gaminette asked Jonathan L. Howard:

Hello! Of all the stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which three are your favorites and why?

Jonathan L. Howard That's an interesting question. After some thought, I've decided on the following.

"The Call of Cthulhu." Perhaps an obvious choice, but it's probably his best known story because it deserves to be. I like its slightly unusual structure, and especially the very big ideas it contains. More so than any other, this is the one that defines his take on what "cosmic horror" is really all about.

"The Haunter of the Dark." This was Lovecraft's good-humoured riposte to Robert Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars," in which Bloch killed off a protagonist who was obviously modelled on Lovecraft. The protagonist of "The Haunter of the Dark" is one "Robert Blake," and he doesn't fare so well either. Despite its cheerfully tit-for-tat origin, it's a flat-out good horror story. It's also apparently the last Lovecraft wrote.

For my final choice I was going to go for "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," because I'm fond of the Dreamlands, or perhaps "The Horror in the Museum" (a story Lovecraft nominally revised but essentially ghostwrote for Hazel Heald) since it was the first Lovecraft story I ever read. Instead I'm going to go for another oddity; "The Thing in the Moonlight." This is actually a chunk from one of Lovecraft's letters detailing a nightmare he'd experienced that J. Chapman Miske subsequently couched as a story after Lovecraft's death. It's a fragment of a figment with barely any narrative at all, really, but the description of finding an obsolete trolley car out in the back of beyond and its inhuman crew is very vivid and stays with me.

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