The Illustrated Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read most of Lovecraft’s fiction back when I was a teen, initially drawn to his work not by his reputation or fame but by the lurid Michael Whelan cover art found on the 1981 paperback editions published by Del Rey. The art is fantastically creepy, even if it doesn’t particularly relate to Lovecraft’s stories. You can see the two pieces (chopped up to span seven paperbacks) at Whelan’s site here and here.
I picked up this particular collection because it assembles all of Lovecraft’s stories in chronological order, allowing the reader to experience both the growing skill of Lovecraft as a writer and the expansion and iteration of his favorite themes, settings and tentacles. The included illustrations are merely serviceable but given the price of the volume, that’s a non-issue.
I read the collection over the course of many months, usually taking in a story or two between novels. Not to get all up in the puns, but this is probably the sanest way to read his work. Lovecraft wrote some frightful horror but most of it is delivered in the form of dense, baroque prose that feels as antiquarian as the tombs and ruins his narrators stumble upon. His characters are also strangely mute, with little in the way of spoken dialogue–but this turns out to be a good thing, because as elaborate as Lovecraft’s phrasing could get, he had an undeniable style and facility with language that was completely absent when he presented characters talking to each other. No actual person would ever speak the way a Lovecraft character does. It’s like watching an early rehearsal of a high school play in 1915. A bad high school play.
But if you tackle his body of work with some restraint there are some great stories in here, and any horror buff would be remiss in not sampling at least the better-known works, ranging from the mythos-establishing “The Call of Cthulhu” to the short novel “At the Mountains of Madness,” which eschews most of Lovecraft’s excessive flourishes and in turn stands as one of his most chilling stories, as an expedition explores and uncovers the horrors found in ancient cyclopean ruins deep in the Antarctic.
Lovecraft is at his best when he paints surreal landscapes, often literal dream worlds that his protagonists wander through, sometimes emerging mad, sometimes not emerging at all. Conversely, he is at his worst when his racism and classism comes through, with villains typically described as “swarthy,” “thick-lipped” or otherwise not white and more specifically, not English. You could argue that he lived in a less-enlightened time but that’s really no excuse.
And don’t ask about the cat*.
Still, his influence and unique voice make him one of the essential horror authors and this collection allows one to experience his growth, if not as a person, then as a storyteller.
* the cat in his 1924 story “The Rats in the Walls” is named Nigger Man, after a cat Lovecraft himself owned
