Customer Reviews

Waking Up Screaming: Haunting Tales of Terror

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

H.P. Lovecraft is an underappreciated horror writer. Though flawed in many ways, such as his habit of finding a handful of unusual adjectives and using them over and over and over again, he was an incredible storyteller. He created an entire universe of wonder and at the same time mind-blowing fear which became known as the Cthulhu Mythos, named for the behemoth god-like entity which has become iconic of his works.

That said, there are a lot of great stories here to showcase Lovecraft's talent. Cool Air is a particularly creepy story inspired by the fledgling science of cryogenics which was first talked about in the early 20th century. From this first story, the reader is introduced to one of Lovecraft's signature techniques: using the last line of the story as the climax. Though he did not use it in every story, it proved devastatingly effective in so many of his works such as The Lurking Fear and Pickman's Model.

Herbert West- Reanimator gave me chills the first time I read it. It really is quite a brilliant story, taking the concepts in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and putting a darker, more horrible bite to them. Written in chapters, each one but the last uses the previously stated technique. And each one is more bone-chilling than the last.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth, one of the few stories in this book that officially contributes to the Cthulhu Mythos itself, has a few low points, but is overall a very creepy story with an ending that never ceases to entertain no matter how many times I read it. This is one of the stories I highly recommend to those new to Lovecraft and the Mythos, as it gives one a very good idea of what goes on in this universe of horrors beyond the stars.

Lovecraft also wrote extensively of a world of dreams where the journeys of the mind were made manifest in a land so strange and exotic, it would be impossible to describe it all. The book includes several such stories such as Beyond the Wall of Sleep which introduces the reader to this dreamland. Sadly, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath is not in here. Though a fairly long story, it was one of the best. I can understand it being left out for the sake of brevity however. The same with At the Mountains of Madness.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of the best stories Lovecraft ever wrote in my opinion. I won't give anything away, suffice to say that it really showcases how well he could bring out the darkest depths of your fears. In Lovecraft's stories, there really are things that man was not meant to know.

Anyway, there are a few low points to the book. Dagon, though a nice little story, wasn't really one of Lovecraft's best. Something just seemed to be missing. The Terrible Old Man is a similar case. Though creepy, it's not up to the writer's usual standards.

I do have to say I'm a little irritated with the back cover. It totally gives away the plots and major dramatic points of several stories! The Lurking Fear is supposed to have a shocking ending when you realize where the monsters came from, but the cover just tells you right there! What fun is that? It does the same for The Terrible Old Man and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Overall, this is a four-and-a-half star book. Though it showcases a lot of Lovecraft's finer works, there are a few stories that could have been cut to make room for better ones such as Pickman's Model and The Colour Out of Space. I still highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of classic horror literature.

...oft shine the brightest.

This is a gorgeous selection of H. P. Lovecraft's most often ignored gems, his short-short stories. His sole novel (albeit a short one), "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" - and one of his better long classics, The Shadow Over Innsmouth - are also included, along with some of the less frequently anthologized straight horror pieces of the author's body of work, such as "The Lurking Fear." But it's the inclusion of the horror master's best short-shorts that makes this collection really shine, never seen together under a single cover.

"The Hound" - perhaps the first of the famous Cthulhu Mythos, as the original story to feature the dreaded Necronomicon - finds a pair of foolhardy occult collectors using the black magic tome to track down and grave-rob a buried occult amulet, with disastrous results. "The Outsider" is the unforgettable tale of an imprisoned man coming to a soul-shattering self discovery. "The Unnamable" is what two idle philosophers, discussing the formless nature of fear, find themselves unexpectedly confronting in the flesh. "Herbert West: Reanimator" concocts a serum which reanimates dead flesh, only to have it start tracking him down. And a terrified refugee from a vanished scientist's house relates the man's horrible fate due to creatures "From Beyond."

This is an excellent companion volume to Del Rey's "The Best of H. P. Lovecraft," essentially containing the complementary balance of stories missing from that collection. It's also a great Lovecraft primer - anyone unfamiliar with the author's work couldn't ask for a better first exposure to it. A very handsome and compact volume, Waking Up Screaming is sure to be a welcome addition to any collector of Lovecraftiana.

