In the Desert of Madness

Okay. Wow. The Shadow Out of Time. I’m still a bit shaken. He actually asks all of the questions that the reader is asking himself the entire time. The narrative combines the best of all the techniques he’s developed. It’s kind of perfect. It’s an exploratory novel that manages to remain suspenseful and frightening. It hints at the characters created in previous stories and manages to not over-burden the reader with them. I really can’t say much about it other that the fact that I think it’s perfect.

That missing nothing

I don't know what to think. The Dreams in the Witch House, and actually all of the later things have been generally more well-written. I'm not distracted by character or plot elements, but something of the atmosphere is definitely missing. I think the focus on tangible concepts and events is a big part of this. I think about The White Ship or Erich Zann - where the struggle is mostly internal - or at least a psychologist would attempt to to convince one that the struggle is internal -- but then something externalizes it. Even From Beyond is an excellent example of the internal struggle externalized. So while the Witch House has all of the elements of a really scary story, I think it's missing the internal struggle and focuses on the externalization of the events which (really?) are internal.
The Evil Clergyman and The Book are really just lacking development. The Clergyman is like a full short story with all of the important (read: scary) bits edited out and The Book is just an exposition - there's no development and the climax happens before the story even started. It could have been great: a character who doesn't know if the event he's relating are past, present or future. It would be a nightmare to try and organize into a comprehensible text, but if it succeeded, it would be amazing.

lovecraft really is a shitty novel writer, but the short stories are awesome

Okay, let's just skip the bad, At the Mountains of Madness was horrible. Aside from the fact that it used the increasingly over-used device of setting something in a remote place (Antarctica) , and being just an explanation of setting—which, being in Antarctica, really doesn’t get you far, it was really just an historical record his “Elder Ones” on Earth… with an occasional, “Oh yeah, I was scared” or, “and this reminded me of how frightened I was”. Honestly, it would have been an awesome short story had the exposition of their leaving New England been omitted, their travel and arrival, and the first exploration party’s demise been omitted, and the story started with the two–man rescue team looking for the first party. After that, omitting the fake history of the “Elder Ones” (which really added little to the story, excepting how the shoggoths came to be and evolve) and you’ve finally got an interesting story.
No, let's forget all that and focus on Innsmouth, which is one of the scarier stories. Who of us doesn’t have an unknown ancestor and who’s to say who, or what, that ancestor did? And our future is equally unknown to us. Additionally, it finally made “ancestral birth places” relative to someone who knows nothing about his.
I swear, it’s like he knows I’m reading these.

vacation, expatriotism and self-canonization

Okay, I've had my vacation. Read lots during that time: The Colour Out of Space, The Thing in the Moonlight, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in the Darkness and the fictional histories. What was up with those? It was like he intentionally wanted to canonize his characters and event, locations, and items. Okay as a personal study to make sure that the world he's created would stay true to itself it would be okay, but to publish it jest felt icky.
The horror stories were sufficiently horrifying, and read in broad daylight. Although I think I've figured out why this love of his hometown, or ancestral ground annoys: a) I'm an expat b) I'm a black American. If there were any ancestral feeling I'd probably have to a place, they'd be in Africa: somewhere I've never been. And I voluntarily left the place of my birth; possibly because I don't have any irrational feelings holding me there.

Damned Good

Wow, talk about damned good. Charles Ward is proving to be so much better than that last one that I can’t even remember its name. It’s got depth and maturity, stories within stories, character development that’s insanely good, references to ideas and characters in previous stories (what is up with his re-using names?) and an engaging and cohesive plot. It’s like he set out to write a short story and just expanded on details in the story by writing a short story. I’m only about halfway through the story [this update is actually going up late, and I’ve actually finished the story now, but I want to keep the continuity] and I’ve just pieced (okay, it was kind of given to us) together that Charles is Joseph Curwen and I’m really excited to see how the story comes together.

Well that sucked

I want my money back.
Or, since the whole collection only cost me $1.42, the last three or four days of my life I spent reading The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath back. I haven't been this disappointed in a novel since I didn't read Tess of the D’Urbervilless in English Lit. (sorry, Mrs. Stonehill). If it were all just an excuse to provide an introduction for Nyarlathotep, then it was an overly-long and overwrought one. If it were an attempt to create a single universe where all of the events of the previous stories are codified and brought together, is succeeded but at the expense of the read. (I think I now truly understand horror–the horror of a horrible novel._ If it were an attempt to cash in on a larger audience of novel readers, and make more money than with short stories, I hope he has better luck in the future, because this single novel wasn’t worth what I paid for the whole collection, and had it been the first thing of his I’d read, I wouldn’t continue (A Farewell to Arms says 'Hi!')
I’m generally not a fan of adventure stories, especially not ones with so much violence (there’s a lot of violence and war in this), but I thought because I genuinely enjoy the writing of the previous short stories, and the had the hope that the hallmarks I’ve seen the previous stories would become more apparent, I decided to keep reading. But the writing is bogged down in the detailing of events that the explanation of motive (or lack thereof) which makes the other stories so interesting is completely missing here. Even Herbert West, which uses the detailing of event to create mood still remembers to give the reader a very conspicuous lack of motive as to why his friend sticks around, and that makes the story all the more gruesome.
The next one had better be damned good.

Magic!!!

There is magic in the world. I think we all know this instinctively and it's an unfortunate series of events that leads us to forget it. I was lucky--I don't think my father ever truly forgot this fact, despite the best efforts of the world we live in to take this knowledge away form him. I think it was a conscious effort on his part to try and constantly remind me of this when I was younger--especially since I was part of the effort to take this knowledge away from him.

Randolph Carter and his silver key reminded me again. I constantly repeat that these stories were written with me specifically in mind, and the more I read, the more I am convinced of this. I know that I will forget again, and I hope that something in my future comes along to remind me.

Yes, I read The Call of Cthulhu and I think that there's nothing I can really say about it that hasn't already been said. It hasn't really affected me personally (and I hope it never does), so I'll leave the literary criticism to those more capable of it than I.