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alyssayafan's review against another edition
2.0
so not my cup of tea. parts of this book (it’s a bunch of short stories and books so selections of those) were great but most were to me, TO ME, boring. all of them were very well written though, perhaps i’m just not refined enough for lovercraft
sarah_gibson's review against another edition
2.0
Wow, talk about overrated. Each short story has the exact same carbon copy protagonist and always follows the exact same setup; It's very boring, to say the least. There were a couple of ok stories at least, such as The Thing On The Doorstep, which is why I'm giving this two stars instead of just one. But overall these stories were just plain boring and repetitive. Worst of all, these short stories were supposed to be, at the very least, creepy, but this just did not do it for me. I suppose I just don't find "big, scawy monstwers" to be at all frightening. I made it up to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward when I decided to put it aside.
kaitlynbrianna's review against another edition
5.0
It’s hard to review a collection of stories, some were so much better than others, but I have found a new favorite author and therefore this is 5 stars
funeralthirst666's review against another edition
I can’t justify the amount of time I would spend reading needlessly detailed descriptions of every fabric of clothing, every piece of architecture, and every goddamn though the narrator has. I wasn’t enjoying myself and so I’m not gonna force myself to read 300 more pages of this insipid nonsense.
baneofsand's review against another edition
challenging
dark
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? No
3.25
delimeatz's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
pretty good overall! you’ve gotta think about it like the plot is irrelevant, but it’s all for his writing style, which is pretty swag
franchescanado's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
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? No
3.75
desheria's review against another edition
4.0
Books don't generally scare me, but some of Lovecraft's creations left me jumping at things that went bump in the night.
I can see why Lovecraft is considered the master of eldritch horror.
I tried Poe first and couldn't stomach his redundant, slow, almost pompous prose, and was a little afraid of Lovecraft going into it.
I found the writing delicious- sufficiently descriptive while not feeling overwhelming.
My favourites include The Colour out of Space, The Vault, Cool Air, The Thing on the Doorstep, and Herbert West-Reanimator.
A special mention to Pickman's Model for foreshadowing the ending so damn well and still making me gasp at the last sentence.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward had no business being as long as it is, and was a large part of why this collection took me so long to finish.
I can see why Lovecraft is considered the master of eldritch horror.
I tried Poe first and couldn't stomach his redundant, slow, almost pompous prose, and was a little afraid of Lovecraft going into it.
I found the writing delicious- sufficiently descriptive while not feeling overwhelming.
My favourites include The Colour out of Space, The Vault, Cool Air, The Thing on the Doorstep, and Herbert West-Reanimator.
A special mention to Pickman's Model for foreshadowing the ending so damn well and still making me gasp at the last sentence.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward had no business being as long as it is, and was a large part of why this collection took me so long to finish.
valhecka's review against another edition
STORY TIME!
Today, August 11th 2016, I left my apartment at a bit after noon to go to the laundry room in my building's basement. Time to switch clothes from washer to dryer, and collect the stuff that needed to air-dry. I was the only person home and it was a short errand, so I left the door to the unit unlocked. The spring bolt lock on our unit's door has become increasingly finicky in the two years we've lived in this apartment; keys turn the lock to a certain position, immediately before tripping the springs that withdraw the bolts, and there they stick. They complete the full rotation necessary only with some amount of effort, overcoming the stiffness of the lock; the trick is to wait for the SECOND click, because the first won't open the door.
We've become wary of it, and before I headed downstairs I poked at the lock (I like locks!) and ensured that the knob on the inside of the door was oriented in the way that shows it is farthest from activating the springs. I closed the door behind me (we have cats) and tripped off downstairs.
When I came back up the stairs, carrying my delicates, the door was locked.
Like, really freaking locked.
Maybe one of my roomies had come home from work early; I knocked. Maybe they were in the bathroom? I knocked again. Maybe taking a shower, since it's so absolutely disgusting outside (today was close to 100 Fahrenheit, with humidity in the 70% range; I'm in New England, where air conditioning is a capricious and unreliable thing). I waited and knocked again. And again. Then realized that standing outside my apartment door with a handful of damp special-care clothes, including lingerie, was stupid. I went back to the basement and chucked the delicates in with the rest - one turn in the dryer on its lowest heat setting wouldn't hurt them. I came back upstairs and knocked.
One of the cats meowed plaintively. That was the only response.
To the lobby! If a housemate WAS home, and was just plugged into headphones or some other thing, I could buzz them on the intercom and they could let me in. No big deal.
