HP Lovecraft - Classic Or Dud?

Start with the three-volume Penguin set (or the equivalent Arkham House editions if you can find them at a library). Go forThe Call of Cthulhu (Penguin) or The Dunwixh Horror (Arkham House) first.

Or if you mean an individual story, try The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space or The Whisperer in Darkness.

individual stories won't really do it tho. you kinda have to immerse.

telephone thing otm

lmao the whisperer in darkness is fucking hilarious

he does a lot of different styles and i agree w/ rogermexico about immerse

which is probably why the best anthologies front load w/ a ton of short pieces

the shorter pieces tend toward more fantastic and the longer ones tend toward straightlaced w/ a twist at the end

i think starting with the more overtly weird stories helps you suspend disbelief when you read the long investigative ones (mountains of madness, call of cthulhu, dunwich horror, shadow out of innsmouth, etc)

Barnes & Noble has the complete stories of H.P. Lovecraft for like 13 bucks in their store. If you have a Kindle, it's public domain, so you can find all of it in the e-reader format for free.

Here you go: http://cthulhuchick.com/free-complete-lovecraft-ebook-nook-kindle/

Via Gotham City Comics:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/251640_4279510598751_771978851_n.jpg

brilliant

post on FB so i can share it

that's terrific

xpost -- Already did! Check earlier in my timeline today.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.8144

Fuck, he was right!

http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/rawfile/2013/03/Seal-660x933.jpg

:D

VINDICATED

classic. fucking obsessed with this stuff right now.

Like Poe in that, assuming you're a certain kind of child, you go from taking the stories (and sensibility) overly seriously during early adolescence, perhaps dismissing it when you reach young adulthood, and then coming back to it and finding it's still possible to really enjoy and even take seriously these strange American authors.

An impossibly ancient city of lizard-things hidden under the desert, imagined in obsessive detail = immune to satire.

Also, everyday life in Arizona AMIRITE

My new roommate is a fellow appreciator so if you ever hear about us being killed by squamous things you know what to blame.

good interview with pre-eminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi
http://heathenharvest.org/2014/01/12/gods-of-the-godless-a-discussion-on-h-p-lovecraft-with-s-t-joshi/

thanks for linking that!

he looks like a badass

What if HP Lovecraft was Cornish?

http://cthrnwall.blogspot.co.uk/

thinking about reading some of the lovecraft i never read - what editions do you guys have? as a kid i had this one and it did the job: http://www.amazon.co.uk/H-P-Lovecraft-Omnibus-Mountains/dp/0586063226/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445677683&sr=1-5&keywords=hp+lovecraft

there are tonnes on amazon. does it even matter?

I have the Barnes and Noble edition of his complete fiction. It's a chronological compilation of the Joshi editions, it's a hardcover, it's cheap, and it's everything in one volume.

as a kid I had the Ballantine paperbacks with John Holmes covers, those paintings still creep me out

arkham house editions for meeee

Those Ballantine covers really used to creep me out as well.

Wow, I've never seen those, pretty gruesome

Ballantine Adult Fantasy series editions for me (HP's and Clark Ashton Smith's stuff)

I always got the four Arkham House editions from the library when I was a kid- The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, and The Horror In the Museum and Other Revisions. The current Penguin Classics (3 volumes) are pretty great, still under Joshi's stewardship, and AFAIK just as complete (albeit without the revisions and collaborations).

http://www.hippocampuspress.com/h.p-lovecraft/fiction/variorum-lovecraft

This is the definitive edition, there will be cheaper paperback versions eventually.

Friends used to live near a sex shop called Lovecraft. Not very appealing. Now it's a deli, which is also unappealing because just how clean or those surfaces really?

I dig the annotated versions from ST Joshi

Has anybody read Victor Lavelle's "Ballad of Black Tom"? I really dug it. Much like Mat Johnson's _Pym_, you have modern black American writers taking some of HPL's really racist-ass shit and repurposing/reclaiming it to both comment on how fucked it was but also function as cosmic horror itself.

Here's Victor on Fresh Air a coupla months back:

http://www.npr.org/2016/02/29/468558238/the-ballad-of-black-tom-offers-a-tribute-and-critique-of-lovecraft

Yeah, I read it. It was good but too short. Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country is superficially related, and also well worth reading - one of the best books I've read so far this year, in fact.

https://www.cnet.com/news/hagfish-spill-oregon-highway-101-slime-eels/

Turns out "Cthulhu fthagn!" is the sound of him sneezing on the highway.

This adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a podcast series is fun. It’s a bit cackhanded in places, which is inevitable, and suffers from English actors doing American accents a bit, but it’s otherwise pretty good i think.

i see with interest that the sound engineer is David Thomas. That’s surely a fairly common name, but when I see it was recorded in Brighton and Leeds where DT of Pere Ubu lives, it does make me wonder.

nope different guy. obviously.

David Thomas lives in Leeds??!!?

ffs Lewes. autocorrect.

Phew, I wondered if the old fella had taken leave of his senses.

i think i was the one who had taken leave of my senses thinking that an old cantankerous and ill rock musician would be doing sound engineering for a bbc radio series.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/cms/attachment/65a792d7-c485-4b78-b428-916f62ead13e/rspb20182792f03.gif

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.2792

Sollasina cthulhu! so cute!

....two columns of four adradial plates each and nine plated tube feet per ambulacral area; plates of non-peristomial tube feet arranged in longitudinal rows; aboral thecal plates with strong granular ornamentation.

accursed!

Awww, who's a cute little Old One?

Yes but did they worship shoggoths
https://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Scientists-say-monster-penguin-once-swam-New-14302988.php