octavia_cade 's review for:

The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft

2.0

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This is a mixed bag for me. There's a handful of stories by Lovecraft in here, and most of them weren't that good. The Rats in the Walls, The Dunwich Horror, and At the Mountains of Madness have interesting elements but don't rise to likeable. The high point here was The Colour Out of Space, which I thought was excellent. It tried its damnedest to drag the rest of the anthology up to three stars by main strength, but one good story compared to three indifferent (and one of those indifferent being a short novel) just isn't enough to compensate for the rest, or the letter fragments in which Lovecraft expounded on weird fiction in a way that made me think he must have been a terrible bore at parties. I think the best word I can use to describe the collection as a whole, bar that one excellent story, is "overwrought." Still, I read it and I gave it a good shot.

The whole volume is introduced and annotated by S.T. Joshi, and I don't know why he didn't bother with a table of contents or captions for the various illustrations, but I wish he had. His short introductory essay was clear and interesting, however, as were some of the notes, but others seemed a bit like filler. A number of them were just definitions for not-very-unusual words. Is it really necessary to have footnotes explaining words like "pustules," "puerile," and "plethora"? If so, that might just be more terrifying than anything else in here...