The intercom went without answer.
I spent twenty minutes contemplating my options, back up on the third floor. (Yeah, so I'd already done a dozen flights of stairs.) It seemed likely that one of my housemates had had a morning appointment, come home, grabbed their stuff for work, and left, locking the door behind them, not realizing (and how could they) that I was elsewhere in the building without my keys. Maybe it was the other way around - they had worked in the morning, come back to dump their stuff, then gone out again for an appointment or errand or something. They might be coming back right now!
They did not come back right then.
In the era of social media and the slow death of actual phone conversations, it isn't atypical for one to have nine ways of contacting another person without having the faintest clue what their phone number is. I have about seven phone numbers memorized: my own, my parents' landline, my mother's cell phone, two medical facilities' automated prescription refill/medication ordering lines, possibly my psychiatrist's, and, atavistically, the landline for the house I lived in for the first eleven years of my life. My housemates' cell numbers are conspicuously absent from this list.
There had been a flyer in the lobby a couple weeks ago saying that the fee associated with calling management to deal with lock-outs had been increased as a deterrent. It wasn't exorbitant, but with my budget it was not inconsiderable. So basically, I had to determine whether being able to access my home at that moment, or within the hour, was worth the fee, while remembering that my housemates could return at any point and render the issue moot.
When I'd left the apartment, I had carried the clothes I was wearing, eight quarters, and a dryer sheet. I hadn't bothered to put on shoes, even flip-flops. As I said, I hadn't brought my keys. My cell phone was on my desk inside the apartment. My wallet was in my day-to-day bag, hung up on a hook inside the apartment. Even more crucially, air conditioning was inside the apartment.
Okay. Worth the fee.
However, the building's management company has a placard in the lobby with their phone number.
So if I could find a phone, I could call management! My difficulty would last precisely as long as it took to find someone - a building resident, with any luck, because the lock on the building itself presented significant limitations on my mobility - willing to lend me their phone.
Enter Wally.
Wally lives in the unit across the hall from us. It isn't a social building; I recognize a few other residents by sight but know none of their names, and I'd never spoken to neighbors. Desperate times, though - so when this guy, total stranger, came out onto the landing, I got over my social anxiety precisely long enough to say "Hey. Do you think I could borrow your phone?"
He was at a loss, and I gave a synopsis: locked out of the unit, wanted to call management, phone is on the other side of a locked door, what crappy luck. He made sympathetic noises and unlocked his iPhone before handing it over. He was going to go to the store, back in ten or fifteen minutes, and in case his wife called he asked that I tell her he'd be available shortly. Yup, okay, got it, and I followed him down the stairs to check the management company's phone number and dialed.
I mentioned social anxiety. Add phones and it's nearly paralyzing. But again, desperate times - so I hung on until someone picked up and said something I could barely hear. It was quieter upstairs, so back up I went, and the representative took my name and address and did some database-y work. I was treated to four minutes of hold music before an entirely different voice picked up and I gave the name and address and unit number again.
Wait, though, I was locked out of my unit? Not the building? The managers weren't the people to call, in that case; I should get in touch with my landlord for spare keys.
My landlord lives in Ireland.
I thanked the management company rep and hung up. A few minutes later, my neighbor came back from his errand and asked if I'd had any luck. Nope. None. Did I have friends in the area? No, I'm in a weird suburb that's pretty isolated. Did I have a locksmith's number? Nope. Did I - no, I was barefoot.
That part seemed the most disheartening to him, that I did not even have shoes.
I thanked him for letting me borrow his phone, despite it having yielded nothing, and started contemplating an afternoon spent on the landing floor. He commiserated with me for a bit, before saying that he was planning on being home all day and that if I thought of anything he could do, just knock and let him know.
An hour had passed. I trucked back down to the laundry room, thought about dragging the clean clothes up the stairs, and then decided they'd get to stay in purgatory.
Half an hour or so passed. I spent the time thinking of other afternoons I have had that were definitively, cut-and-dry, far worse than a few hours of sitting on a landing. I could totally deal with this. It'd be another three or four hours until my housemates got back from work, but what's three or four hours?
It's a lot.
Out of boredom, I went back down to the laundry room (which doubles as the boiler room and general storage, and tends to average a temperature of about 120 degrees), folded all my clothes, and carted them back upstairs. I set them on the floor. I now had no way to pass the time.
The door across the hall opened, and my neighbor stuck his head out. Still no luck? Nope, nothing. Oh well. Stuck until the housemates come back? Yeah, seemed like. Did I need anything? Not that I could really think of. Did I want anything? Water? Fresca? It's a freaking heat wave, after all. I said that water would be great. Did I want a book, maybe?