Beware - for "That is not dead, which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons, even death may die..."

There may be better collections of Lovecraft's work out there, but this is one of the most accessible anthologies on the market today. Almost none of the stories have anything to do with the otherworldly mythology Lovecraft created, but all of them are examples of the eerie style that originated with the author. Many of the stories are short, and some of them are throwaways. Few of them reference Miskatonic University, the fictitious academy that is at the center of Lovecraft's best-known works. But there are some true gems here. Among them are:

Herbert West - Reanimator: in which many aspects of the "Frankenstein" novel are reinterpreted in an even more sinister light.

The Outsider: in which Lovecraft explores an almost Edgar Allen Poe-like pathos.

Shadow Over Innsmouth: containing enough paranoia to keep any conspiracy theorist happy.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: containing a meticulously researched colonial-era backstory, and one of Lovecraft's best fleshed-out doomed heroes.

As horror writers go, Lovecraft never really jolts you while the book is open. But his stories have an insidious way of working their way into your imagination and inspiring nightmares. They possess a consistent, unnerving and disturbing worldview that's impossible to forget. Many thanks to Del Rey for keeping this author available in readily affordable paperback editions!

H.P. Lovecraft revitalized the Horror genre (too bad it wasn't noticed until after his death). Between Poe and King, Lovecraft stealthily introduced "cosmic" horror; a mix of mythology, science fiction and horror. It is his combination of science fiction and horror that really introduced a new way to look at the fear of the unknown.

Waking Up Screaming has a collection of some fine stories, but some of the themes were a little too repetitive for me. The discovery of an unknown entity or mythical heritage seems to take-up the bulk of these stories. While I appreciate the author's contribution to genre with these stories, my fault lies with the publisher putting too many similar stories together in one collection.

The central theme in most of the stories, besides a strong focus on how family heritage and its bloodlines can warp the family tree, is the knowledge that there are things in this universe that can not be explained. Many stories introduce the reader to terror that is beyond description - literally. Lovecraft purposely does not describe the terror in detail because the characters can not comprehend what they see without going mad.

Lovecraft really brings this theme to the forefront, almost as a guide to the reader, in his story the "The Unnamable". The protagonist in "The Unnamable" attempts to explain to his skeptical friend why he has a "preoccupation with the mystical and unexplained". That not everything has "fixed dimensions, properties, causes and effects...." there are things beyond our imagination that have no motive and can not be processed in our limited reality. The skeptic is of course, just like the reader, made a believer as the two characters are attacked by an "unnamable" or indescribable beast.

There are some great stories here and well worth a read to follow the development of the horror genre. "Cool Air", "The Hound", "The Unnamable", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "Herbert West - Reanimator", "Arthur Jermyn" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" are all important stories in Lovecraft's legacy.

This is a great set of some of Lovecraft's stories. Not the best, book good for what it is. This is my first book of Lovecraft stories, and has gotten me hooked onto all of works. This book contains sixteen stories. Not all are great, but none are bad. Some of the ones in here that I love is Herbert West - Reanimater, The Hound (scared the heck out of me!), The Outsider (the band Nile gets their debut album title from this book), Cool Air, The Lurking Fear, The Shadow Over Innsmouth (a Lovecraft classic), and others. If you're looking for any of the stories that are within the Cthulhu mythos, you won't find any here (though Shadow Over Innsmouth contains a brief reference to Cthulhu). You get sixteen stories, some awesome, some good, for a cheap price. If you want a collection with some of his best stories, then get The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and Macabre.

I'll be honest -- while I admire Lovecraft's innovative ideas as much as the next horror writer/aficionado, I've always found him over-rated as a storyteller. His prose is often needlessly dense and academic, and while he's great at describing a horrific image, he rarely creates an effective plot to wrap around it, or lets me connect with the characters experiencing all this on any human level*

* -- Poppy Z. Brite's "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood," available in the story collection, erm, "Wormwood." Both are essentially the same tale; in fact, Brite seems to have written the latter in homage to the former (further suggested, since she wrote the gushing forward to this volume). But Brite's work is far different in detail, concerned with bringing you into the heads and worlds of the two main characters, so you honestly care about them when the weird fit hits the shan.

