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The Complete Collection (2011)

by H.P. Lovecraft(Favorite Author)

4.3 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Signature Edition

review 1: June 30 is not the date I finished this book; it's the day I gave up on it. I keep hearing what a great writer Lovecraft is and how spooky and chilling his stories are. Okay, maybe I should have given them more of a chance. But... There's only so much vagueness I can take in a story. Even with supernatural stories, I prefer that there's an explanation of *some* kind for what's going on. Lovecraft seldom delivers. I suppose that's intentional, but I just don't care for the style. And his often-repeated device of "what I saw was too horrible to write about" gets old quickly. It started to feel less like a device and more like a failure of imagination. But that's just my opinion; take it for what it's worth.
review 2: H. P. Lovecraft is a difficult man to like in ... morethe modern sense. He was clearly a racist and held other views virtually everyone would dismiss as incorrect. If you can't get past that there are stories he wrote which are virtually unreadable as there are several stories which rely on the fear of having ancestors who were not as pure as he would have liked. But there are a lot of stories that are not that, and even in many of those the impurities are actually monsters which can be taken metaphorically as fear of racial impurity but do not have to. Once you are past that though you can find one of the most interesting writers of weird fiction ever. His stories have good variety and not all of them are about how man is insignificant in the universe, but there is a theme of understanding how small we are that is a unique and interesting form of horror that is not touched on often. For those that are interested in the best of Lovecraft there are plenty of lists of which stories to read and which to avoid, but for those who enjoy the discovery of greatness and are willing to read a few things that are downright bad picking this up and going through it is well worth your time. In fact one of my most enjoyable moments in reading this was the end of one of the worst stories because the simple absurdity of the ending was funnier than most jokes as in that story, after being chased around a burning house by the decapitated monster head the 'hero' of the true 'horror' of the story is revealed as the character discovers that one of his distant ancestors may have actually been African. And while I know that race can be a touchy subject if you can't find the absurdity of that concept at least a little funny you're taking things way to seriously. less

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Reviews (see all)

muna248

it took nearly a year but I got through it. difficult to read die to the Olde language choices but some of the stories were good. The case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, Music of Erich Zann, Herbert West Reanimator and In the Vault were all good. Some are short but others a 150 of plus. he revisits ideas over and over again but since these were originally published in magazines it is forgivable. I'd recommend it to any one who wants to see who inspired writers like Stephen King.

nick

Ali

Always a fan of HP Lovecraft, even if his writing does tend to get a bit silly

thorntonjm

Lovecraft. Enough said.

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