Reviews

The Complete Tales of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

weechito's review against another edition

4.0

Don’t get me wrong: there are some great stories here. The Cthulhu Mythos is one of the great supernatural concepts I literature. And when Lovecraft does a story well, he REALLY does it well. But then there are the hundreds of pages of stories that feel like they’re just recycling plots and ideas from other stories. Four stars feels fair: I acknowledge the importance to horror fiction but recognize that this isn’t a flawless body of work.

jellygh0st's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious reflective sad tense

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

See, it's hard to review because it's mostly pure aesthetic. Not from its writing, no, the act of reading it is purely aesthetic. There's something to be gained from it, for sure, but most of us approaching this work already know the vast majority of what there is to know about it - and that is its aesthetic. Actually reading it is gratuitous, even when it's valuable, just so you can make a check mark in your mind and recall that you did, in fact, read the classic horror thing. That's not to say it's bad, often it's inspiring and I still take influences from many of the stories in my own work, but it's not like... substantial in the way you'd want it to be when compared to other important works of horror.

klbailey's review against another edition

dark mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

If you can stand to read over a thousand pages of blatant racism you’ll realize there’s mainly boredom surrounding the mystery and horror…he left a lot of the stories as cliff hangers but none of them made me want to listen to more, honestly it was hard to get through and I only did it out of stubborn determination and I wish I hadn’t wasted the time it took. Why he’s a literary classic and constantly talked about is beyond me but hey if you like a dozen different ways to poorly describe poc have at it

hendrix67's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

grimboj's review against another edition

2.0

Initially I just wanted to read Dunwich and Cthulhu but started giving the whole book a go after enjoying them. Innsmouth and Mountain of Madness were enjoyable along with some others.

I enjoyed some parts of this book and after reading the first 1,000 pages I would say I gave it a fair go but ultimately some of the stories are quite poorly written and simply dumping all of Love-crafts works in alphabetical order doesn’t make for an easy to read book.

Dream-Quest and Dexter Ward were particularly bad, I couldn’t get 1/4 into them. Dream-Quest read like religious scripture.

Even the stories I enjoyed got very samesy. Academic learns of some weirdness in his state, goes to see it and finds Necronomicon on the book shelf, invisible monster lurks, turns out to be 8ft tall prawn/cucumber/cone/frog. Academic proceeds despite obvious danger then somehow gets away but is left traumatised.

jabarkas's review against another edition

I'm about 33% through this right now. A lot of it is very fun, but in general its been a bit of a slog due to two factors. First, I find Lovecraft's general paranoia a bit hard to empathize with - I tend to think of the world as being ruled mostly by benign incompetence, rather than malicious conspiracy. Second, Christ is the man long-winded. Pretty much every story hear could stand to lose about 30% of its total length.

eni_se's review against another edition

Way too racist for me but actually not that impressed with the writing or storytelling. Maybe I'll read some of the newer lovecraftian authors later but I'm done with Lovecraft' s bullshit. His stories aren't even that scary or monstrous anyway, more confusing than original. I don't know, maybe if you look at it from behind?

smatthew459's review against another edition

dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

mc_j_ho's review against another edition

5.0

Well it took nearly five years between many other things but I finally finished this collection. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is probably my favourite but so many of the stories are so good. This collection sadly doesn't include his ghost written and collaborative works but that means I can still look forward to those. Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!

arrak1s's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0