Status Updates From The Best of H.P. Lovecraft

This may be my new favorite - I’m not certain if the somewhat predictable nature of some of the reveals is intentional, but for me it felt like it just added to the horror. The layers of mysteries are creepy and I love the hubris of Wilmarth, because basically the whole story was just me screaming at him “HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE THE SIGNS YOU IDIOT” and watching him naively waltz straight into a nightmare.

Honestly I thought the Dunwich Horror was fine, with some cool moments, but the last line recontextualizing the whole second half of the story makes me enjoy it much more in retrospect. I think that’s been one of Lovecraft’s biggest strengths throughout this book - even if I don’t love a story, his endings are usually one of the best parts for me and often subsequently raise my enjoyment of the story.

Kind of a bummer that The Call of Cthulhu contains some of Lovecraft’s most chilling lines in the book so far, with probably my favorite overall narrative with all the creepy reveals and fantastic imagery. It’s a bummer cause this is also probably the story in this book with the most blatant xenophobia (at least so far), which was kind of distracting at times in the first two parts.

The Silver Key lowkey felt like Lovecraft’s philosophy lecture, which I genuinely enjoyed; i liked his pontifications on dreams, and though not really scary the ending was sufficiently unsettling to leave me satisfied. The Music of Erich Zann was my favorite story so far, it was the first one i felt I could really get sucked into the scene, and because of that it was the first to feel genuinely scary for me.

I liked Pickman’s Model - it was effectively creepy and mysterious, and, as with most of the stories so far, had a wonderfully disturbing reveal to close it out. In the Vault was fine for me, it did well to establish the trapped feeling in a creepy setting, but overall I didn’t get too much from it.

Read the first 3 stories; I don’t know if I was just really sleepy while reading but apparently the first two were about cannibals, and I somehow fully missed that. The rats in the walls was creepy enough without me catching onto the cannibalism, but third one, the Outsider, I really liked - very creepy lonesome vibes and a pretty cool reveal at the end.

alright. skipped the first story bc i simply could not deal w how often i was being forced to read the n word on the page. lovecraft wtf is wrong with you. a couple of these i read in 'the dream cycle' collection, so i've skipped those as well. mostly these have just been unfortunately very boring, many of them featuring thinly veiled eugenics & phrenology that i simply do not have the patience for.

happy halloween month. couldn't make it one full story into this before we dropped the hard r n word talking about his self-insert's cat. depending on how the rest of today goes reading this i may just move onto something else lmao