Part 1: Let’s Get the Conversation About Madness Out of the Way
Part 2: The Beast in the Cave
Part 3: The Alchemist
Part 4: The Tomb
Part 5: Dagon
Part 6: Double Feature
Part 7: Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Part 8: Old Bugs and Juan Romero
Part 9: The White Ship
Part 10: The Street, the Doom That Came to Sarnath, and the Statement of Randolph Carter
Part 11: The Terrible Old Man, the Tree, and the Cats of Ulthar
Part 12: The Temple
Part 13: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
Part 14: Celephais and From Beyond
Part 15: Nyarlathotep and the Picture in the House
Part 16: Sweet Ermengarde
Part 17: The Nameless City
Part 18: The Quest of Iranon
Part 19: A Conclusion For Now
For those of you reading these as they come out, you’ll remember that I meant to post this on Saturday, wound up reviewing a bit of Leaves of the World Tree instead, which I was originally going to review on Monday, but then Conan the Indomitable arrived early, so I started in on that. Conan the Indomitable is shaping up to be no fun at all, although that’s mainly because of its villain, who will hopefully not feature very much. In any case, I am procrastinating that by posting a wrap-up post for the first chunk of Lovecraft’s work.
I’m reading these stories in order of writing, because that’s the order Barnes and Noble presents them in their Lovecraft collection that I’m reading from. This means that this chunk covers his work from 1905, when he finished the Beast in the Cave, to 1921, when he finished the Other Gods. It covers Lovecraft’s early Poe period, several of his Lord Dunsany inspired dream works, and the first inklings of the Cthulhu Mythos in stories like Nyarlathotep, Dagon, and the Other Gods. Also, there’s a couple of stories that are basically just racist propaganda, because unlike most of these old timey authors, Lovecraft is pretty much exactly as racist as you’ve been led to believe.
At this point, Lovecraft’s stories are all very short, usually clocking in at less than ten pages (albeit ten pages of Barnes and Nobles’ large-ish hardback collection books), and they cover such a massive breadth of subject matter that it’s hard to summarize. This is the danger of reviewing collections by the same author rather than ones with any kind of unified theme or a single, larger work, I suppose. Lovecraft has written comedy that fell flat (Old Bugs) and comedy that worked really well (Sweet Ermengarde). He’s written spooky stories that are recognizably Lovecraftian (Dagon), that are more Poe-like (the Tomb), and ones where the basic fear is that black people exist (Arthur Jermyn). He’s got a surprisingly wide range.
The range on quality is pretty wide, too, although naturally for a collection that starts from when the author is fifteen, there’s a noticeable increase in quality over time. The Beast in the Cave and the Alchemist are of mainly historical interest, but starting with the Tomb and Dagon we get into some actually good Lovecraftian stories. Quality veers all over the place, as Lovecraft often hits duds when writing outside his comfort zone, as with the Tree, about Greek sculptors, and some of the stories have just aged really poorly, like the Street or Arthur Jermyn.
The only one of the sub-sub-genres that Lovecraft will ultimately be famous for that really get explored here is his dream writing. Polaris, the White Ship, the Doom That Came to Sarnath, and the first appearance of Randolph Carter (albeit not in any kind of dream world) are all amongst these stories. Dagon and the Nameless City give us glimpses of Call of Cthulhu, but Lovecraft’s dreamscape isn’t just glimpsed, but already pretty fully formed. The basic idea of a dream world full of alien wonders is a compelling one, but Lovecraft doesn’t always deliver on the alien wonders. The White Ship was a tour of all kinds of weird places, but the Quest of Iranon was basically just a list of weird names attached to pretty normal societies. There was a Calvinist place, and there was fantasy Las Vegas, and that was basically it so far as fantastical locales went.
It’s hard to really write about what Lovecraft’s written so far without thinking about what’s still coming, though. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, the Call of Cthulhu, and the Shadow Over Innsmouth are all still in the future, and it’s hard to see these stories as really anything more than build-up to that. Lovecraft’s whole career may actually just be a series of prototypes building up to his best works.
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