i was reminiscing the other day about how i was first introduced to h.p. lovecraft. i had a friend in highschool who was reading up quite a few of the del ray lovecraft publications at the time. this publication run were the books with the mostly greyscale covers that contained one element of the color red. these books were widely available in bookstores at the time.

anyways, i got one of the books myself to find out what was so alluring about lovecraft. after reading some of the shorter stories in the book i actually didn’t find myself getting into it so much. i blame this on youthful impatience and partially on del ray for including a lot of the obscure lovecraft stories in the dream/fantasy genre. i don’t mean to portray that lovecraft’s dream/fantasy work is bad, a lot of it is very interesting…it’s just in my opinion that these are horrible introductory lovecraft stories. i didn’t give up on lovecraft entirely and eventually came across a story that i felt was fairly gripping – “the shadow over innsmouth”. i thought it was a creepy and fascinating story and it felt like nothing i had read before.

even though i found a story i really liked i ended up putting down lovecraft as i moved on to read other things (something i’ve been guilty of nearly my whole life). just a few years ago i was reading a horror story compilation that contained “the temple” by lovecraft. i liked this story and it renewed my interest in lovecraft. i began reading lots of lovecraft stories i had never came across before and found quite a few personal favorites. in my opinion his best stories are the ones that are border-line science fiction. i’m actually annoyed by the fact that the masses only seem to go on about “the call of cthulhu”. i think that’s a great story too, but in the present time it seems to have overshadowed all of  his other work. even worse is that cthulhu has turned into a dimwitted meme. i often wonder if these people have read any lovecraft at all…

some of my top favorites:
“the music of erich zann”
“from beyond”
“cool air”
“the colour out of space”
“the whisperer in darkness”
“in the walls of eryx”
“pickman’s model”
“herbert west–reanimator”

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