Well, in a conversation regarding imaginative fiction, a friend mentioned how Lovecraft's style is honestly an acquired taste, but once you let yourself get used to the prose style, the heart of the tales grows more accessible.

So I idly picked up this volume, and man, was he ever right!

Also, before, I'd mostly only read HP's shorter works, which don't do justice to longer pieces. Numbers like "Herbert West - Reanimator" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" are where the author's real talent lies, since this is where he lets himself develop a proper narrative. I guess I'd avoided them 'til now, 'cause while I enjoyed the shorter pieces, I thought I'd only be able to enjoy the writing style in such small doses.

I should have bypassed all that, and gone straight to the good stuff, a lot of which you'll find in this volume.

Lovecraft's contribution to supernatural horror in literature was not primarily as a writer-it was his creation of what is usually called "The Cthulu Mythos"-a fictional connection between the stories he wrote.He created a mythology involving creatures that might be aliens or might be demons,who are worshipped by an intensely secret, violent cult."The Call of Cthulu" takes up loose ends from happenings literally all over the world and weaves them into a rope that will eventually hang the fictional author of the story.I loaned several collections of Lovecraft's books to a friend. After he returned them, I asked "Have you noticed that there is no dialogue in any of these stories?" The answer was no.Lovecrafts' dialogue,when it appears,is awful. The pep talk that the hero in "The Dunwich Horror" gives his men is ludicrous.But his power as a storyteller and the amazing mythology he develops are so powerful that the reader simply doesn't notice that none of the charecors ever say anything. One of his best works is an essay on horror fiction called "Supernatural Horror in Literature." Anyone interested in fiction-any kind of fiction-should read this brilliant essay. Lovecraft was a deeply troubled man, a racist,usually broke, and a writer who was simply incapable of writing believable dialogue. He was also a towering figure who's ability to leap from writing horror stories to creating a completely convincing cult based on supernatural creatures stranded on earth remains breathtaking. A complicated man who demands study

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a sickly child who suffered from night terrors--a dream state in which the dreamer cannot awaken from a bad dream. Many scholars believe these night terrors gradually motivated him to write, and that he drew from them in the creation of his stories, many of which were published in well-known magazines of the day. But like his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft found it impossible to support himself as a writer, and he gradually slipped into ever-deepening poverty. He died of a combination of cancer, Bright's disease, and (shockingly) malnutrition, unable to purchase food and unwilling to resort to charity.

Lovecraft was not what you might call a "natural born writer." His works are wordy and his construction painful. There is seldom much plot or character development, and it is rare to find much in the way of dialogue in any of his stories. He gives you page after page of narrative description. And like the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead, when he is good, he is very, very good, and when he is bad, he is horrid. At his worst, he is so tedious that he is virtually unreadable. At his best, he leads you through a series of uneasy images--and then suddenly sucker punches you in a way that makes your blood run cold.

Lovecraft created a "mythos" of ancient, largely evil, and completely alien gods and entities, and these often appear in his short stories--"The Dunwich Horror" is a good example--but while there is some reference to such in WAKING UP SCREAMING, most of the stories here have little to do with that particular segment of Lovecraft's writings. Some are dismisable, with "Cool Air," "The Terrible Old Man," and "The White Ship" at best ho-hum. Some, however, are among the best things Lovecraft wrote, most specifically "The Lurking Fear," "The Shadow over Innsmouth," "Herbert West--Reanimator," and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" among them. Although distinctly dated and too often relying on discoveries of ancient ruins and such, these particularly stories are still capable of chilling you to the very marrow of your bones.

Any collection of Lovecraft's work is a mixed bag in terms of quality and WAKING UP SCREAMING is all of that. Still, it's not a bad place for a new reader to be introduced to his work, and Poppy Z. Brite does a nice introduction to the collection. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

This book was nice and clean, and I was very pleased with it. It is important to me to have books in good shape.

What a GREAT book. Once you get used to the literary style of H.P.Lovecraft, he takes you away to a place where your imagination runs wild! I can't put the book down, and when I have to, I can't wait to get back to the story. And it's also good because it's short stories, so you don't get bogged down in a long story that goes on forever. I can't give this book a high enough review, it is great scary stuff.