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landminecat 's review for:
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
by H.P. Lovecraft
Okay technically I didn't finish this so I shouldn't rate and review, but it's been sitting on my "currently reading" for so long now. I decided to give one more story a chance before giving a 2 star review and I may yet try to get through the most famous few, out of remaining ones.
It's well known that lovecraft was a racist prick, but wow I didn't expect it to be so blatant and visible in the writing. It's bad even if you try to force on the flimsy "it was a different time" excuse.
Even looking past the racist shit at the rest of the writing, it's just not well written in my opinion. If you took a drink every time something was described as indescribable or a sentence lasted more than 35 words, you wouldn't make it through a single story.
I wanted to give 2 stars, because there's some good ideas and dark tones that inspired so many other things in popular culture. There are brief moments where you get a sense of what these stories could have been. Some specific stories within this might deserve 3 or even 4 stars, but they're the exception not the norm. Once you've read one story, you've got the gist of most of them. The average quality of the compilation as a whole just doesn't deserve shit.
This is a version with some explanatory notes. The notes are sometimes useful, clarifying names and places and details of lovecraft's life, but they offer no particular analysis beyond that and in a several page introduction about the life and impact of his work, you'd think they'd have had the space to mention the bad side of him too.
It's well known that lovecraft was a racist prick, but wow I didn't expect it to be so blatant and visible in the writing. It's bad even if you try to force on the flimsy "it was a different time" excuse.
Even looking past the racist shit at the rest of the writing, it's just not well written in my opinion. If you took a drink every time something was described as indescribable or a sentence lasted more than 35 words, you wouldn't make it through a single story.
I wanted to give 2 stars, because there's some good ideas and dark tones that inspired so many other things in popular culture. There are brief moments where you get a sense of what these stories could have been. Some specific stories within this might deserve 3 or even 4 stars, but they're the exception not the norm. Once you've read one story, you've got the gist of most of them. The average quality of the compilation as a whole just doesn't deserve shit.
This is a version with some explanatory notes. The notes are sometimes useful, clarifying names and places and details of lovecraft's life, but they offer no particular analysis beyond that and in a several page introduction about the life and impact of his work, you'd think they'd have had the space to mention the bad side of him too.