Customer Reviews

The Dunwich Horror And Others

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In my humble opinion, there are two ways to read Lovecraft. The first, and best, is to get your hands on an original "Weird Tales" or other pulp. There is something about the musty smell that adds to the tale. For true connoisseurs, read them under the covers with a flashlight, late in the evening hours.

Realizing that original pulps may be prohibitively expensive, the Arkham House Editions are the next option. These hardback treasures are as much a part of Lovecraft's legacy as the stories themselves. Lovecraft would be all but forgotten if it were not for the small circle of friends who founded Arkham House, with the sole mission of keeping his writings in print. Arkham House is the definitive Lovecraft volume.

"The Dunwich Horror and Others" contains some of Lovecraft's finest (and most popular) stories. Here is that slippery tale of a town, an ocean, and an undiscovered heritage "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," the eerie and resounding "The Music of Erich Zann," the much-adapted and still classic "The Colour Out of Space," my personal favorite "The Rats in the Walls," the tile story "The Dunwich Horror" and many other chilling tales.

And let's not forget "The Call of Cthulhu."

This is the best Lovecraft edition for those who have been acquainted with Lovecraft and like his writings. Definately the best of the Arkham House collections and is the first of the Arkham House books to get. Probably not the best for those unfamiliar with Lovecraft just because of the cost.

This collection includes my favorite Lovecraft story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", as well as the wonderful stories "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror". Some of the other better stories include "The Music of Erich Zann" and "Pickman's Model". Robert Bloch's introduction is a nice supplement to Lovecraft's writings. Highly recommended, but I also recommend buying additional Lovecraft because this collection does leave out some Lovecraft gems(i.e. "At the Mountains of Madness").

I've been at a loss for a couple of years to find something to read that really grabs me. In fact, I usually find myself bored beyond tears with the recent spate of pulp and sloppy nonsense that gets passed off as literature by most of our contemporary, popular authors. So lately, I've been going back and trying to catch up on the works of acclaimed authors from the 20th Century, focusing on those that I never had the time or opportunity to read before now. This week, I stumbled upon THE DUNWICH HORROR AND OTHERS by H.P. Lovecraft and was introduced to Lovecraft's whole weird and fascinating world of "the Cthulhu Mythos". I was familiar with some of Lovecraft's more popular short stories, mainly from their bad movie adaptations (THE DUNWICH HORROR and RE-ANIMATOR spring to mind), and I've read many times where others among my favorite authors have called him "their inspiration" or "a genius ranking with Poe, Hawthorne, and Conrad". I knew that his mythology provided a backdrop for most everything produced by Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, and Neil Gaiman, to the entertaining EVIL DEAD movie trilogy, even to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and DARK SHADOWS of TV-dom. But I'd never had a chance to read Lovecraft's work for myself until now. I've always loved a good scare and a really creepy story. Trouble is, they're just so damned hard to find! And when you find one that starts out with great potential, it usually degenerates into formulaic banality and clichés by the end. However, I now understand why Lovecraft is so admired. While his writing style is clearly dated, his stories are downright frightening. It's awfully hard for anything, let alone a book, to make my hair stand on end or give me gooseflesh, but I usually get at least one good case of crawling flesh from each of Lovecraft's stories and, in many instances, they delivered so much more. Not since my first reading of Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE have I walked away from a book and had to shake it off physically before I could move on to something else. There are many Lovecraft imitators out there. But if you haven't tried a genuine Lovecraft, you haven't even begun to know horror.

Because there are so many different Lovecraft collections out there, it may be helpful to prospective buyers to know what's actually in this volume:

[By S. T. Joshi:] A Note on the Texts; [by James Turner:] A Mythos in His Own Image [an introductory essay]; [fiction by Lovecraft:] At the Mountains of Madness [novella]; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward [novella]; The Shunned House [short story]; The Dreams in the Witch House [short story]; The Statement of Randolph Carter [short story]; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath [novella]; The Silver Key [short story]; Through the Gates of the Silver Key [short story collaboration with E. Hoffmann Price]

There are two noteworthy features of this book: It's the only Lovecraft collection ever to contain all three of his novellas in a single volume; and it collects all the fiction he ever wrote about his alter-ego character Randolph Carter, namely the last four titles in the contents list.

