Tales (2005) By H.P. Lovecraft

 

Several years ago, I read a short story by H.P. Lovecraft that I liked, then bought a collection of his works published by the Library of America titled Tales but never got around to reading it. More recently I saw the horror film The Reanimator, based on the one of Lovecraft’s early works, which has reawakened my interest. Lovecraft is renowned for his horror stories, and as the “father” of a sci-fi genre known as the Cthulu Mythologies.

The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Normally I’m a stickler about reading things in their written sequence, which has not been the case with my recent return to his short stories. The first should have been The Call of the Cthulu because it lays the groundwork for future works. In it, a young man narrates how he inherited the papers of his late granduncle, a professor who was a well-known authority on ancient inscriptions. With the papers is a locked box, the only item which was locked.

Inside is a document titled “Cthulhu Cult” and a mysterious looking clay-like icon with an undecipherable inscription, and an array of newspaper cutting about strange objects, secret societies and of recurrent dreams from around the world. [This was quaint, I’m actually old enough to remember newspaper “cutting services,” which along with library card catalogs died with Google and Wikipedia).

The nephew will spend the rest of the story pursuing the stories and having the icon analyzed – it is not an element known to man. What he discovers is an ancient civilization from another planet which battled and lost to another civilization, then fell to the Earth. It has been submerged under the sea, occasionally rising to the surface with its members then terrorizing people it comes across.

 The Color Out of Space (1927)

In a small farming community west of Arkham (a fictional New England town with a university that plays a role in several Lovecraft stories), a meteor has fallen in a field. Geology professors and other experts are unable to determine the mineral composition of the meteor rock. But it melts. Several months later crops and livestock have died, agricultural experts think that it could be the water table, but it tests okay. Then people begin to die, but only on the farm. People who came to help the family become engaged in a battle with strange creatures, when they withdraw, no one reports this to authorities, knowing that no one will believe them, but local people will avoid the farm property which is gray and unfertile forever.

 In the Mountains of Madness (1931)

This is the first story I read and blogged about, five years ago. It is an absolute horror story detailing an expedition to an unexplored region of Antarctica. A group of explorers set out from the ship to investigate a mountain range – they do not return. A search party is sent out uncovering the first group who had been hideously murdered and discovering an ancient non-Earth civilization living under the mountains. One member of the search party connects this reality to a story he once heard about (see The Call of the Cthulhu above). In his formal report on the expedition, he will not mention this but discourages further explorers from going there.

Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)

Innsmouth is a fishing and long-ago shipping town abandoned by tourists and industry alike. It is isolated from other nearby towns by marshes. A young man doing a tour of antiquarian towns in New England unknowingly plans a day trip to Innsmouth. Locals at Newburyport where he is waiting for the bus the next morning, have nothing nice to say about Innsmouth or the peculiar people who still live there. Years ago, a religious cult had arrived from Polynesia, they intermarried with the townspeople and had converted the entire town. The children of these marriages are rumored to be amphibians. People then began to disappear after attending mysterious meetings on a reef off the coast. Authorities will try to quell the rumors declaring it to be a bootleg operation and bomb the reef. The student will end up spending the night stuck in Innsmouth where he is targeted for death because he has learned too much trying to solve the mystery. I left a lot out of this brief recap; it is a masterpiece of horror, and of Cthulhu mythology.

Reanimator (1922)

The Reanimator is the source story of a horror movie I saw recently during a local theater’s scary Halloween month series. It is not part of the Cthulhu series. It is about a medical student who has created a serum that will bring people back to life if you can get to them soon enough after death. The movie is true to the plot, but definitely a B-movie, lots of gore, lots of unwarranted nudity. Did I mention lots of gore!

Other

There are twenty-two other short stories in the Library of America’s Tales, the collection of Lovecraft’s work, all in the horror and/or science fiction genre. I've not read them all yet, but I will.

Recommendation: Yes. These short stories make perfect bedtime reads.