for old school fright-mongers

books:


	• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) Howard Phillips Lovecraft Penguin Classics, 1999 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Lovecraft at his best

The only missing piece from this mosaic of horror and alien maddnes is "AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADDNES"- If Penguin Publishing would have added it into this book, than it would be accurate to say that this book had all that you need (unless your'e a hard core fan, but than you wouldne't be reading my review anyway...)

Excellent prose and poetry

Excellent story. For me, it combines the best elements of The Adventures of Indiana Jones, the experience and lore of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion (and the feeling of being in 'old' New Orleans, and Cloverfield the movie.

for more information click here

Free SF Reader

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

4.5 out of 5

for more information click here

for old school fright-mongers

Having never before read any H.P. Lovecraft, I held a deeply geeky shame. This was an author that was supposed to have helped define modern horror, helped define weird fiction and the truly-out-there sci-fi. The "Cthulhu Mythos" was something that I referenced frequently and yet ignorantly. All this time it was as if I had been brandishing a phony R'lyeh passport, muttering incoherently in the Elder Gods' tongue without any authority.

And since Great Cthulhu was the fulcrum here, the pivotal point of contention, I was certain to identify the Lovecraft collection at the library that actually held that short story. (Only doubling my shame for having imagined it to be a full-fledged novel for all these years...)

Working through this collection, I could see why Lovecraft became so well-known as a father-figure in modern sci-fi and horror. He seemed to have an odd relationship with his vocabulary. Reading his prose, I get the impression that Lovecraft latched onto a handful of peculiarly "advanced" words and significant mythological/literary images and then milked them for every atom of their worth. It is a shame that he died as young as he did; it would have been interesting to see what may have happened had he had another 20-30 years to develop his werk. As is, while his prose was far from high literature, he did manage some curiously well-executed pieces with respect to pacing and imagery.

What I was not prepared for (however) was some of the -- how shall I put this? -- ideological artifacts of his era. I posed the question to some friends: Was Lovecraft a racist? Or was he just exploiting the overt physical differences between European-descended and African-descended peoples for the sake of otherness? Take "Herbert West -- Reanimator", for example; simply peppered with what we would consider racists perspectives! Meanwhile (I had a friend point out) many of these perceptions and opinions were quite commonplace for the period. As my friend remarked: "He lived in a United States that was toying with the idea of eugenics, phrenology still hadn't been fully dismissed, and decades before desegregation." Fair enough -- but I still was not fully prepared to encounter some of the expressions kicked around in the text.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

An unparalleled selection of fiction from H. P. Lovecraft, master of the American horror tale

Long after his death, H. P. Lovecraft continues to enthrall readers with his gripping tales of madness and cosmic terror, and his effect on modern horror fiction continues to be felt-- Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Clive Barker have acknowledged his influence. His unique contribution to American literature was a melding of Poe's traditional supernaturalism with the emerging genre of science fiction. Originally appearing in pulp magazines like Weird Tales in the 1920s and 1930s, Lovecraft's work is now being regarded as the most important supernatural fiction of the twentieth century.

Lovecraft's biographer and preeminent interpreter, S. T. Joshi, has prepared this volume of eighteen stories--from the early classics like "The Outsider" and "Rats in the Wall" to his mature masterworks, "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." The first paperback to include the definitive corrected texts, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style, and establishes him as a canonical--and visionary--American writer.

"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." --Stephen King

for more information click here

hot