Book. Book and water and time to read. That would improve my situation immeasurably. I accepted the offer with great thanks and he started squirreling through piles of grad-school stuff, before surfacing with three doorstop paperbacks: a best-of-sci-fi anthology, an epic gritty postapocalyptic something, and - finally, the point of this stupid review, this book. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural.
While I was chief extortionist (treasurer) for the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu in undergrad, I have never actually read any Lovecraft fiction, mainly because he was a white supremacist POS. However, I don't trust the editor of that line of sci-fi anthologies, and a novel didn't seem like a good idea for a wait of indefinite duration. I'll take the Lovecraft, I said, and he passed it to me. He noted that if I got hungry, I should knock on his door - he'd be more than happy to microwave me something or whatever. I thanked him profusely for the water, the book, and the offer, and on my way out introduced myself. By the way, right, people have names, here is mine. He said no problem, none, and said his name was Wally.
Which is how I got around to reading about 300 pages of pre-1930s "weird tales," peppered with rather overly critical snippets from Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," while sitting on a third-floor landing of a crappy post-WWII apartment block next to a pile of clean laundry during a freaking colossal heat wave.
Then my housemate came home from work and I was saved, shortly after I'd finished a reread of [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808], which was included in the anthology. I deposited book and borrowed glass with Wally and immediately took to whining on the Internet. AS YOU DO.
SO ANYWAY LET ME TALK ABOUT THE ACTUAL BOOK: Being conversant with the Cthulhu mythos and reading modern weird fiction was not in any way predictive of how much I enjoyed the stories that Lovecraft himself had considered to be either formative or emblematic of the horror genre. I found the collection very hit-or-miss. The Irving story was almost laughable; Poe's was intriguing but forgettable (it seemed rootless); [a:F. Marion Crawford|15300762|F. Marion Crawford|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s ACTUALLY laughable. Standouts were "The Wind in the Rose-Bush," "The Invisible Eye," "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," and "What Was It?" I skipped [b:The Turn of the Screw|12948|The Turn of the Screw|Henry James|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1443203592s/12948.jpg|990886] because I've read it within the past couple years. My housemate intervened just after I'd finished the Kipling, whereupon I returned the book, and I don't know if I'll pick it up again.
Lovecraft's essay struck me as pompous blithering inflated to mask his unmaskable xenophobia. The snippets introducing each story were sometimes enlightening (I knew barely anything about [a:Ambrose Bierce|14403|Ambrose Bierce|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1183231430p2/14403.jpg], for instance), but usually petty little stabs at the author or the people the author is imitating (or their imitators). It's a bit much for Lovecraft to say that an author is overly dependent on imagery, for example.
The stories themselves tended toward either dread of the other (AKA racism) or fear of divine justice, but the standouts veered off from those themes. "The Torture of Hope," for example, was almost Borges-like in its simplicity (although not in its rampant antisemitism). I'm glad to have had the introduction to Bierce, de Maupassant, Wilkins-Freeman, and Erckmann-Chatrian.
I'm also just really, really glad my neighbor is the kind of nerd who recognizes that books can turn a day around.
Today, August 11th 2016, I left my apartment at a bit after noon to go to the laundry room in my building's basement. Time to switch clothes from washer to dryer, and collect the stuff that needed to air-dry. I was the only person home and it was a short errand, so I left the door to the unit unlocked. The spring bolt lock on our unit's door has become increasingly finicky in the two years we've lived in this apartment; keys turn the lock to a certain position, immediately before tripping the springs that withdraw the bolts, and there they stick. They complete the full rotation necessary only with some amount of effort, overcoming the stiffness of the lock; the trick is to wait for the SECOND click, because the first won't open the door.
We've become wary of it, and before I headed downstairs I poked at the lock (I like locks!) and ensured that the knob on the inside of the door was oriented in the way that shows it is farthest from activating the springs. I closed the door behind me (we have cats) and tripped off downstairs.
When I came back up the stairs, carrying my delicates, the door was locked.
Like, really freaking locked.
Maybe one of my roomies had come home from work early; I knocked. Maybe they were in the bathroom? I knocked again. Maybe taking a shower, since it's so absolutely disgusting outside (today was close to 100 Fahrenheit, with humidity in the 70% range; I'm in New England, where air conditioning is a capricious and unreliable thing). I waited and knocked again. And again. Then realized that standing outside my apartment door with a handful of damp special-care clothes, including lingerie, was stupid. I went back to the basement and chucked the delicates in with the rest - one turn in the dryer on its lowest heat setting wouldn't hurt them. I came back upstairs and knocked.
