A review by lezreadalot
The Thing On The Doorstep and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

2.0

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

My first adult experience with Lovecraft, and because I was prepared for all of his nonsense (read: racism) I didn't have as bad of a time with this as I could have. But I mean, I didn't have a great time either. I'm pretty sure I read some abridged versions of his stories when I was a teen, but none of these were familiar to me. There were only about six stories in this version of the collection, and they were all a version of the weird eldritch horror that I expected. I have to say, there were several times when a terrible thing happened or was seen, and all the narrator would say about it was that it was too horrible or gruesome to be spoken of or described? That kinda felt like a cop-out. Some interesting lines here and there, but otherwise the writing kinda bored me. The titular story did make me think a lot (mostly because I anticipate reading some queer horror based on it, not because of any merit of its own). The last line of "The Festival" was metal.

Listened to the audiobook as read by William Roberts, and it was actually pretty good. He went hard on those bits where he had to perform any sort of emotion. This isn't something that I would recommend, but I'm content to read it myself and get a taste of Lovecraft's oeuvre. I might have given this a 2.5, but the fucking cat is in one of these stories. You know the one.

ETA 19/11/2023: I also read "The Dunwich Horror", and since it's a short story that's included in most editions of this anthology (but wasn't included in this edition) I decided to just tack on my review here. And my review is... it basically reads like the rest of the stories. This one was more explicitly paranormal and otherworldly, and the concept of a fast-growing monster child eager to unleash his father onto the world is a cool one? I probably liked this one better than the others. But not enough to change my rating.