I have to travel to Charlotte, NC for my job this week - I'll be there Sunday through Friday.  This will actually give me quite a bit of free time to read . . . so I stopped by the local used book store and finally picked up some H.P. Lovecraft . . .   I've yet to ever actually read any Lovecraft, so I'm looking forward to it.

It's a "Best Of" book, but it seems to have most of the titles I've heard of before:

Call of Cthulhu
Whisperer in Darkness
Dunwich Horror
Thing on the Doorstep
Shadow Over Inssmouth
Haunter of the Dark

etc. etc.

Beyondthebreach wrote:Call of Cthulhu
Whisperer in Darkness
Dunwich Horror
Thing on the Doorstep
Shadow Over Inssmouth
Haunter of the Dark

You're in for a treat with most of those. Good ol' H.P. ... he was one creepy dude.  

The ironic part is that youi'll probably feel right at home, having bought/sold/traded/ or heard of gaming items with those titles over the years.

Anyone read the military scifi stuff from authors like John Ringo and David Weber?  Not the deepest reads by any stretch but fun, action filled reading nevertheless

Beyondthebreach wrote:
"Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre" with an introduction by Robert Bloch.

That's part of the Del Rey series of Lovecraft books, and works well as a starting point.

Of all the non-Arkham House publishers, I prefer the newer Penguin series, but it's not like the stories are any different among the various editions, just the order and supplementary material from the editors.

I'm a little envious.  I would love to be just now starting on Lovecraft.

Beyondthebreach wrote:
Recently, a friend of mine got me all the Robert E. Howard Conan stories - I've read about half of them.  They are really fantastic.  I still have several more to go . . . I kind of spread them out so they aren't all done at once.

Interesting you should mention that, because I was thinking about this thread earlier, and about all the various authors mentioned here, and how I'd never read any REH.  That might well be worth checking out.

I do remember reading a number of Fritz Leiber's "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" books back in the day.  Those were very enjoyable.

Beyondthebreach wrote:I have to travel to Charlotte, NC for my job this week - I'll be there Sunday through Friday.  This will actually give me quite a bit of free time to read . . . so I stopped by the local used book store and finally picked up some H.P. Lovecraft . . .   I've yet to ever actually read any Lovecraft, so I'm looking forward to it.

It's a "Best Of" book, but it seems to have most of the titles I've heard of before:

Call of Cthulhu
Whisperer in Darkness
Dunwich Horror
Thing on the Doorstep
Shadow Over Inssmouth
Haunter of the Dark

etc. etc.

That collection is pretty definitive, you should get enough there to know whether or not to try to find some of his more obscure works.  I don't believe Mountains of Madness is in there; Horror at Red Hook, The Festival, and The Temple are three more that aren't in that collection but worth hunting down.  Maybe some day you'll get like me....having read all the Lovecraft stories dozens of times each, I spend my time seeking out the best pastiches from other horror authors.  Some of these are pretty awful (aka Derleth and most of Lumley) but there are a few gems there also.  TED Klein's "Black Man With a Horn" and Brian McNaughton's "Throne of Bones" are two exceptions.  

Mike B.

jasonw1239 wrote:I have been working my way through some of the Chaosium collections of Lovecraft based work, some are good and others are...just ok.

Robert M. Price is the series editor and writes the intros for the stories. He was the editor of Crypt of Cthulhu publication for 17 years and is a professor of theology so he brings an interesting perspective to the overall mythos.

In my opinion some of the better books from that series are:
Tales Out of Innsmouth
The Disciples of Cthulhu
The Dunwich Cycle
The Nyarlathotep Cycle
The Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays

I am not sure if they are all still in print, but they do come up quite often on eBay.

The Pagan Publishing fiction is also quite good and still in print.
Denied to the Enemy
Dark Theatres
Rules of Engagement

They can still be ordered through the Pagan Publishing site
Tynes Cowan Corporation

or through Arkham Bazaar
Arkham Bazaar: H.P. Lovecraft DVDs, Cthulhu T-shirts and stickers, Miskatonic University, Role-playing and board games, Movies, Sculptures, Books, Posters, Gifts, and more

The Innsmouth collection is probably the best.  Disciples of Cthulhu is based on a 70's collection and is uniformly excellent.  As far as I know, Ramsey Campbell's "The Tugging" is the only Mythos story ever nominated for a major award (the Nebula award, I believe).  Brian McNaughton's collection "Throne of Bones" won the World Fantasy Award, but it's really less a Lovecraft pastiche and more a Clark Ashton Smith/Lovecraft/REH/Weird Tales pastiche...
 Personally thought the Necronomicon collection was a waste of time...too many quasi-serious and boring "essays" that are based on a fictional work and ultimately useless.  
 Also, modern master Stephen King has dabbled in the Cthulhu Mythos, sometimes successfully. "Jeruselum's Lot" is a very passable Mythos tale with nods of the head to stories such as "Rats in the Walls" and others.  Didn't much care for "Crouch End" or some of the others....
  Oh, almost forgot, Karl Edward Wagner wrote one of the most incredible Lovecraft/Mythos homages ever, "River of Night's Dreaming". Absolutely stunning piece of fiction!

Mike B.

Badmike wrote:  Personally thought the Necronomicon collection was a waste of time...too many quasi-serious and boring "essays" that are based on a fictional work and ultimately useless.  

Mike B.

The Necronomicon book, while having some sections that are somewhat...dry also has a couple of the best "mood" short stories that I have encountered in the Chaosium series.
I thought that the Manly Wade Wellman story "The Terrible Parchment" provided some useful atmospheric twists and the "Settler's Wall" story by Robert A. W. Lowndes made great use of the principals of a Mobius loop in a physical setting that meshed well with the Lovecraftian themes of strange angles and geometries.

Some of the Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp sections could probably have been skipped (I have always found their treatment of other authors work consistently inconsistent   )
The Robert M. Price essay "A Critical Commentary on the Necronomicon" in the back of the book is a bit long but does cover how so called 'forbidden books' have been treated throughout history and how the writings of various religions and cults tend to be conveniently modified/edited/retranslated for their immediate purposes over time.

Munafik wrote:For those of you like myself that have read everything Lovecraft and his colleagues wrote, and am looking for something novel-length that reads like his work, then may I suggest picking up a copy of N.C. Henneberg's The Green Gods.

Munafik,

Green Gods sounds like it'd be right down my alley.  I'll definitely have to hunt down a copy of that.

Thanks for the suggestion,
Keith