Books: Tales - H.P. Lovecraft

The problem with any review of an H.P. Lovecraft collection is that if you just read a single page of a story like "The Call of Cthulhu," the writing seems, well, bad. Packed to the gills with hyperbole and colorful adjectives, the narrative often slows to a halt with the protagonists describing their deepest mental states, or perhaps the vagaries of some arcane ritual. It's hard to believe, you say to yourself, that writing like this could inspire whole generations of of science fiction and horror.

What I've found, though, is that reading an entire Lovecraft story (especially one of his longer, later works like "At the Mountains of Madness") is almost like being submerged into someone else's consciousness. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required here, but if you can accept the narrator's take on events, you can share the narrator's terror. Cthulhu, for example, is not very scary on his own, but, like witnessing a tornado, he's much scarier if you can picture it firsthand.

"Tales: H.P. Lovecraft" is a neat little hardbound collection of pretty much everything important Lovecraft ever wrote. It's a bit expensive, and you might balk at the price when you see how small the book really is. It's a deceptively complete volume, though - the paper is Bible-thin and what looks like perhaps 300 pages is actually 800+ pages, covering even the longer novellas like "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Shadow Out of Time." It comes with its own little sewn-in blue ribbon bookmark, which should come in handy for my big plane flight to Spain. I should warn any potential buyers - the collection does include some of Lovecraft's early stinkers (most of which were written just to make money, like "The Lurking Fear").