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H. P. Lovecraft was a rather strange person. He had a philosophical point to make, and made it in many of his stories. He believed that human intelligence was incapable of making sense of the Universe, and therefore that we perceive the Universe not as it is, but as we are capable of understanding it. There is nothing new in this idea to anybody who has read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Lovecraft added the concept that we can find out about things that we can't understand, and therefore that learning things is extremely dangerous. It's not a philosophy I find attractive, but he did write some very good stories about it.
The standard Lovecraft story (if I can overgeneralize) is slow-paced but very powerful. There is little physical action. The point-of-view character is a scholar or other respectable person who slowly becomes involved in researching some oddity or other, and stumbles across a horrible secret. The story gains credence for the reader in being reasonably told, and with oddities coming first, culminating in the secret. This is an excellent formula to produce horror, and Lovecraft is usually considered a horror writer.
Unfortunately, Lovecraft suffered from ham-handed editors. His stories attempt to set moods to complement ideas, and this is best done with a consistent literary style. Lovecraft was an excellent writer for this purpose, but he also considered himself an old-fashioned gentleman who wouldn't dream of arguing with an editor. Of late, S.T. Joshi has recreated the stories as best he could, working from original manuscripts. He was able to find these for many stories, but for some (including some of the best) he had to go with lesser sources. These are the editions I recommend. I don't know what other editions have the better texts and what simply reprint the old magazines.
Lovecraft also suffered from his loyal fans. After his death, August Derleth founded a publishing house called Arkham House, primarily to publish Lovecraft's writings. He publicized them and wrote his own fiction with Lovecraft's settings, and using some of Lovecraft's discarded scraps (referring to these as collaborations). He had a very different viewpoint than Lovecraft's, and his became the most well-known. Derleth's ideas were to tell stories of great beings of good and evil, and how people coped with them. Lovecraft's ideas were to tell stories of great beings to which our ideas of good or evil are irrelevant, and to depict people unable to cope, or coping by flight. To Derleth, if there were evil beings there would have to be good counterparts; to Lovecraft, the major beings were not evil, but could be extremely harmful to humans without giving it a thought, and "good" beings were not only unnecessary in the scheme of things but mostly inconceivable. After all, how would rabbits characterize humans as good or evil?
The main stories:All contents of these pages Copyright 1997 by David H. Thornley.