One of the cats meowed plaintively. That was the only response.
To the lobby! If a housemate WAS home, and was just plugged into headphones or some other thing, I could buzz them on the intercom and they could let me in. No big deal.
The intercom went without answer.
I spent twenty minutes contemplating my options, back up on the third floor. (Yeah, so I'd already done a dozen flights of stairs.) It seemed likely that one of my housemates had had a morning appointment, come home, grabbed their stuff for work, and left, locking the door behind them, not realizing (and how could they) that I was elsewhere in the building without my keys. Maybe it was the other way around - they had worked in the morning, come back to dump their stuff, then gone out again for an appointment or errand or something. They might be coming back right now!
They did not come back right then.
In the era of social media and the slow death of actual phone conversations, it isn't atypical for one to have nine ways of contacting another person without having the faintest clue what their phone number is. I have about seven phone numbers memorized: my own, my parents' landline, my mother's cell phone, two medical facilities' automated prescription refill/medication ordering lines, possibly my psychiatrist's, and, atavistically, the landline for the house I lived in for the first eleven years of my life. My housemates' cell numbers are conspicuously absent from this list.
There had been a flyer in the lobby a couple weeks ago saying that the fee associated with calling management to deal with lock-outs had been increased as a deterrent. It wasn't exorbitant, but with my budget it was not inconsiderable. So basically, I had to determine whether being able to access my home at that moment, or within the hour, was worth the fee, while remembering that my housemates could return at any point and render the issue moot.
When I'd left the apartment, I had carried the clothes I was wearing, eight quarters, and a dryer sheet. I hadn't bothered to put on shoes, even flip-flops. As I said, I hadn't brought my keys. My cell phone was on my desk inside the apartment. My wallet was in my day-to-day bag, hung up on a hook inside the apartment. Even more crucially, air conditioning was inside the apartment.
Okay. Worth the fee.
However, the building's management company has a placard in the lobby with their phone number.
So if I could find a phone, I could call management! My difficulty would last precisely as long as it took to find someone - a building resident, with any luck, because the lock on the building itself presented significant limitations on my mobility - willing to lend me their phone.
Enter Wally.
Wally lives in the unit across the hall from us. It isn't a social building; I recognize a few other residents by sight but know none of their names, and I'd never spoken to neighbors. Desperate times, though - so when this guy, total stranger, came out onto the landing, I got over my social anxiety precisely long enough to say "Hey. Do you think I could borrow your phone?"
He was at a loss, and I gave a synopsis: locked out of the unit, wanted to call management, phone is on the other side of a locked door, what crappy luck. He made sympathetic noises and unlocked his iPhone before handing it over. He was going to go to the store, back in ten or fifteen minutes, and in case his wife called he asked that I tell her he'd be available shortly. Yup, okay, got it, and I followed him down the stairs to check the management company's phone number and dialed.
I mentioned social anxiety. Add phones and it's nearly paralyzing. But again, desperate times - so I hung on until someone picked up and said something I could barely hear. It was quieter upstairs, so back up I went, and the representative took my name and address and did some database-y work. I was treated to four minutes of hold music before an entirely different voice picked up and I gave the name and address and unit number again.
Wait, though, I was locked out of my unit? Not the building? The managers weren't the people to call, in that case; I should get in touch with my landlord for spare keys.
My landlord lives in Ireland.
I thanked the management company rep and hung up. A few minutes later, my neighbor came back from his errand and asked if I'd had any luck. Nope. None. Did I have friends in the area? No, I'm in a weird suburb that's pretty isolated. Did I have a locksmith's number? Nope. Did I - no, I was barefoot.
That part seemed the most disheartening to him, that I did not even have shoes.
I thanked him for letting me borrow his phone, despite it having yielded nothing, and started contemplating an afternoon spent on the landing floor. He commiserated with me for a bit, before saying that he was planning on being home all day and that if I thought of anything he could do, just knock and let him know.
An hour had passed. I trucked back down to the laundry room, thought about dragging the clean clothes up the stairs, and then decided they'd get to stay in purgatory.
Half an hour or so passed. I spent the time thinking of other afternoons I have had that were definitively, cut-and-dry, far worse than a few hours of sitting on a landing. I could totally deal with this. It'd be another three or four hours until my housemates got back from work, but what's three or four hours?
