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A bunch of smaller pieces before the next big one. Up until the story of the travelling skull in “Ibid” it was generally indistinguishable as a satire from a scholarly article. I’m guessing if I knew more about the subject then it would be far more humorous / recognize what is wrong about it. “Very Old Folk” is a cosmic horror dream that Lovecraft transcribed; it’s very detailed and thrilling.

“The Colour Out of Space” is another of the few Lovecraft stories I read some ten years ago. I love it; it really stuck with me as a sort of concept of a truly alien life form and not just Lovecraft’s Outer Gods that want to usher humanity into amoral cataclysms. For a time I wanted to use an alien presence that basically existed as sound waves or something of the sort.

Just as fun as I remembered. A very slow-boiling subtle romance that builds up between Cimorene and Mendanbar. I enjoyed more Morwen and I forgot all about Telemain.

“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, I read maybe 10 years ago or so when I was reading open source Lovecraft on the internet. I was drawn in back then and I enjoyed it on this second read. It’s a slow, painstaking detective story about witchcraft and necromancy and hints at cosmic horror when you fit it into the broader Cthulhu Mythos. Very different novel than the “Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”.

I was familiar with the plot of “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” but to read it is something else entirely. It’s a beautiful adventure, a travelogue through Lovecraft’s Dreamland that reminds me - positively - of some of the bizarre worlds that Dr. Seuss sketched out on his pages, except there is always the lurking threat of the alien and insanity-inducing Other Gods.

“Silver key” is a beautifully nostalgiac piece; it’s more fun to assume that carter gets his happy ending here but I know that he has a sad end as befits Lovecraft’s world vision, though not by his initial imagination (it was a solicited collaboration piece). “Strange high house” is another dream-cycle fragment, only hinting at the darker aspects of the impossible universe.

A lot of Lovecraft’s stories trace a thread of mystery as he slowly pulls back the curtain of investigation. “Call of Cthulhu” is a fantastic example, as it one person traces the accounts of Cthulhu across three different main narratives: the present, the past, and sightly beyond that pst present. “Pickman’s Model” is a cool, simple horror story, mostly driven by the detail of the paintings described.

Weird stories that feature characters preserved far beyond their natural deaths, then decomposing rapidly when their artificial stays give out. Except “in the vault”, where a boor of an undertaker suffers from vengeance wrought by his malign indifference. Also read a story not featured here where a death-loving man turns into a serial killer so that he can be closer to death.

“Shunned House” is a fun bit of supernatural lore that involves the dark forces that animate werewolves and vampires and has a, uh, fungal root, as does a lot of Lovecraft’s horror. “Red Hook” is sort of a slow-moving detective essay about devil worshippers. I’m unsure as to whether the villain attempts to undue his own resurrection in counter to potential demonic servitude.

TIL that Lovecraft ghost-wrote a story for Harry Houdini. The narrative voice is indistinguishable from Lovecraft’s but it’s a cool story in what he tries to establish for his Mythos for his warped take on ancient Egypt. The idea of a secret Egyptian underworld where the mummified roam aimlessly, awaiting the awakening by Osiris, is a neat concept for his fantasy / horror.

Some good ones. “Rats” is probably what King borrowed from the most with his “Jerusalem’s Lot” and reveals a noxious birthright that drives the last of the line insane. “The Unnamable” is part essay on the nature of horror and part a single, bizarre occurrence shared between two friends. “The Festival” is another birthright story, evidence of Lovecraft’s obsession with genetics and memory.

Fun fights but the series sort of suffers in how it went from being sort of cute spirit detective plots to all-out demon brawls. Haven’t connected to what i ended up seeing of the anime yet!

“The Lurking Fear” furthers a tradition that Lovecraft started out with in his Arthur Jermyn story, and leveraging “racial degeneration” is exactly what you think it is. Lovecraft was far from the only author of his era to use it, but Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Olalla” as a sort of vampire story is less loaded since it does not stampede toward ape-like beings as the product of… genetic erosion.

Three lovely pieces involving dreams / nightmares, the first of which details the perils of humans getting the attention of the cosmic beings whose powers place them beyond our approach. “The Hound” is about thrill seekers who take to robbing graveyards and are cursed by a potent talisman. The description of their morbid treasures is plausible and thus more disturbing than their predicament.

“Iranon” is lovingly poetic and tragic. “The outsider” is recommended as a story from the perspective of the unknowing villain. “The Other Gods” is an early hint at the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft’s later work. The biggest bit in this section was “re-animator”, a ghastly horror serial about a Frankenstein-like doctor who is trying to restore life after death, to ghastly results.

Lovecraft is hitting his stride. Well, One of these stories is a goofy-ass melodrama with an unsettlingly misogynistic twist where the female lead flops to calculating sociopath. The rest span from apocalyptic dream visions to a harrowing encounter in ancient ruins to a dialogue with a hillbilly New England cannibal. The prose poem of “Nyarlathothep” is fantastic.

Weird tales include a doomed submarine, the ancestor of an explorer who married an ape-princess, and a tale traveling the Dream Lands that Lovecraft further developed in Randolph Carter’s Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. It feels like an extension of his fantasy of The White Ship and its darkly Seuss-like imagined places (like Oh the Thinks You Can Think).

“Beyond the Wall of Sleep”, about cosmic star spirits that exist sympathetically with Earth-dreamers, is pretty good. I like the prose-poem of “Memory”. It’s one of those “insignificance of mankind” concepts. “Old Bugs” is not horror, but rather a sort of fuzzy twist-ending story about a tragedy of the past averting one in the future.

Lovecraft’s short story format is a lot of exposition that sets the scene for a singular moment where his characters suffer some sort of event that makes them doubt humanity’s place in the universe. Or, uh, there have been a few stories thus far where the main character is influenced by the spirit / experiences of one of his ancestors, rendering them functionally insane in the present day.

More wacky hijinx. The screwball comedy never really lets up. There’s another take on the ghost date story but the one with Ataru from earlier in the series is much better as far as having emotional beats. I enjoyed the pet store worker who falls in love with Ryusuke’s gnarly dad because he is basically a dog. Takahashi’s new supporting character, Shingo, is a tv-loving jungle boy.

of the Argive infants… that’s quite the heavy lifting. It was interesting having Ariadne see in Perseus a fellow trauma survivor. Of all the characters in this book I thought that I would see re-habilitated, it wasn’t the dude who cut off the head of sleeping Medusa, who was cursed for being raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Theseus has a much deeper history of being a shitbag, though.

Theseus is such a horrible boor; Saint doubles down on making him a painfully unappealing LI once his mask drops. Dionysus is a far more loving LI and while he gradually destabilizes, Saint gives him an understandable arc. He is a God, and she is not, and while he gets a taste of simple home pleasures he is inwardly mourning his inevitable loss of them. Saint tries to put a less appalling spin on the massacre

The list of male figures in Ariadne’s life slouch toward revealing themselves when their morals are tested. Minos is a hyper-abusive father and tyrant from the onset. Theseus appears to be a virtuous hero to young Ariadne but the story picks up on everything that makes him a grade-A asshole, revealing some things - like the rape of Hippolyta - much later. We are spared his capturing of prepubescent Helen.