The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft: 12 (Knickerbocker Classics)

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The Nameless City: First appearance of the famous “unexplainable couplet of the mad poet Abdul Alhazred”: That is not dead which can eternal lie, Y no solo hay repetición en sus protagonistas. Cuando llevas leidas muchas novelas y muchos cuentos ves que la mayor parte son variaciones de otras, sin que cambien muchas cosas, pues, al fin de al cabo, están relacionadas unas con otras. Y para redondear la guindilla el estilo literario de este escritor es muy lento la mayor parte del tiempo, si bien esto tiene su explicación y ha sido lo que menos me ha chocado de todo lo que he dicho anteriormente, ya que al final esto último se le perdona. The Thing In The Moonlight, Horror in the Museum, Poetry and the Gods, and In the Walls of Eryx are mentioned as missing, but these are collaborations with notes on the Wikipedia bibliography. It does, however, include Through the Gates of the Silver Key which was in fact a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price, and Under the Pyramids which was a collaboration with Harry Houdini.

I think it is beyond doubt that H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale,” writes Stephen King. Neil Gaiman declares, “H.P. Lovecraft built the stage on which most of the last century's horror fiction was performed.” The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: I read this in recent years and didn’t love it, but I enjoyed it more now. It marvelously pulled in places and events from years-ago prior stories, ever more firmly establishing a Cthulhuverse. Lovecraft's first (short) novel-length fiction. The Shunned House: Disappointing; long, dull, and without a good payoff. The only thing to fear is French itself. I did not read the entire book's contents, but instead read only the following. I'm still interested enough in his fiction that I will probably slowly dip into other stories of his I haven't read.

Included Stories

The stories aren’t charming or magical or inspiring or anything like that. Which is fair, they’re cosmic horror. But don’t expect to come out of reading these stories energized to do good in the world or to treat your fellow human beings with greater love and kindness. Unless you think doing good in the world involves sacrificing a goat to the Elder Gods to stave off their hunger and imminent return. In which case you may well be plenty inspired. The Hound: Great! A demonic rather than cosmic horror story, florid and macabre with great energy. Reportedly the first mention of the Necronomicon. Overshadowed by Lovecraft's reputation as a master of horror is his unique contribution as a science fiction visionary. There are no supernatural elements in his stories. None. All of his horrifying creations are creatures of an incomprehensible but strictly materialistic science.

My favorites, though, were two of the longer (short novel length) pieces. At The Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time. It's taken us three years to record, edit, mix and master this collection. We hope it will provide Lovecraft fans with a high quality means to enjoy to these stories read aloud by professional actors who share their love for HPL's writing.HP Lovecraft didn’t know Sumerian, Babylonian, or Aramaic. But that didn’t stop him from making up incantations in other worldly languages. ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Yi-nash Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdog-Yah! They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting." The Complete Fiction to me is more than merely a book I immensely enjoyed. It’s a gateway to a veritable rabbit-hole of written word and other artworks before, during and after Lovecraft’s lifetime. The influences are now so extensive that to be ‘Lovecraftian’ is almost a lifestyle. The Quest of Iranon: The closest thing to a fable yet encountered in this collection, and rather lovely, but inconsequential. It could be considered a Dreamlands tale. Beyond the Wall of Sleep: It turns out the term ‘white trash’ was in use as early as 1919. Who knew? Another dream-world tale, more cosmic than the last, in which a psychiatrist receives a six-month paid vacation for taking on too much stress from his patient, a degenerate from that famous hotbed of brutish hillbillies, the Catskills. Points for ‘ululation’, ‘effulgent’ (twice), and ‘architraves’.

We largely went with Mr. Joshi’s determination as to the contents of this collection. The first volume includes stories written just by HPL himself, with the exceptions of “Under the Pyramids” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. The famed magician Harry Houdini gets a minor credit for “Under the Pyramids” as the general concept was his, but the writing of the story itself was left to Lovecraft. E. Hoffman Price also gets a minor credit for “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”. Price wrote a 6,000 word draft of the story and sent it to Lovecraft, who then expanded the story to some 14,000 words, out of which Price estimated that only about 50 were words from his original draft.

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Many have learned from H.P. Lovecraft and tried to imitate his genius, but the hypnotic stories in LOVECRAFT TALES remain supreme and a continuing inspiration for both readers and creators of modern supernatural fiction.

Now, on to the fiction itself. Lovecraft is regarded as one of the best authors of supernatural horror and weird fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, and is credited with turning the concept of horror in literature at that time on its head, casting the gaze of the reader out into the endless cold beyond our atmosphere while his precursors and many of his contemporaries dealt with far more terrestrial and comparatively homely methods of inspiring dread and fright. I'd honestly say that Lovecraft's Dream Cycle works are not worth the read at all and can simply be skipped. The Music of Erich Zann: Now this is the type of mythos tale I remember best, with a nightmarish realm adjacent to our own, always threatening, and barely held at bay by brilliantly insane and esoteric means. The Strange High House in the Mist: Intriguing, surprisingly more joyous than menacing, with beautiful poetic descriptions and phrases.

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It's also immediately apparent that Lovecraft had an incredible vocabulary and a near-encyclopedic knowledge of an impressive number of subjects. The HPL Omnibus Collection - all stories principally attributed to Lovecraft, plus his collaborations with other authors for more than 100 stories in all. Shipped on our custom USB drive in a great new faux book I have just compared (Dec 27, 2013) the 'fiction' section of the Wikipedia bibliography with all of the stories featured in this volume. All of the fiction is included in this volume. The final novella is often regarded as Lovecraft's best and most devastating tale, and is one of the primary stories of the third category of his work, the Cthulhu Mythos. "At The Mountains Of Madness" follows a scientific expedition to Antarctica that meets disaster and uncovers evidence of a fully sentient, advanced, societal race of beings that inhabited earth before and during the genesis of the scientifically accepted chain of evolutionary life on Earth. It is this, more than any of the other Cthulhu tales, that references and amends the mythology of all of Lovecraft's previous work, Dream Cycle and necromancy cycle included, recasting everything not as supernatural but as part of a vast, multi-faceted, and purely natural universe in which the "gods" of humanity's religions are merely ancient and powerful creatures from far reaches of our universe, mischaracterized and largely indifferent to us. And again, this novella most of all was most like the sort of sci-fi thrillers we read today, with very competent writing depicting the harsh Antarctic wild and the piece-by-piece revelation of ancient knowledge and terror by human scientists who are only following their instincts and their desire to discover and understand. I found myself surprised by the ultimately sympathetic view the story gives to the Elder Things, the aliens that came before all known earth life, since nearly all other instances of alien encounters in Lovecraft's world casts them as amoral animals to be feared and avoided, at best. Other notable stories in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle are "The Dunwich Horror", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Shadow Out Of Time", and, of course, "The Call of Cthulhu". Note that many of the earlier Cthulhu Mythos tales put a supernatural/deity spin on the alien beings encountered, prior to Lovecraft's "retcon" in this novella.