Contains accurate texts to the stories, unlike many other Lovecraft collections. The only major annoyance here is that the stories aren't assembled in the chronological order of their original writing by Lovecraft, inasmuch his fiction is enhanced by experiencing the sequence and continuity of recurring characters, places, and events. (Fortunately, the table of contents gives the year or years of each piece's composition, so it's convenient to figure out that order.) A near-must for serious Lovecraft fans.

Lovecraft's work does for the horror fiction tale what David Lynch's films do for cinema. It takes the genre into a stratum of the unconscious so abstract and frightening that one finds beauty in the macabre madness that exists there. "The Dunwich Horror and Others" is the ideal starting point for any Lovecraft neophyte. All of Lovecraft's most important and frightening short stories are found in their original forms in this beautiful Arkham House hardcover. There are a few omissions such as "The Lurking Fear" and "The Dreams in the Which House," but these stories and more are easy enough to locate in other Arkham House or Del Rey collections. To sit and read this volume cover to cover is to experience horror fiction at its most dismal and horrific. In "The Dunwich Horror," the reader visits the damned Whateley farm, where an extra-dimensional being has been summoned. In "The Colour Out of Space," a farm in Arkham, Ma. has been hit by a meteorite that carries with it a pestilence that drives the land and its inhabitants to madness and death. The maddeningly eerie "The Whisperer in Darkness" an isolated man describes his encounters with a malign alien colony that has taken residence near his home in backwater New England. "The Whisperer in Darkness" is one of Lovecraft's most potent tales due to the fact that it's narrative is largely drawn from letters, journal entries and even phonograph recordings of the extra-terrestrials themselves.

WARNING: DON'T BUY THE PAPERBACK VERSION OF THIS BOOK. The paperback version published by CreateSpace with the skulls on the cover has completely different stories from the hardcover (seems like the only similar story is The Dunwich Horror).

Edit: Found out CreateSpace is a self publishing tool, so apparently someone just decided to take some random HP Lovecraft stories and print their own version of "The Dunwich Horror and others".

In spite of the smug dismissal of an ealier reviewer, there is absolutely no gainsaying the originality of Lovecraft. Yes, he is formulaic. So is Poe. Yes, his weltanschauung is morbid and overwrought. So is much of Hawthorne's and Melville's. He doesn't achieve the architectonic precision and interconnectedness of Tolkien, but that was never his ambition.

What he does have in abundance is a marvelous descriptive felicity allied with a prose rhythm that is perfectly calibrated to elicit terror and awe in the reader. Yes, he overwrites. But he's never boring.

"The Shadow out of Time" paved the way for my appreciation of Borges. And "To the Mountains of Madness" is one of the great visionary works of 20th century literature. Period. To compare Lovecraft unfavorably to the rodomontade of Sandburg or the dessicated exquisses of Djuna Barnes shows how far removed from a living pulse are the critical canons of the academic establishment.

H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" is an exquisite, and compelling horror story that remains to be one of Lovecrafts finest pieces of literature. The novel is well written with the descriptive flair, and style that only Lovecraft can express. It's not your average horror novel, and a must read for any fan of the horror genre.

I highly recommend this first in a series of Arkham House books which comprise the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. As Robert Bloch points out in his introduction, Lovecraft was the premiere horror writer of his day and even now we owe much to him. The genre of horror fiction (and cinema) owes and insurmountable debt of gratitude to Lovecraft. His existential vision of an uncaring universe, his colorful and panoramic prose, and his penchant for turn of the century vocabulary (such as "phantasy")takes the reader into *his* narrative like few other writers of horror can. Consider writers like Stephen King, who like Lovecraft sets many of his tales in their familiar and beloved New England and you realize the unmistakable presence and influence of Lovecraft. This edition published by Arkham House is the definitive edition of Lovecraft's work, corrected, re-edited, and thoroughly revised.

