The Haunter of the Dark - H.P. Lovecraft

The Haunter of the Dark (Lovecraft, 1920-1943)

After reading all that serious stuff, it was time for fun. The Haunter of the Dark compiles a generous helping of Lovecraft's finest horror/sci-fi stories with all the Randolph Carter stories, including the bizarre fantasy-horror epic The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Let's start with the Dream-Quest. Unpublished during Lovecraft's lifetime, it chronicles Randolph Carter's quest through the Dream World to find Kadath, the residence of the Great Ones. Driven by a dream of paradise that he is convinced the Great Ones can make a reality, Carter travels far and wide, braving dark horrors and enlisting ghoulish help before he comes to his cataclysmic destination. Throughout the journey, Lovecraft ties together several of his earlier stories, myths, and prose poems (most of which are included in this volume). His imagination is grandly unbridled in this sweeping, Tolkien-esque tale, and alongside The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, another great novel unpublished in his lifetime, it might be his weird fiction masterpiece.

A book of Dream-Quest and its related tales would be plenty, but on top of this we have a dazzling array of classics:

• "The Haunter of the Dark" - A young man accidentally calls forth an ancient evil from a desecrated cathedral.
• "The Shunned House" - A truly unique and creative twist on the haunted house story.
• "The Colour Out of Space" - After an asteroid crashes on a farm, an insidious substance saps the life out of the land and the family.
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth - A stranger in a blighted town must run for his life when he learns about the strange cult of the inhabitants.
• "The Dreams in the Witch House" - A student suffers from increasingly vivid and disturbing dreams, while mysterious kidnappings are reported in the poorer regions of town.
• "The Thing on the Doorstep" - A man worries for the health of his friend, a reclusive student of the occult whose wife's dark knowledge is even more arcane and dangerous.
• The Shadow Out of Time - A professor loses five years of his life, during which his personality changes and he conducts strange research. Upon regaining his personality, he has no recollection of what he did during that time, but he is haunted by weird dreams of an eldritch, Cyclopaean civilization.

As if this wasn't enough, we get his weird poetry cycle "Fungi from Yuggoth", the "History of the Necronomicon" snippet, and a lengthy essay entitled "Supernatural Horror in Literature", which might be the closest thing to a statement of artistic intent Lovecraft ever wrote, before it devolves into a list of novels and stories he likes. The only misstep for me is "Herbert West - Reanimator", a gruesome yet scattered update of Frankenstein. On the whole, this collection makes a stunning case for Lovecraft as a true pioneer of horror and science fiction.

Arbitrary rating:  4.5 out of 5 grandly unbridled imaginations