It's been a while since I've posted anything.
How about mini-reviews of short stories from The Collected Stories of H.P. Lovecraft? I'm trundling through them on my Kindle.
Please remember I'm judging these works as parts of H.P. Lovecraft's canon for new initiates or old fans. I do not intend a five-star story here to match up in the same way to a Hemingway short story. Lovecraft compared to Lovecraft is the order of the day.
Let me warn those delving in that Lovecraft uses a lot of exposition, in the style of Victorian-era diary-like entries and pseudo-academe. Pretend it's real. Bask in the horror of the first person, instead of the carefully crafted and well-tuned cinematic third-person omniscient. Enjoy these as the ghost stories told by real people—or storytellers—who never lived.
"The Beast in the Cave" -- ***
We encounter our first bipedal white-ape-like creature. He'll show up again. This one is a cave-dwelling devolving human trapped for too long in the dark.
"The Alchemist" -- ***
The final revelation is easily predictable, but the tale is entertaining.
"The Tomb" -- ***
The lone discoverer of a sinister happening is locked away, we learn, in the first few paragraphs. His tale is a good one.
"Dagon" -- ****
Stellar, Hodgson- and Poe-inspired vision of a horrific, black-moss-covered island discovered by a soon-to-be-disturbed shipwreck victim. Wonderful use of sublimely large beings.
"A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson" -- ***
An old man remembers literary icons in this humorous paean to greats.
"Sweet Ermengarde or, The Heart of a Country Girl" -- ***
Turns a Victorian moral tale on its head.
"The Green Meadow" (co-written with Winifred V. Jackson) -- ****
A short, beautiful tale of dimensional and chronological travel that leaves a man fearful, shamed, shocked, and distressed. Includes dream, fantasy, war, honor ... and the collapse between fiction and reality.
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" -- ****
It's a little slow, but it builds to a expository crescendo and fascinating dialogue with a being accessible only through sleep and a strange machine.
"Memory" -- **
A trifle with a predictable end.
"Old Bugs" -- ***
A maudlin but interesting story of a junkie's last good deed.
"The Transition of Juan Romero" -- ***
Touches of Lovecraft's belief in the degeneracy of primitive races, in this case Mexicans, cannot mar a troubling story of uncovered dark horror in an old mine.
"The White Ship" -- *****
Lovecraft puts to use dream, fantasy, horror, and great want of a modern man to reach to his dreams through the thin—but indomitable—barrier between what is and what might be. One of my favorites.
"The Doom That Came to Sarnath" -- ****
Wonderful fantasy story of an old god's final revenge.
"The Statement of Randolph Carter" -- ***
Lovecraft cleverly employs a favorite trope of his: a survivor that didn't glimpse the most terrible visions of the accursed/dead/disappeared main character tells the tale of his mild encounter with forces of darkness.
"The Terrible Old Man" -- ***
Short, entertaining story of some common house criminals who pick the wrong target.
"The Tree" -- ****
A story that leaves a mystery in its end. Worthy of a good Neil Gaiman comic.
"The Cats of Ulthar" -- ****
Another fantasy tale of cruelty and cruelty avenged.
"The Temple" -- ****
A U-boat captain finds himself at wit's end and the bottom of the ocean, and tries to hold on to honor his Fatherland in the face of dark happenings on board and darker visions through the portholes. This is one of Lovecraft's better attempts at realistic internal thoughts, with some good, arrogant, racist ideas in this WWI German soldier's head.
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" -- ***
Overlong, but a good example of the twisted-geneology tales and substories to follow in his work.
"The Street" -- ***
Racist vision of encroaching lesser races in a New England town, but presages Neil Gaiman's idea of sleeping cities by decades.
"Poetry and the Gods" (co-written with Anna Helen Crofts) -- *
Painful pseudo-poetry miserably mucks up a tedious tale. Disaster. Unfinished dreck.
"Celephais" -- ****
An incomparable and moving fantasy/modern-day work of "Twilight Zone" end and gripping middle.
"From Beyond" -- ***
Lovecraft begins to truly craft his otherdimensional horrors. Here, they're not so scary.
"Nyarlathotep" -- *****
Nothing fully prepares us for the horrid vision of a prophet who bears scintillating truths that burn away hope and comfortable reality for audiences. Lovecraft captures in a few paragraphs what takes others to blather on about when it comes to the end of the world.
"The Picture in the House" -- ****
Gives the creepy degenerates of the sinister Virginia mountains their first voice. They love them some cannibal pikchurs...
"The Crawling Chaos" (co-written by Winifred V. Jackson) -- ****
Earth ends not with a whimper, but a terrible, ocean-eating, sand-sucking explosion witnessed by a man on the wrong side of an opium dream.
"Ex Oblivione" -- ***
The gate in a dream is a doorway to ... what? A sad traveler at the end of his life, finding solace in sleep, finds out.
"The Nameless City" -- ****
Sarnath, Ib, and the Mad Arab are name-checked her in what stands as one of the first tales of true Cthulhu mythos. A traveler ignores the warnings of the natives and delves into a pit as deep and dark as the pit Gilgamesh stumbled down, seeking eternal life. What this guy finds, of course, is eternal terror. Sublime size startles him, most of all.
"The Quest of Iranon" -- ****
A gentle tale of a bard whose timelessness finds its match in the end to his quest.
"The Moon-Bog" -- ***
A little uninteresting, perhaps as the failure to personalize the man to become the main victim of the tale.
"The Outsider" -- ****
A classic, especially for its depiction of the dark tower and its single, high spire our protagonist must scale to reach light. His unsettling discovery is great.
"The Other Gods" -- ***
Meet the wise men who worked with kings from previous tales, like "The Cats of Ulthar." His quest is presumption, seeking to scale one mountain where the gods like to reminisce and dance the way they did before mankind's mountain climbing pushed them from the peaks to higher and higher summits.
"The Music of Erich Zann" -- *****
Lovecraft's first-person style blossoms into brilliance here in the story of a man haunted by terror whose music is as ephemeral as the lonely street he lives on. The protagonist's quest to find him again, set at the beginning, is wonderful.
"Herbert West—Reanimator" -- ****
A gruesome tale of a doctor whose medical miracle of reanimation only manifested itself in more and more grisly experiments. Would get 5 stars, but because it was serialized and not properly rewritten as a whole, parts of it are irritatingly repetitious in their narration.
"Hypnos" -- ***
A cool tale of a frightening stranger playing with crossing dimensions in his sleep.
"Azathoth" -- ***
A charming piece that proves Lovecraft's ability to write of the fantastic of the fairy tale with the same aplomb s he does terrible horror.
"The Horror at Martin's Beach" -- ***
Satisfying revenge is had by the mom of a caught ocean monstrosity. Great fun.
"The Hound" -- **
A weaker version of Lovecraft's other grave-robbing tales.
---- More to to be added!
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