Some of the editions here are not the one pictured. The book saw its first edition, edited by Derleth and published by Arkham House, in 1963; the book had additional printings in 1966, 1970, 1973 and 1981. The texts were then corrected by S. T. Joshi, and these Corrected Text editions have been the one published since 1984. As is stated in his notes on this latter edition, in SIXTY YEARS OF ARKHAM HOUSE: "The first of the revised editions of Lovecraft's tales edited by Joshi, from consultation of manuscripts (most of them at the John Hay Library, Brown University) and early publications. In the process, thousands of textual and typographical errors that had crept into successive Arkham House editions of these works were eliminated. Although for copyright reasons the new editions were labeled 'corrected printings,' they have been entirely reset. Bloch's introduction is taken from the collection The Best of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Ballantine, 1982)." My copy is the Corrected Tenth Printing with its magnificent jacket illustration by Raymond Bayless. The newer editions have jackets by, I believe, Tony Patrick -- and I find them awful, cartoonish and insulting to the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. Arkham House was created by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei in 1939, for the purpose of publishing Lovecraft's weird tales in hardcover editions. Their first book, THE OUTSIDER AND OTHERS, now sells for a fortune (here at Amazon copies sell anywhere from $1,200 to $9,000!!!). Derleth is a controversial figure in the history of publication of Lovecraft's Works, but it is primarily because of his Arkham House editions of the fiction, poetry and (especially) Selected Letters that Lovecraft became the world-renown figure he is today.

Despite the awful dust jacket illustration, this new hardcover edition is an excellent introduction to Lovecraft's weird tales (although the Library of America edition, which sells for around the same price or less here at Amazon, includes twice as much material). Lovecraft's fiction revolutionized the horror genre, and his tales continue to influence modern writers of supernatural horror. We have many books of stories by other writers who were influenced by Lovecraft, beginning with Derleth's superlative TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS to Ellen Datlow's delightful recent anthology, LOVECRAFT UNBOUND. S. T. Joshi himself has edited an anthology of modern Lovecraftian tales, BLACK WINGS, and it will see publication this year. I began to read Lovecraft because of my friendship with Robert Bloch, who has a wonderful introduction in this hardcover edition. Two of the tales in this volume, "The Picture in the House" and "The Colour Out of Space," so affected my younger self when I first read them, so depressed me by their awful relentless power, that they put me off reading more of Lovecraft's fiction for a little while. For sheer narrative power, I think "The Colour Out of Space" is Lovecraft's greatest success; and in that tale he creates a denizen from outer space that is alien in every way. This edition also includes my favourite tale by Lovecraft, "The Haunter of the Dark" (Lovecraft's last story, which he dedicated to Robert Bloch) -- I love this story for its thrilling Gothic atmosphere, for its evocation of Lovecraft's beloved Providence, and for its portrayal of the horror writer Robert Blake. Lovecraft has often been chided by critics for his supposed inability to create realistic or interesting characters, but I find the opposite to be true. His characters live for me, and some of them (Wilbur Whateley, Erich Zann, Richard Upton Pickman) are wonderful and unique within the realm of fictive horror.

The editing of Lovecraft's works continues. The version of "The Shadow Out of Time" published here has become outdated, for Lovecraft's original manuscript of the story, given as a gift to Robert Barlow, was discovered and arrived at John Hay Library on January 17, 1995, giving the world this story, considered by many as Lovecraft's supreme masterpiece, exactly as Lovecraft penned it. The tale was published in a handsome single edition, edited by Joshi and David E. Schultz, by Hippocampus Press, and then was included in the third and final edition of H. P. Lovecraft's tales edited by Joshi for Penguin Classics, THE DREAMS INT HE WITCH HOUSE AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES, where it is extensively annotated. The text has also been published in The Library of America edition of Lovecrafts Tales, and in the single volume of all of Lovecraft's original stories that was published by Barnes & Noble.