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Astro Ritter astrannari8088 — I bought this book a couple of years ago. Many friends had suggested checking him out due to my affinity for horror. A month ago I was reading a book which proved to be FUBAR due to missing about 50 pages, and had to order a replacement online. I wanted to read something light that I could put back down when the replacement arrived, so I grabbed this. I thought it would be light since it was a bunch of short stories, but I was mistaken. Lovecraft is best enjoyed with a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia standing by if you wish to understand everything he's talking about. I was able to glean the meaning of most unfamiliar words due to the context, but there were a couple I had to look up. This was actually kind of exciting because those words weren't in the regular dictionary, and I had to consult the unabridged. I love going to the unabridged. It's like a half foot thick, and looking in it makes me feel like a powerful sorcerer consulting a spell. (I really need to get a lectern for it). In order to enjoy Lovecraft properly, one must take him into historical context, and realize that he is quite dated. He's considered by some to be one of the fathers of modern horror right alongside Poe. Lovecraft wrote in the 1920s and 30s, and his themes have been so thoroughly explored and packed into books, movies, and television shows since then that one can see the "surprise ending" to the original stories from a mile away. While this didn't detract from my enjoyment of reading them, I was still amazed when considering that not only did someone write this kind of stuff down (a lot of thick demonology [or daemonology as he would've spelled it; he seems to like archaic terms and spellings] in these stories), but he also had the cojones to attempt to get them published in that day and age when such things were hardly mainstream. I enjoyed the stories in this book, but I must confess that I'm relieved to be done with it. I don't think I'll get another one of his random story books (most of what he wrote was short stories), though I do intend to check out "The Call of Cthulhu" and a story about a painter if I can find it. While the stories are good, sometimes they get really thick, and extremely slow, and I was reminded of the old Dick Tracy comic strip in the newspaper where the man would enter a room in the first panel, walk across the room in the second, and then reach a door at the other end of the room in the third; it took him fucking forever to do anything. This was the case for many of Lovecraft's characters. He would be standing somewhere, then would take a step, consider the terrain and other deep matters, then take another step, pause, look around, consider more deep thoughts, then take another step... Sometimes I wanted to shout to the author "God dammit, man, would you just get his ass down the road? Hemingway would've had him enjoying his retirement by now." The story I have specifically in mind for this observation is “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” I understand this is a suspense building technique, but I found it to be a bit distracting. However, please don’t think that I didn’t enjoy that story; it was actually one of my favorites in the book, his slow speed escape notwithstanding. Here are some things I enjoy about Lovecraft: he could occasionally throw out a good turn-o-phrase, which I always love. I'll give a couple of examples further down. He was also extremely racist, and said some things that were awesomely awful. Being a history dude, I love to see this kind of stuff in books and writings for historical purposes. The world really was a different place back then, and nobody batted an eye if horrible things were said about black people. Recall that the second KKK was enjoying its major heyday at the time that Lovecraft was doing most of his writing, and it was nothing for people in full Klan gear to be marching around the streets. In fact, the KKK was never more popular than it was during the 1920s when it was estimated to have six million members, which was just a bit more than 5% of the population, a HUGE percentage comparatively. (In 2008, KKK membership was estimated at 0.002% of the US population). And there I go again. I tell ya, never get me started on historical stuff. Sorry about that; back to the book. Here's a description of a Negro in one story from the “Herbert West – Reanimator” series: “The negro had been knocked out, and a moment’s examination showed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life – but the world holds many ugly things.” Yeah, try getting THAT past an editor or publisher today. Oh. My. GOD! One of the stories even had a black cat named Nig, and he goes whole hog in another story (which isn’t in this collection), and names the cat Nigger Man. So, if such things offend you, it’s probably best that you not check out Lovecraft at all, for many of the stories are peppered with unflattering descriptions of persons not Anglo-Saxon. “The Terrible Old Man” was probably my favorite story in the book, and was also the shortest, totaling 3 pages to the sentence. You can see the ending coming from about the first couple of paragraphs, so it’s not the surprise factor that does it for me. No, it was the witty way in which most of it was written. Here are a couple of examples, paraphrased: “It was the design of (3 names) to call on the Terrible Old Man. (He was) reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. (3 names) for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery…. Messrs. (3 names) selected the night of April 11th for their call. (2 names) were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst (3rd name waited in the hidden car). Desire to avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.” Great stuff! I also thoroughly enjoyed “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and “From Beyond” due to their intensely cerebral foci, and the first one did have an ending that caught me a tad off guard. “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” was probably my favorite, and it’s actually more of a novella (about 140 pages). Since I don’t want to mark this review as “containing spoilers,” I’m going to leave it at that, and let you read it yourself to find out what’s so great about it. So: 3 stars for Mr. Lovecraft. Good stories, but a bit weighty at times. I didn’t wake up screaming while reading it, and in fact I occasionally fell asleep yawning from time to time. (This is due to no fault of the author; it’s just something I do when reading late at night). Also, I’m not a major fan of short stories to begin with, so that alone drops it by one star. If you DO like short stories, horror, and bizarre weirdness, then you should definitely check him out. -Pierce