Happy birthday to the high priest of weird, H.P. Lovecraft! The Gentleman from Providence may no longer be among us, but his legacy remains. Musicians, artists, filmmakers and writers continue to add to the considerable body of work known as the Cthulhu Mythos. As long as the tendrils of tentacled horrors from beyond continue to weed their way into popular culture Lovecraft will never die. To quote his story, The Nameless City:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
yet with stranger aeons, even Death may die.
Lovecraft left a large body of work behind, much of which varies in both quality and style. It’s difficult to recommend a starting place for the Lovecraft neophyte. To further complicate matters, his stories and poems have been published in hundreds of complications, anthologies and single novellas. Finding your way into the Mythos can be difficult, to say nothing of the author’s way with words; an acquired taste to say the least.
The good news is that there are several inexpensively priced anthologies in both e-print and paper formats, and you can find a large assortment of them available via any book retailer. Random House offers an inexpensive mass market paperback collection called Waking Up Screaming that features several of Lovecraft’s more accessible stories. Grab it and just flip around a bit. Don’t worry about reading straight through; find a story that piques your interest and give it a whirl. Lovecraft’s stories are largely united by theme rather than plot, and while some characters and entities do recur now and again, it’s no impediment to the adventurous reader looking to test the waters. Speaking of testing “the waters”, may I recommend one of my favorites? It’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, included in this volume, a fishy tale of polluted bloodlines and ancient secrets in an old New England town.
Good choice! “Shadow” is a really good one to start with… it even has a chase in it!