Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a bridge between Edgar Allen Poe and modern horror literature. His writing might not be of the strongest quality, but there is a black poetry to it in places, and the stories themselves are imaginative and gripping. This collection brings together semi-related stories that find their horror in an infinite and uncaring universe that threatens mankind's existence and sanity.
Most of the stories involve ancient, pre-human civilizations from Earth's forgotten aeons. They could be considered science fiction, some to a greater degree than others. The collection includes four early short stories, plus five meatier offerings. Here's a taste of the treats to be found within:"The Hound": Grave robbers steal a cursed amulet and are pursued by a grotesque fate.
"The Call of Cthulhu": Several unrelated people experience the same lucid dream, while a murderous cult increases its activity, worshipping an ancient idol depicting the creature in the dreams.
"The Dunwich Horror": In rural New England, several unexplained deaths and wholesale destruction of the landscape leads to helpless, claustrophobic panic.
The novella "The Whisperer in Darkness" is perhaps the most successful story, both as horror and as science fiction. An academic exchanges several letters with a paranoid loner from the hills of New England about folkloric monsters. The loner claims the stories are true: the monsters are actually aliens, and he thinks they are after him. The action takes place mostly through the mail, but the constricting sense of an inescapable trap never relents. Don't read this one alone, late at night...
The last novella in the collection, "At the Mountains of Madness," illustrates both Lovecraft's strengths and his weaknesses. It's another suspenseful story -- for the first half. An expedition to Antarctica unearths ancient things and unleashes violence. Unfortunately, the second half is almost an anthropological tract. Two of the explorers find an ancient city covered in hieroglyphic-like historical records and recount what they think happened in the place. It eventually picks back up at the end, but there's a lot of filler, imaginative though it may be.
I would recommend Lovecraft for fans of Poe, Conan Doyle, Stephen King, or the X-Files. If you can excuse the occasional digression into imaginary pasts, there are some great horrors to be found.
Arbitrary Rating: 4 out of 5 ancient evils
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