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

Keith the Thief wrote:
"At the Mountains of Madness" is a must.

I also agree about Derleth and Lumley.

I can tolerate some of Derleth's material, but I found Lumley absolutely awful.

Lumley is actually quite a bit better when he's NOT abusing Lovecraft's themes and creations. Unfortunately, he doesn't stray from the cash cow very often....

Mike B.

Other speculative fiction writers from the Golden Era who I've always enjoyed include Frederick Brown and Avram Davidson.

Brown is just too funny for words, and Davidson's stuff is definitely a diamond in the rough.

jasonw1239 wrote:
The best of his mythos based stories is the Arkham House book Horror at Oakdeen, but I believe that has been out of print for a number of years now.

I've seen it once or twice at a bookstore in Birmingham that specializes in OOP books.

Here's a link to an online shop that has it for sale for $125:
http://www.biblio.com/books/24119150.html

Keith the Thief wrote:
My advice regarding Lovecraft is to read his stuff slowly.  His prose is dense.  It's not "beach reading".  

Character development was not Lovecraft's strong suit, but his mythology, for me, greatly outweighs any drawbacks in characterization.

Those stories are a great place to start.  Do you happen to know which "best of" anthology it is (i.e., who's the editor?).

If you like those, I strongly encourage you get the Arkham House anthologies edited by S.T. Joshi and read those.  It's a four volume set, and, IMHO, contain the stories in the order in which they should be read.

Enjoy.

Keith

I first read Lovecraft slowly, over a number of years, starting when I was (maybe) in the 6th grade.

The first story I read was The Dunwich Horror.  It impressed me both with the frightening proposition of an invisible behemoth, but also with the sense that there are things close-but-not-visible that our feeble human minds would rather not know about...enormous presences, looming over our shoulders, that we have always sensed, but do not want to see.

I became a Lovecraft fan when I was in college and I read Lin Carter's biography, Lovecraft; A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos.

I accordingly set out to collect every publication on Lin Carter's list of Cthulhu mythos stories in the appendixes of that book.  (It was still possible in those days...when 1950's-70's editions of the classic paperbacks were still on used bookstore shelves...as opposed to the current glut of fantasy re-hash novels apparently written by, for and about lesbian tree-huggers).  I had nearly entirely succeeded when the game Call of Cthulhu appeared and made Cthulhu a pop star.

Lovecraft's genius was not in his writing skills or in his brilliant story-telling.  Most of his stories run a fairly typical route:

1)  Find book/learn secret
2)  Discover the awful truth
3)  Write about it in a journal...preferably one that starts by warning everyone not to read it.
4)  Go mad/run screaming/die/disappear - or all of them at once.

Where Lovecraft was brilliant was in achieving his major goal...to invoke in the reader a sense of cosmic horror (an over-used phrase today, but new when Lovecraft started)...a sense that creation and everything in it is not really the way we think it is...and that mankind does not know everything and by God doesn't want to know everything.

His writings are a wonderful relic of the first half of the 20th century...when science had begun to make lives better and less bearable at the same time.  Science had begun to create monsters as well as miracles...which was the theme of almost every horror and science fiction movie of the century.  Essentially, every sci-fi/horror genre film of the era owes something to Lovecraft...which is why virtually every writer in the twin genres has written some sort of Lovecraft homage story.  Very few writers can claim to have had so much influence...possibly only Tolkien and Howard.

(Judging by the commercials I see on TV, we are no longer so much afraid of science.  We apparently have gone back to being afraid of witches and the restless dead.  Also, we have the wierd new theme that vampires are sexy and everyone needs an erotic experience with a blood-bloated walking corpse.  It strikes me that we have more to fear from science...and possibly from whatever makes sex with the leering dead attractive to so many people.)

Most recently, I have been interested in reading the works of the author who most influenced Lovecraft.  One could argue that the entire inspiration for all of Lovecraft's work can be found in two poems by Edgar Alan Poe:  Dream-Land and The City in the Sea.  Toss in Robert Chambers and Ambrose Bierce and you pretty well have the soil where Lovecraft's ideas took root.

Mark  

Lovecraft was not any more or less racist than a lot of people in his era.

Ever read a Tarzan story?

Mark  

Keith the Thief wrote:Have you read Shadows Bend by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh?

According to the cover, the main characters are Lovecraft and R.E. Howard on cross-country quest.  It sounds pretty good, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.

Another good collection is Shadows over Baker Street by Michael Reaves and John Pelan.  It's a series of Holmes/Watson stories where they encounter Lovecraft's mythos.  I found it quite good, especially the story by Neil Gaiman.

Keith

Shadows Bend is absolutely abominable. Throwing aside the fact that nothing happens, and nothing makes sense, and more time is spent on a completely silly and useless secondary character that seems to be a Mary-Sue for the author, the characterization of REH and HP seems forced and silly.  Now, the idea is quite interesting and I would love to read a story like this that made sense, but skip this one.....

Mike B.

Badmike wrote:
Shadows Bend is absolutely abominable. Throwing aside the fact that nothing happens, and nothing makes sense, and more time is spent on a completely silly and useless secondary character that seems to be a Mary-Sue for the author, the characterization of REH and HP seems forced and silly.  Now, the idea is quite interesting and I would love to read a story like this that made sense, but skip this one.....

Mike B.

Bummer.  I was hoping it would be a good account of HPL's and REH's personalities, but that is quite obviously not the case.  Thanks for the tip.