal, bending-reality, Tim Buron/Stephen King style, Lovecraft might be hard to enjoy. But he's so worth a try. :) He's the original master of thriller, horror, and supernatural suspense! All of his stories are intense, suspenseful, unique thrillers. You might not scream or be afraid of the dark after each one, but you'll definitely get that mental chill when he reveals that that one man wasn't who you thought, or the music was playing by itself all along, or maybe the main character was the crazy one, and all you can say is, "Whhhaaaaaaatttt????"
Lovecraft has such skill with piling plot, climax, tension, and character into each short story. You may not love each character, but you grow immensely attached to them; they are your guide through whatever universe Lovecraft has placed them in. No story is alike.
Pretty much, if you like Supernatural, Welcome to Night Vale, X-Files, Stephen King, or Tim Burton, you'll love their original inspiration: Lovecraft.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love H.P. Lovecraft. I'm about to start reading Penguin's third and final volume of his collected stories and am dreading the day I run out. He's the author I remember wishing I could read in middle school but didn't know existed (although I tried writing a few disastrous stories of my own). I thought this one line from At the Mountains of Madness (1931) sums him up neatly:

"It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests."

[Noelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a thin line between "subtle, creeping horror" and "extremely dull." Lovecraft mostly knows where that line is.

(There is also a thin line between "establishing setting through detailed description" and "I did a shit-tonne of research and you're going to hear about it." Lovecraft has no idea where that line is.)

[Cassie W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Tomb: 5/5
Beyond the Wall of Sleep: 2/5
The White Ship: 3/5
The Temple: 4/5 
The Quest of Iranon: 3/5
The Music of Erich Zann: 2/5
Under the Pyramids: 4/5
Pickman's Model: 3/5
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: 5/5
The Dunwich Horror: 4/5
At the Mountains of Madness: 3/5
The Thing on the Doorstep: 4/5

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned that you should never dig up bodies in graveyards for any reason whatsoever, not even if your oldest friend (who has progressively gone made from dabbling in evil science) asks for your help.

[Kia Groom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovecraft's stories are curious, intense and chilling. He is a genuine master of the genre and the short story form.

[Andrew Sydlik · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a longtime Lovecraft reader, I have several editions of his works, such as a couple of the Del Rey paperbacks and The Annotated Lovecraft and More Annotated Lovecraft (the last two also edited by preeminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi). These Penguin Classics collections (along with The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories and The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories) are my favorites. While they don’t include all his work, they do represent his best and most influential works, as well as some earlier, lesser known tales. Each volume samples texts from his entire publishing career, from the late 1910s to the mid-1930s.

I’m not entirely sure if Joshi had a particular theme in mind for each volume. The Thing on the Doorstep includes both fantasy and horror, including two of his longest works, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "At the Mountains of Madness." If there is a theme among these tales, perhaps it is of doubles and mind transference.

"Ward" involves a young antiquarian being taken over by his alchemist/sorcerer ancestor Joseph Curwen, while "The Thing on the Doorstep" similarly tells of a young occultist Edward Pickman Derby who swaps bodies with his wife Asenath Waite (a resident of the infernal Massachusetts seaport Innsmouth, and who may not be who he thinks she is).

"The Dunwich Horror" tells of the Whateleys, a backwoods family devoted to the occult, and their otherworldly twin sons with plans for cosmic conquest, while "Mountains" describes the exploits of a disastrous Antarctic expedition that came across the prehistoric city of the Elder Things, whose scientific and colonial ambitions parallel those of humanity, who are in turn imitated by the shoggoths, protoplasmic beings the Elder Things created as slaves until they rebelled.

These are my favorite stories of the volume, and among my favorite Lovecraft works (except for "Thing," which is somewhat mediocre in comparison). Another favorite included here is "Pickman's Model." Although it's one of his Poesque tales that can seem derivative and simplistic compared to his works of cosmic horror, it still creates quite a creepy atmosphere and leads up to an awesome--if predictable--punchline.

Also of note here among Lovecraft's earlier works are "The Music of Erich Zann," which Lovecraft considered among his best for its subtlety, and "Under the Pyramids," a collaboration with Harry Houdini that reportedly tells of the magician's escape from a gigantic cavern beneath the Sphinx, where he encounters the real-life inspiration for the Egyptian monument.

What also recommends these Penguin versions is Joshi’s annotated endnotes, which provide historical background, literary, historical, and autobiographical influences. They are also corrected texts, meaning they are as close to the original texts as possible with some minor errors fixed.

The font and margins are small, and being legally blind, I struggled to read the text at times, but not so small that it was undoable. They're typical for these Penguin editions, which usually have smaller font and margins.

Full list of stories with year written/year published.

1. The Tomb (1917/1922)
2. Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
3. The White Ship (1919)
4. The Temple (1920/1925)
5. The Quest of Iranon (1921/1935)
6. The Music of Erich Zann (1921/1922)
7. Imprisoned with the Pharaohs aka Under the Pyramids (1924)
8. Pickman's Model (1926/1927)
9. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927/1941)
10. The Dunwich Horror (1928/1929)
11. At the Mountains of Madness (1931/1936)
12. The Thing on the Doorstep (1933/1937)

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars!

And thus I've finished the last of the Penguin Classics Lovecraft collections I had left to read. Despite this one containing two of his most famous stories, The Dunwich Horror and At the Mountains of Madness, this might be my least favorite out of the three collections Penguin has put out. That isn't to say that I didn't enjoy The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, far from it. Its more of what I expect and crave from Lovecraft, the brooding atmosphere and his limitless imagination. It's just that if I were to rank my favorites this compilation would go into the number 3 slot.
While the last selection I read, The Dreams in the Witch House, contained more of his dark fantasy work this one leaned more towards his mythos while still having a sprinkle of that aforementioned fantasy. Strangely enough the stand outs to me were not his more popular works like The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, or even The Case of Charles Dexter Ward but his smaller lesser known works such as The Temple, The Quest of Iranon, and The Music of Erich Zann. These three deviate from Lovecraft's typical opening of "man wanders into a strange and sinister New England village" and add a bit more flavor. The Temple has a cruel German navy commander as the protagonist, with the setting being a submarine slowly sinking into the depths. The Quest of Iranon follows a golden haired youth's quest to return home and is beautifully tragic. Lastly, there's The Music of Erich Zann. While The Dreams in the Witch House had mathematical concepts be the center focus, this one has music!
I can't recommend this collection enough to those who are on a journey to read more from Lovecraft. I would suggest to follow up The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories with this one as your second. You're in for a nice blend of his staple and more celebrated works along with some underappreciated gems.