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The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre

H.P. Lovecraft,

August Derleth (Editor)

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Feb 22, 2008 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: short-stories, science-fiction

Not well-appreciated in his own time, reclusive and eccentric New England writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a household word in the world of weird fiction after his death. His prose style was greatly influenced by Poe, and like Poe, he preferred natural causes for his horror ("supernatural," in one of the alternate titles listed above for this collection, means "uncanny" or "unearthly," not supernatural per se). While his genre was science fiction, he was wholly outside the optimistic and Not well-appreciated in his own time, reclusive and eccentric New England writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft became a household word in the world of weird fiction after his death. His prose style was greatly influenced by Poe, and like Poe, he preferred natural causes for his horror ("supernatural," in one of the alternate titles listed above for this collection, means "uncanny" or "unearthly," not supernatural per se). While his genre was science fiction, he was wholly outside the optimistic and technophilic hard SF tradition that dominated the genre pulps of his time, publishing instead mostly in venues like Weird Tales. Much of his work is based on what has come to be called his "Cthulhu Mythos" (a term coined by August Derleth): a vision of malevolent alien races who supposedly ruled the primeval Earth, and whose remnants are still very dangerous. A number of the stories here are part of this body of work (which is often internally inconsistent in details from story to story), and some others foreshadow aspects of it. Several of these are set in his imaginary town of Arkham, MA, seat of Miskatonic Univ. --an interesting place to visit, but not one you'd want to live in. :-) (And nearby Innsmouth isn't even a place you'd want to visit!)

Unlike Poe, Lovecraft's horror is existential rather than situational; an atheist and an uncritical Darwinist (in "The Rats in the Walls," for instance, investigators probing below the sub-basement of Exham Priory find numerous bones of "Piltdown Men" --some trick, since the species was a hoax!), he regarded the universe as a bleak, meaningless place hostile to humanity, and presents his "Great Old Ones" or "Elder Gods" as the embodiment of that hostility. Awareness of their existence is treated as a knowledge that forever annihilates any conception of meaning or rationality in the universe for those unfortunate enough to stumble on them. For Christians, of course, versed in the concept of Satan, the idea that the universe contains super-powerful and evil entities hostile to mankind evokes no surprise, or fear --but readers with a worldview like that of early 20th-century bourgeois materialism probably would find it soul-shattering. Lovecraft fans fall into two groups: those who find this perspective the best part of his writing and eat it up with a spoon, and those (including myself, and apparently Derleth) who don't, and who may even consider it a defect. But his originality, his story-telling ability, his mastery of style and plot, and powerful evocation of atmosphere make his work highly readable and fascinating despite this. ...more

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