Diocletian

Ah yes, H.P. Lovecraft. Whenever I would look up famous horror stories, his name would always be near the top. Many games and stories referenced and borrowed from his works. I had been planning to read his works for a while, but I just had not gotten the chance. Now that I finally have, it was quite an enjoyable change from my usual reading of history (Still love history, it's just nice to read something else once in a while). This book is a collection of 16 of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, ranging from 7 pages with the shortest story to 56 pages with the longest. The stories were very good overall. They were not as scary as I had hoped for them to be, but I am not sure if the author meant for them to be entirely terrifying. Then again, maybe I just do not scare easily. When Lovecraft writes, he does not scare you with the details. Instead, he tries to scare you with the lack of them, a technique which works quite well. He does not tell you everything, and often has his characters leave things unexplained, as the details are, according to the narrators in most of these stories, too terrible for the reader to hear. Overall, his stories are not utterly terrifying, but instead leave you with a somewhat uneasy feeling of impending danger that is impossible for humanity to stop. My five favorite stories in this book are (in order): The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow Over Insmouth, Pickman's Model, which is probably the most disturbing story in the collection, The Call of Cthulhu, and The Silver Key, which has some interesting personal opinions and feelings of the author mixed in. I have two main criticisms of this collection, one of which has to do with Lovecraft personally and the other with his characterization. First, and most significant, is his racism. You can detect his superiority complex throughout many of his stories. Just read his cat's name in his first story... And that is not the end of it. Second, his characters are always passing out at everything. I mean really. I could understand getting scared at seeing something from out of your dreams, but passing out? I do not think so. Even with these flaws however (particularly the first one), the stories are still worth reading. They are enjoyable for horror fans and his work has greatly shaped the horror genre ever since it became popular.