Title The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft Series --- Author H.P. Lovecraft Cover Art Santiago Casares Publisher --- First Printing --- Category Horror Warnings Blatant racism Main Characters Randalph Carter, Pickman, Nyarlathotep, Azatoth, Cthulhu, and many others, human and otherwise Main Elements Aliens, demons

The following were downloaded from The Arkham Archivist

• The Tomb (1917)
• Dagon (1917)
• Polaris (1918)
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
• Memory (1919)
• Old Bugs (1919)
• The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)
• The White Ship (1919)
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)
• The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)
• The Terrible Old Man (1920)
• The Tree (1920)
• The Cats of Ulthar (1920)
• The Temple (1920)
• Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)
• The Street (1920)
• Celephaïs (1920)
• From Beyond (1920)
• Nyarlathotep (1920)
• The Picture in the House (1920)
• Ex Oblivione (1921)
• The Nameless City (1921)
• The Quest of Iranon (1921)
• The Moon-Bog (1921)
• The Outsider (1921)
• The Other Gods (1921)
• The Music of Erich Zann (1921)
• Herbert West — Reanimator (1922)
• Hypnos (1922)
• What the Moon Brings (1922)
• Azathoth (1922)
• The Hound (1922)
• The Lurking Fear (1922)
• The Rats in the Walls (1923)
• The Unnamable (1923)
• The Festival (1923)
• The Shunned House (1924)
• The Horror at Red Hook (1925)
• He (1925)
• In the Vault (1925)
• The Descendant (1926)
• Cool Air (1926)
• The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
• Pickman's Model (1926)
• The Silver Key (1926)
• The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
• The Colour Out of Space (1927)
• The Very Old Folk (1927)
• The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)
• The History of the Necronomicon (1927)
• Ibid (1928)
• The Dunwich Horror (1928)
• The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
• At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
• The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
• The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
• The Evil Clergyman (1933)
• The Book (1933)
• The Shadow out of Time (1934)
• The Haunter of the Dark (1935)

Not included in my copy of the "Complete" works, but can still be found online:

• Through the Gates of the Silver Key
• Fungi from Yuggoth
• The Mound
• Under the Pyramids
• The Horror in the Museum

Title At the Mountains of Madness (Vol I and II) Series --- Author H.P. Lovecraft Illustrator Gou Tanabe Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2019 First Printing 2016/2017 Category Horror Warnings --- Main Characters Pabodie, Dyer, Lake, Danforth, Gedney Main Elements Aliens

Title The Hound and Other Stories Series --- Author H.P. Lovecraft Illustrator Gou Tanabe Publisher Dark Horse Manga - 2017 First Printing 2014 Category Horror Warnings --- Main Characters St. John Main Elements Aliens

At the Mountains of Madness Vol I & II

The Hound and Other Stories

A few months ago I read a young adult book based in a world where the Cthulhu mythos was real. I had heard of Lovecraft and Cthulhu before but other than the octopus head, didn't know much. Then I came across another book and decided that before I read it, I would read this book, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft to know what all the fuss was about.

Now you can dowload it for free, and I read it on my eReader while commuting to and from work (must admit that its a weird thing to read first thing in the morning to start your day!). I found the first few stories quite creepy, what with the more formal language of the times when Lovecraft wrote, as well as the very, very freaky things that went on inside that man's head. But after a while, the stories started to have a very similar feel to them, and I became immune to the creepiness.

The collection contains all the stories in his Dream Cycle and the Cthulhu mythos, with a few other unrelated ones mixed in.

Now if the stories were simply creepy horror, I might have gotten very bored. But in fact, some don't even attempt to be scary, but rather thought provoking. The Shadow out of Time is about an alien species capable of exchanging their minds with other species, for the sole purpose of learning about the other cultures and worlds. In the meantime the mind of those they switch with is treated well on the alien homeworld, encouraged to interact with other minds.

And I have to admit the mind that came up with the various alien and demonic creatures in their weird shapes and forms must have had quite the vivid imagination. These aren't your Star Trek aliens, humans with a few bumps on their heads, these are well and truly like nothing you'd envisined before, and Lovecraft put a fair amount of thought into how these things would move, communicate, and make sense of the world. And remember the time period in which he was writing a lot of Einstein's theories of relativity were coming out, as well as quantum theories, alternate universes, and the like, offering Lovecraft a wealth of new concepts to play with, which are as relevant today as they were then.

While each of the stories are pretty well standalone, some actually refer to each other and characters can show up in unexpected places. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is in fact a novella, and while being mind-numbingly repetitive, it brought many stories together, like The Cats of Ulthar and Pickman's Model.

Now I don't know if it was the fault of the times, or of Lovecraft himself, but I often had to cringe at his description of "foreigners" and peoples of other (human) races. The guy was an outright racist and it was hard to swallow some of his descriptions.

So now I finally know what this whole Cthulhu thing is...and I can say this, do NOT read "The Call of Cthulhu" while you have a 100+ degree fever from the flu...the resulting dreams I had that night would have made Lovecraft envious!

2022 - Last year I had an urge to do a re-read, in particular because I found The Lovecraft Reread on Tor.com. I highly recommend it, and not just reading the posts, but the excellent comments people made, sure, sometimes going way off on a tangent trying to figure out what "non-Euclidean" geometry might be, or the correct way to swear in German, but it's great fun. In the process I discovered that my "Complete" collection only covered stories written by Lovecraft on his own. Works he co-authored or ghost wrote for others were not included. I'm not going to review them individually but I'll update my list of stories at the top of this review as I go. And come on, how you could skip something like Under the Pyramids where the protagonist is none other than Harry Houdini!

I also discovered my library had some graphic novel adaptations of some of Lovecrafts works. The first being At the Mountains of Madness manga. This was a faithful retelling, in fact I was really eager to see the artist's renditions of Old Ones and Shoggoths...but the way he drew snow (this tale takes place in the Antarctic), the way he drew rocks, and the way he drew Old Ones were so similiar that for the most part I couldn't see anything, just weird bumpy wavy swirly lines that you could barely make out. This was unfortunately since he clearly put a lot of detail in there, but the aliens and the landscape just blurred together to an indecipherable mass (very Lovecraftian in a way, since we're not supposed to even be able to grasp some of his ideas, but that didn't actually apply to these creatures...)

On the other hand, I felt The Hound and Other Stories to be both well adapted and illustrated, I can see why it was nominated for an award. It kept Lovecrafts creepiness without needing to illustrate unseeable cosmic things, the choice of stories helped here, no indescribable colours or geometries involved.