![]() However, on the whole, they add a great deal of depth to the collection and you get to learn a lot about Lovecraft’s life and writing process along the way. It’s a shame there wasn’t someone on hand to edit Joshi’s notes. But equally often they’re notes describing whether or not a particular church or newspaper is real or made up, or Joshi’s thoughts on what Lovecraft might mean by a certain phrase. Often the footnotes are really interesting additions to the stories, notes pointing out references to other stories and other writers, developments of ideas and where Lovecraft might have got them. There are considerable footnotes throughout all the stories that have you skipping to the back pages time after time. Often this is good, but sometimes it’s downright annoying. I don’t know who S T Joshi is (or even if they’re a man or woman) but they obviously have a massive knowledge of all Lovecraft’s work and the Cthulhu Mythos. This particular volume is edited and with an introduction and notes by S T Joshi. You get lost in Lovecraft’s language as much as in his stories and when it works it works really well. ![]() The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse A good example of language, at its descriptive best, is this, from The Shadow Over Innsmouth: This usually works and marks his style well, though sometimes it comes across as too heavy handed. Lovecraft deliberately writes with a prosaic and detailed verbosity, demonstrating his mastery of the thesaurus at every turn. Written in the 1920s and 30s, the language is something you have to get used to. When you have people affected by these horrors without any fault on their part the story’s always more disturbing. When you have a story where people are deliberately calling up the Old Ones or trying to discover their secrets you tend to have less sympathy for the characters. The stories that really work are the ones that affect innocent people. Person does discover more and wishes he hadn’t While there was a lot of scope within Lovecraft’s chosen field, the stories usually followed the basic idea of: ![]() In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.” They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don’t regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. Howard Lovecraft said, “All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. As an atheist, Lovecraft wanted to write horror that didn’t depend on religio-mythical fodder, so his monsters were creatures from beyond space and time, hideous things older than mankind that travelled across the vast tracts of space to cause us horror. Sometimes that makes the story boring, but often with Lovecraft’s work you know what’s going to happen but you want to read it anyway. Some of the stories are extremely predicatable and obvious. Stephen King describes Lovecraft in a quote on the cover of this book as, “The twentieth century horror story’s dark and baroque prince”. This particular collection has many of the classics, including the title story, The Call Of Cthulhu, the aforementioned The Shadow Over Innsmouth, plus other well known stories such as Herbet West – Reanimator, Dagon, Nyarlathotep and The Colour Out Of Space (which turned out to be my favourite yarn in this book). The vast majority of his stuff was published in Weird Tales and other similar pulp magazines. It also includes the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, which was the only actual book of Lovecraft’s fiction to be published in his lifetime (by William L Crawford’s Visionary Press). This is an excellent collection, including eighteen stories from quick two or three page vignettes to extensive multi-chapter stories and novella. The Call Of Cthulhu And Other Weird Stories, and the author Howard Phillips Lovecraft This edition was first published in 1999. I recently decided to reread some of his stuff and picked up the new edition of The Call Of Cthulhu And Other Weird Stories, edited by S T Joshi. Ever since those days the intergalactic horror fiction of Lovecraft has had a special place in my heart. Me and friends even played some Call Of Cthulhu role playing game, investigating weird phenomena while trying to hold onto our sanity points. I first read some of H P Lovecraft’s short stories back in my mid teens.
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