Thurston reads of “ an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.” While going through the papers of his recently deceased grand-uncle, he comes across an awful-looking sculpture and a manuscript detailing his grand-uncle’s findings with regards to the sculpture. The story is told in first person by Francis Wayland Thurston and, despite being short, is divided into 3 parts. The sciences… have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. “ The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. The way he weaves his choice of words together is almost poetic as seen in the opening lines: Lovecraft’s use of language is one of the things that stuck with me after reading this story way back when. John is a mangled corpse I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way.”Īt just over 6 pages, I couldn’t read this story fast enough!Įven though ‘ The Call of Cthulhu’ is one of the few stories I’ve read before, it does not suffer from repeated reading. “ In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound… St. I admire Lovecraft’s ability to hook the reader and make them want to read more, feeding their morbid curiosity. ‘ The Hound’… oh my gosh, the hound! Again, the opening lines really fed my imagination.

I liked that it wasn’t ‘in-your-face’ horror but more psychological with just enough description to be unsettling with so much left to the reader’s imagination.

“ … I can bear the torture no longer and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below… When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.” ‘ Dagon’ sets the tone well with its opening lines: The majority of the stories are told in first-person, usually in the form of manuscripts, letters or diary entries I think it adds to the sense of mounting horror. I’m not going to go through each story, but I’ll pick the ones I particularly enjoyed. The 23 stories, listed in ‘date of publication’ order from 1923 to 1936, are:

The complete tales of hp lovecraft