All righteo, boys and girls, listen up here. I have, by this time, accumulated a whole shelfload of H.P. Kovecraft collections. Some of them are short, some of them are long. Some of them are scholarly and filled with notes, some of them are popular, with nary a notation at all. Some of them are cheap paperbacks, some of them are Arkham House collector's editions. Some of them are general, some of them are very specialized.
But if i could have only one collection by H.P. Lovecraft, it would be _The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre_ (1983) , with the introduction by Robert Bloch. None of Lovecraft's novels are included, but the collection does contain seventeen of his very best short stories. Moreover, the _balance_ of stories seems to be about right. The last ten stories (beginning with "The Call of Cthulhu") may be called Cthulhu (pronounced "thullu") mythos tales. The first seven stories are not. Two stories ( "The Outsider" and "The Silver Key") are classified as dream stories, and one of those stories ("The Silver Key") is a Randolph Carter tale. Two stories ("The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Out of Time") are science fiction tales. Most Lovecraftian horror stories invoke the supernatural, but three stories ("The Rats in the Walls, "The Picture on the Wall," and "In the Vault" ) are masterpieces of the macabre that do not rely on the supernatural at all. So there is a fair amount of variety. All of these stories appeared between 1924 and 1936 in _Weird Tales_, except for three stories: "The Colour Out of Space" (_Amazing_, 1927), "The Shadow Out of Time" (_Astounding_, 1936), and "Shadow Over Innsmouth" (which was a 1936 pamphlet of limited circulation). None of these stories is posthumous.
Let us start with the dream stories, "The Silver Key" and "The Outsider". I have always felt that Randolph Carter was something of a weak-tea hero, since his main talent seems to be to retreat into dream worlds. Carter (like other dream-heroes of Lovecraft) seems to be modeled heavily on Lovecraft himself. L. Sprague de Camp once shrewdly noted that there is often a self-pitying note to some of the dream stories. The hero is considered too high-toned and sensitive for a crass, uncaring, and materialistic world.. This self-indulgence mars "The Siver Key" a bit. But there _are_ some visions of some beautiful worlds.
Damon Knight long ago noted that "The Outsider is marred by Lovecraft's tendency to use "unspeakable" and "unnameable" languaage and a trick ending. Yet Lovecraft does build up an atmosphere in spite of it all.
I don't believe that "The Music of Erich Zann" has ever been formally classed as a "dream story" of Lovecraft. But in many ways, it seems to be a dreamlike tale-- with its hero of uncertain origins, its mysterious Paris street, and the wild music fending demons off from another dimension. Lovecraft seems to have inspired a multitude of rock musicians, but this is the only story by Lovecraft that I know of that deals directly with music.
"Pickman's Model" deals with art and has that opening line echoing a number of Edgar Alan Poe stories: "You needen't think I'm crazy, Eliot..." It continues on to a portrait of a most unsavory artist long abandoned by Boston society for very good reason. The closing line to the story is one that Joanna Russ used as the title for one of her stories.
"The Rats in the Walls," "The Picture in the House," and "In the Vault," are all traditional macabre horror tales-- something owing a strong debt to Edgar Alan Poe's tales of psychological horror. Like Poe's stories, they come to an abrupt conclusion once the main story is told. They do not waste an additional word. I suspect that these are among Lovecraft's most oft-reprinted stories, the tales upon which he first made his reputation.
The remaining ten stories are all "Cthulhu Mythos" stories. But it is importantto recognize how Lovecraft viewed this series of stories. He never took it very seriously and was never very consistent from story to story in his treatment of Cthulhu and the Elder Gods. Sometimes they were treated as a race of super aliens, sometimes as a race of malignant ancient gods. In most stories Cthulhu never appears onstage for more than a few seconds-- if at all. The systemizing of the mythos was really the work of later writers working Lovecraft's universe, such as August Derleth.
Let us start with the science fictional tales, "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow out of Time". The first story is about the life form on a meteorite that deadens a New England countryside. The second is about a member of an expedition to Australia who tumbles into a massive alien library. There was a lovely cover to _Astounding_ by that illustrated "The Shadow Out of Time," though it was a bit on the whimsical side and did not capture the feeling of horror that Lovecraft wished to convey in his story. For my money, "The colour Out of Space" and "The Shadow Out of Time" remain two of Lovecraft's very best tales, because they are better plotted and contain some of his sharper description.
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