The Lurking Fear - H. P. Lovecraft

The Lurking Fear (Lovecraft, 1916-1939)

If The Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter of the Dark showcase Lovecraft's unique genius for horror and weird fiction, the round-up compilation The Lurking Fear showcases the author's missteps, mediocrity, and pent-up racism, though it does have a few short stories worth reading within its cold pages.

After reading some of these more conventional horror stories, I see Lovecraft's limitations as a writer. In the absence of truly creative and gripping conceptions, Lovecraft is reduced to transparent foreshadowing and verbose hysterics. His themes seem to fall within a few categories:  reverse evolution, tainted bloodlines, ancestral curses, and doomed artists. The strongest of the reverse evolution stories, "The Lurking Fear" is notable more for its grotesque violence and disjointed timeline than its ability to inspire terror. There are some additional prose-poem dream studies and myths here, like "The White Ship", "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", and "The Quest of Iranon", which have subtle tie-ins to The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and reveal the despairing poet always hiding behind Lovecraft's macabre imaginings.

We do get some excellent horror stories here that are worth a note:

• "The Temple" - Some rare humor, as Lovecraft lambasts a WWI German U-boat commander whose pride sacrifices his crew to an underwater vengeance.
• "From Beyond" - A scientist creates a machine that allows him to see the dreadful beings and powers that surround us each day.
• "The Outsider" - A prisoner in a dark tower tries to escape, but is there anywhere for him to go?
• "In the Vault" - A corner-cutting gravedigger traps himself overnight in a vault with several fresh caskets.
• "Cool Air" - A mysterious doctor whose specialty is prolonging life keeps the temperature in his apartments exceedingly cold.
• "The Rats in the Walls" - An American returns to his ancestral home in England, only to uncover a family curse that starts to manifest in terrifying ways.

These stories are good, but The Lurking Fear as a whole is for the completist only.

Arbitrary rating:  3 out of 5 macabre imaginings