Customer Reviews

The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales

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This book is the final volume in a three volume anthology of the works of H.P. Lovecraft: a horror writer of real genius. I have already explained my reasons for according Lovecraft genius status in my review of volume one, so I shall not repeat myself here. For those who are interested I will place a link to that review in the comments section below.

Taking then my estimate of Lovecraft's merits as a writer simply as a given, the question then becomes one of the strengths of this particular volume.

The first thing you need to know is that unlike most serious writers, Lovecraft did not express himself in full-sized novels. Rather, he wrote exclusively in short stories and novellas. This means if you are going to explore his body of work, you are going to need to do so via collections such as this one. The great thing about this series (The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus vols. 1 to 3) is that it contains literally everything Lovecraft ever wrote in three modest volumes. Thus, you can easily use this series to explore his writing without any difficulty or redundancy.

All three volumes in the series are close to the same size, but they vary considerably as to whether they contain a larger number of fairly short tales, or a smaller number of relatively long ones. This, the final volume in the series, contains twice as many stories as volume one, but far few than volume two. For the benefit of those who are already Lovecraft fans, or who otherwise have some familiarity with his work, I will now list the stories to be found in this specific volume:

The Outsider, The Rats in the Walls, Pickman's Model, The Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Colour Out of Space, The Haunter of the Dark, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Music of Erich Zann, The Lurking Fear, The Picture in the House, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Shadow Out of Time.

The Call of Cthulhu, and to a lesser extent The Shadow Over Innsmouth, are both truly iconic Lovecraft tales that do much to establish the core of the Cthulhu mythos. No Lovecraft fan should miss either one. But for me, two relatively short, simple tales - The Outsider and Pickman's model - are also stories that very much stand out and stay with me.

The Outsider in particular is well worth mentioning precisely because it does have such a fundamentally simple storyline, and one that can in fact work entirely independently of Lovecraft's broader cosmology. At the same time, it is also Lovecraft at his purest and finest: a mind-bending tale of profound personal horror; one that suggests rather than lays bare the deeper cosmic horror beneath. More than anything else, it is a story that compels us to wonder at the kind of universe that could give birth to the events it describes.

That, in the end, is what Lovecraft always did best.

Theo.

this can almost be considered as "best of hpl". it does in fact contain better storie than most collections that are supposed to be the best horror stories by hpl. the collection contains so many great stories, i won't even mention them . it's impossible. hpl had a way of taking the best from the best, and use it. gothic style when it comes to describing houses, like poe he strove against really different ideas, etc. sometimes he describes in a truly great manner, sometimes he avoids describing - hinting at something as impossible or undescribeable - being just as great as that. he never failed when having a good idea. excellent at carrying the story forward with lots of detailed information, given to us in an exciting way.

This is the best way into Lovecraft of all the titles on sale here. It's an anthology which includes almost all of the 'greatest hits' and some of the best of the lesser known material from his Cthulhu period. By comparison, volumes 1 and 2 in this series are B-side albums scraping around for fillers. If you're not familiar with Lovecraft at all, it's superlative, intelligent early twentieth century suspense horror with a delicious turn of phrase which still makes me happy. I recommend it very highly indeed, ikhwaan..