It's a lot.
Out of boredom, I went back down to the laundry room (which doubles as the boiler room and general storage, and tends to average a temperature of about 120 degrees), folded all my clothes, and carted them back upstairs. I set them on the floor. I now had no way to pass the time.
The door across the hall opened, and my neighbor stuck his head out. Still no luck? Nope, nothing. Oh well. Stuck until the housemates come back? Yeah, seemed like. Did I need anything? Not that I could really think of. Did I want anything? Water? Fresca? It's a freaking heat wave, after all. I said that water would be great. Did I want a book, maybe?
Book. Book and water and time to read. That would improve my situation immeasurably. I accepted the offer with great thanks and he started squirreling through piles of grad-school stuff, before surfacing with three doorstop paperbacks: a best-of-sci-fi anthology, an epic gritty postapocalyptic something, and - finally, the point of this stupid review, this book. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural.
While I was chief extortionist (treasurer) for the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu in undergrad, I have never actually read any Lovecraft fiction, mainly because he was a white supremacist POS. However, I don't trust the editor of that line of sci-fi anthologies, and a novel didn't seem like a good idea for a wait of indefinite duration. I'll take the Lovecraft, I said, and he passed it to me. He noted that if I got hungry, I should knock on his door - he'd be more than happy to microwave me something or whatever. I thanked him profusely for the water, the book, and the offer, and on my way out introduced myself. By the way, right, people have names, here is mine. He said no problem, none, and said his name was Wally.
Which is how I got around to reading about 300 pages of pre-1930s "weird tales," peppered with rather overly critical snippets from Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," while sitting on a third-floor landing of a crappy post-WWII apartment block next to a pile of clean laundry during a freaking colossal heat wave.
Then my housemate came home from work and I was saved, shortly after I'd finished a reread of [b:The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|99300|The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories|Charlotte Perkins Gilman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327909237s/99300.jpg|1467808], which was included in the anthology. I deposited book and borrowed glass with Wally and immediately took to whining on the Internet. AS YOU DO.
SO ANYWAY LET ME TALK ABOUT THE ACTUAL BOOK: Being conversant with the Cthulhu mythos and reading modern weird fiction was not in any way predictive of how much I enjoyed the stories that Lovecraft himself had considered to be either formative or emblematic of the horror genre. I found the collection very hit-or-miss. The Irving story was almost laughable; Poe's was intriguing but forgettable (it seemed rootless); [a:F. Marion Crawford|15300762|F. Marion Crawford|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]'s ACTUALLY laughable. Standouts were "The Wind in the Rose-Bush," "The Invisible Eye," "The Middle Toe of the Right Foot," and "What Was It?" I skipped [b:The Turn of the Screw|12948|The Turn of the Screw|Henry James|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1443203592s/12948.jpg|990886] because I've read it within the past couple years. My housemate intervened just after I'd finished the Kipling, whereupon I returned the book, and I don't know if I'll pick it up again.
Lovecraft's essay struck me as pompous blithering inflated to mask his unmaskable xenophobia. The snippets introducing each story were sometimes enlightening (I knew barely anything about [a:Ambrose Bierce|14403|Ambrose Bierce|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/authors/1183231430p2/14403.jpg], for instance), but usually petty little stabs at the author or the people the author is imitating (or their imitators). It's a bit much for Lovecraft to say that an author is overly dependent on imagery, for example.
The stories themselves tended toward either dread of the other (AKA racism) or fear of divine justice, but the standouts veered off from those themes. "The Torture of Hope," for example, was almost Borges-like in its simplicity (although not in its rampant antisemitism). I'm glad to have had the introduction to Bierce, de Maupassant, Wilkins-Freeman, and Erckmann-Chatrian.
I'm also just really, really glad my neighbor is the kind of nerd who recognizes that books can turn a day around.
chezler24's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
I kept bouncing back and forth between 3 and 4 stars depending on how much I liked whichever short story I was reading. I was intrigued by the idea of this book. Creating a collection of short stories based on one of H.P. Lovecraft's essays is an intriguing exercise. I got to see some work from authors I was aware of and others to whom I had not been previously exposed. Because these pieces were written in the earlier part of the 20th century, some of the works seemed a bit dated when I read them thus making them a bit harder to connect with. Nonetheless, there were some pieces that I really gravitated towards and enjoyed. It was a mixed bag for me but what can one expect from a collection of short stories. In the future, I'll probably revisit this book for a select few entries rather than reading it straight through as I did this time.