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Ha ha, this guy's so cool. Unexpected racism ("degenerate Esquimeaux"?), prose so purple it's headed off the visible spectrum, Rhode Island's finest nerdy scientists and amateur genealogists facing off against sorcerers and/or other-dimensional gods and/or sentient fungi who've colonized Pluto, and cults. Always, cults. Is it horror? It's certainly weird. And while he was all about giving characters glimpses of a vast (and crowded!) universe, he paints a pretty interesting picture of late 19th and early 20th century America too. And hats off to Norm Sherman's Drabblecast. His readings of Lovecraft's stories are what made me go looking for this collection, and I couldn't read a word without hearing it read in his cool sinister radio voice.
Sitting down to read "absolutely everything Lovecraft ever wrote" is certainly a daunting task, especially for anyone not deeply familiar with (and a fan of) his writing style. That being said, there is absolutely no excuse not to have this in your library, especially when an industrious grad student has compiled them into an ebook that she is giving away for free.Because I recommend reading everything, one or two shorts at a time between the other novels on your reading list, I'm not going to bother making a list of "must-read" stories from this collection. I DO suggest jumping around a bit; as the stories are in chronological order, sometimes two or three very similar tales that Lovecraft was writing at the same time follow successively.
I am thoroughly enjoying these classics from my youth.