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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Mixed Blessing for HPL fans, March 25, 2002
Annotated Lovecraft--it sounds like a great idea, and it is. However, many of the annotations in this book seem unnecessary and irrelevant. Make no mistake, the stories themselves are some of HPL's best--"The Rats in the Walls," "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror," and the short novel "At the Mountains of Madness." A pretty good introduction by S. T. Joshi starts things off, and the final pages include some noteworthy comments on the art of writing horror (taken from some of Lovecraft's letters) and a short essay on the translation of Lovecraft's work into radio, TV, and film. This complementary material is very useful to someone just delving into the Lovecraftian universe, but the annotations are somewhat of a mixed bag.While some of Joshi's annotations are quite interesting and useful, many seem to me to be totally unnecessary; some, such as biographical material, is interesting but immaterial to the stories themselves. For every chemical Lovecraft mentions, Joshi gives us the chemical formula and scientific name, which is okay if somewhat excessive. When some of the trademark Lovecraft terms pop up (e.g., eldritch), Joshi defines them; however, he also explains to us how aeon is an alternate spelling of eon, immensurable is synonomous with immeasurable, etc.--there are several unneccessary footnotes in each story explaining what seems to me to be patently obvious. Joshi also is fond of taking a notion from the text and explaining how Lovecraft "may have" been thinking of this or that, often ending the note with a quote of several sentences from authors such as Poe, Bierce, etc.--sometimes valid, sometimes not, usually over-the-top. He is also fond of referring back to his own footnotes from earlier in the book each and every time a certain subject is mentioned, which I find annoying. Certainly, many of the annotations are useful, especially in the short novel At the Mountains of Madness. A good bit of the scientific nomenclature and theories, as well as geographic names, have changed since Lovecraft's time, and Joshi does the reader a great service in explaining what Lovecraft meant, what he was referring to, etc.; such important data contribute much to an understanding of the material and proper placement of the settings of the tales. While I would certainly recommend this book to Lovecraft readers, I would strongly suggest that anyone reading these stories for the first time ignore the footnotes completely. Besides sometimes giving away plot points to the current story and others, the footnotes totally interrupt the flow of your reading. To truly enjoy Lovecraft, you must immerse your mind in his language, structure, and flow. I don't think I can read any of these stories too many times, so rereading is more of a pleasure than a pain. Read these stories, move on to other things, then at some point come back and re-read the stories in conjunction with the annotations. You may well have to grin and bear it through many of the unneccessary, repetitive, and not entirely relevant footnotes, but you will gain some rewarding insights and make some new discoveries in these rich otherworldly tales by horror's greatest writer.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Contents of This Book, December 28, 2000
With so many different Lovecraft collections out there, it may help prospective buyers to know what's actually in this one:[By S. T. Joshi:] Acknowledgments; Introduction [an essay about H. P. Lovecraft and his fiction]; [By Lovecraft:] The Rats in the Walls [a short story]; The Colour Out of Space [another short story]; The Dunwich Horror [still another short story]; At the Mountains of Madness [a novella]; Lovecraft on Weird Fiction [excerpts from four letters to correspondents]; [By Joshi:] Lovecraft in the Media [an essay about dramatizations of Lovecraft's fiction in film, radio and television]; Select Bibliography But there's more: A scattering of achival photos of persons and places in Lovecraft's life; another scattering, this time of brief tributes to Lovecraft excerpted from various writers; introductions by Joshi to each of the featured pieces by Lovecraft; and, above all, footnotes, lots of footnotes, by Joshi at the bottoms of the pages. Most of the footnotes are pretty useful -- Lovecraft was a sophisticated, scholarly writer, and the typical contemporary (i.e. post-literary, electronic era) reader would miss or be stumped by many of his literary, historical, geographical and foreign language references. But too often Joshi goes beyond helping the reader better enjoy and appreciate Lovecraft's fiction, instead relating the fiction to picayune details of Lovecraft's personal life. For example, on p. 28, the first person narrator of a story includes this sentence: "My father died in 1904 [footnote 10], but without any message to leave me, or to my only child, Alfred [footnote 11], a motherless boy of ten." Footnote 10 reads: "In fact, it was not Lovecraft's father but his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904), who died on March 28, 1904. Lovecraft's father had been hospitalized in 1893 and died in 1898, and Whipple Phillips had in effect become his father." Footnote 11 reads: "Alfred: the name is possibly derived from Lovecraft's young friend Alfred Galpin (1901-1983). They had come into contact in 1918 and remained voluminous and close correspondents to the end of Lovecraft's life. When Lovecraft first met Galpin in Cleveland in August 1922, he addressed him as 'my son Alfredus' (Selected Letters, I, 191)." Give me a break! That's important material for a detailed biography of Lovecraft -- and Joshi has written and had published just such a book elsewhere -- but of little significance to the reader simply trying to get at the meaning and intrinsic pleasure of a work of fiction. Who but a biographical researcher would want to be distracted by such stuff? So on the one hand Joshi speaks to the stuffiest scholar, and yet often talks down to the reader who's reasonably well-educated. Do we really need to be told what Druids were (p. 30), or who the Marquis de Sade was (p. 32), or what silicon is (p. 66)? Nonetheless, read discriminately, the annotations are helpful for better fathoming Lovecraft. As to the printing of the volume, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the typeface of the main texts is large and easy to read. (The annotations are quite small, though.) The bad news is that the text is rife with typos. Dell Publishing, get your act together! In sum, this book (and its sequel, More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) probably belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Lovecraft reader, right next to Arkham House' Lovecraft collections. The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (like its sequel, More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) is a handy and inexpensive reference for some of Lovecraft's best stories. A warning, though: Don't read Joshi's footnotes on a first reading of a Lovecraft story -- allow yourself to follow Lovecraft's narrative uninterrupted so you can capture the mood and sense of surprise that lie within.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One more layer of the onion..., January 3, 2001
This is definitely not a "beginner's" Lovecraft. For those who are taking their first glance, I recommend "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)." or "Best of H.P. Lovecraft : Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre ." It is also not an "expert's" Lovecraft, who have already tackled the fine Arkham House "Selected Letters" volumes, or such arcane tomes as "The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft : The Route to Horror (New Studies in Aesthetics, Vol. 29)."What it is, is an "intermediate's" Lovecraft, perfect for those who enjoy his stories, and want to peel back one small layer of the onion and look beneath the surface. The volume focuses on his major works, and the annotations range from the broad, such as definitions of words, to the minute, such as genealogy of local towns. There is a nice selection of photographs of Lovecraft's early homes and some locations of stories. The annotations also include some informative biographical notes that help explain his stories, such as Lovecraft's fear of seafood and the cold, or the fact that he was dressed as a little girl when he was a baby. Definitely read other editions of his works first, so that you may enjoy his stories as stories. Then, when you want to take one small step further, give this annotated edition a try.
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