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This morning I finally finished The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. It took about two months. I'd also started reading this once before, back in 2011, when I still lived in WA. At that point, I made it about halfway, up through "The Dunwich Horror," before I just stopped reading it, for whatever reason. This time, I actually made it all the way through.
While there were elements of "Seinfeld" is Unfunny at play here, taking that into account, it was pretty good, overall. The racism and sexism were rather wince-worthy, true enough, but it wasn't quite as prevalent as I'd thought it might be going in. But it was there. Just about the only thing I really remembered from the first time through was the cat named Nigger-Man in the first story (and Lovecraft himself apparently had a cat of the same name when he was a kid).
Also, some of the vocabulary was a bit... much. At times, it had the same problem that Dracula did, where he'd try to emulate the vernacular of some of the, um, lower class people, and it was sometimes difficult to decipher (though not nigh impossible the way it was in Dracula). I didn't really see a lot of the overuse of adjectives that some complain about when talking about Lovecraft, though. Maybe that just wasn't in the stories picked for this collection, though. Or maybe it was, and it just didn't bother me.
On the whole, though, none of the stories were nearly as... well... horrific as I was expecting them to be. They were still good, mind you, just not really all that scary. But then, I've read all but the most recent stuff by Stephen King (who was inspired by Lovecraft), and I find that stuff more "cool" than "scary," too, so... yeah. *shrug* That said, I've read more from King that actually creeped me out (or grossed me out, as the case may be), which just wasn't the case with (what I've read of) Lovecraft.
To be the basis for the so-called Cthulhu Mythos (which wasn't even a thing Lovecraft himself came up with, as the term was coined by August Derleth), there actually wasn't a whole lot of those beings showcased in the stories. Cthulhu himself was in "The Call of Cthulhu," of course, and was mentioned in several other stories, and Nyarlathotep showed up a bit as "the Black Man" in "The Dreams in the Witch House" and was mentioned a few times in other stories, but other than that, the other main gods were little more than mentioned, even in the stories in which they were ostensibly the "main villain" or whatever. Mostly, it was the human cultist characters or the human townie characters or the human redneck hick characters who tended to be the actual villains. There were, occasionally, a supernatural monster or two that was the villain(s), but it was mostly the humans who were the assholes, or were being influenced indirectly by the aforementioned entities behind the scenes.
Almost invariably, the protagonists were men who were generally well-educated skeptics who tended to (try to) doubt what they experienced even up to the end, even as they usually were driven mad. If you know even a little bit about Lovecraft, it's that the protagonist is almost invariably driven mad by all the weird shit in the end.
And then there were the fictional books, such as the Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten and De Vermis Mysteriis and others. The Necronomicon was mentioned in all but a few stories. For these books to be so supposedly rare and forbidden, they sure were getting read a hell of a lot by the protagonists, some of whom were just, like, normal dudes who merely had a layman's interest in the occult, as opposed to actual researchers or professors or whatever. That said, these books were usually little more than mentioned, and rarely played a prominent role in the stories that mentioned them.
Anyway... yeah, for the most part, I liked what I read well enough. I might someday try to find some more Lovecraft stuff that wasn't included in this book. I'm not as interested in the Derleth stuff that came later, since he apparently tried to shoehorn Christian symbolism of good and evil into the Mythos and basically just wrote a bunch of what was essentially shoddy Lovecraft fan fiction? From what I gather, anyway.
While there were elements of "Seinfeld" is Unfunny at play here, taking that into account, it was pretty good, overall. The racism and sexism were rather wince-worthy, true enough, but it wasn't quite as prevalent as I'd thought it might be going in. But it was there. Just about the only thing I really remembered from the first time through was the cat named Nigger-Man in the first story (and Lovecraft himself apparently had a cat of the same name when he was a kid).
Also, some of the vocabulary was a bit... much. At times, it had the same problem that Dracula did, where he'd try to emulate the vernacular of some of the, um, lower class people, and it was sometimes difficult to decipher (though not nigh impossible the way it was in Dracula). I didn't really see a lot of the overuse of adjectives that some complain about when talking about Lovecraft, though. Maybe that just wasn't in the stories picked for this collection, though. Or maybe it was, and it just didn't bother me.
On the whole, though, none of the stories were nearly as... well... horrific as I was expecting them to be. They were still good, mind you, just not really all that scary. But then, I've read all but the most recent stuff by Stephen King (who was inspired by Lovecraft), and I find that stuff more "cool" than "scary," too, so... yeah. *shrug* That said, I've read more from King that actually creeped me out (or grossed me out, as the case may be), which just wasn't the case with (what I've read of) Lovecraft.
To be the basis for the so-called Cthulhu Mythos (which wasn't even a thing Lovecraft himself came up with, as the term was coined by August Derleth), there actually wasn't a whole lot of those beings showcased in the stories. Cthulhu himself was in "The Call of Cthulhu," of course, and was mentioned in several other stories, and Nyarlathotep showed up a bit as "the Black Man" in "The Dreams in the Witch House" and was mentioned a few times in other stories, but other than that, the other main gods were little more than mentioned, even in the stories in which they were ostensibly the "main villain" or whatever. Mostly, it was the human cultist characters or the human townie characters or the human redneck hick characters who tended to be the actual villains. There were, occasionally, a supernatural monster or two that was the villain(s), but it was mostly the humans who were the assholes, or were being influenced indirectly by the aforementioned entities behind the scenes.
Almost invariably, the protagonists were men who were generally well-educated skeptics who tended to (try to) doubt what they experienced even up to the end, even as they usually were driven mad. If you know even a little bit about Lovecraft, it's that the protagonist is almost invariably driven mad by all the weird shit in the end.
And then there were the fictional books, such as the Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten and De Vermis Mysteriis and others. The Necronomicon was mentioned in all but a few stories. For these books to be so supposedly rare and forbidden, they sure were getting read a hell of a lot by the protagonists, some of whom were just, like, normal dudes who merely had a layman's interest in the occult, as opposed to actual researchers or professors or whatever. That said, these books were usually little more than mentioned, and rarely played a prominent role in the stories that mentioned them.
Anyway... yeah, for the most part, I liked what I read well enough. I might someday try to find some more Lovecraft stuff that wasn't included in this book. I'm not as interested in the Derleth stuff that came later, since he apparently tried to shoehorn Christian symbolism of good and evil into the Mythos and basically just wrote a bunch of what was essentially shoddy Lovecraft fan fiction? From what I gather, anyway.
