Welcome to my monthly book recommendation for October! Every month, I recommend a book that I’ve personally read and find worthwhile enough to recommend to my own readers. In each monthly post, I’ll introduce the book, discuss why I found reading it worthwhile, and the major themes the book touches upon. I won’t include any major spoilers, but I may discuss some of the characters and specific details or locations from within the book.
My recommendation for October 2024 is The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales, a compilation of stories written by H.P. Lovecraft.
The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales - H.P. Lovecraft
Available on Amazon
Authors: H.P. Lovecraft
Genres: Fiction, Horror
Description:
The Cthulhu Mythos was H. P. Lovecraft’s greatest contribution to supernatural literature: a series of stories that evoked cosmic awe and terror through their accounts of incomprehensibly alien monsters and their horrifying incursions into our world. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales collects 23 of Lovecraft’s greatest weird tales, including “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Colour out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and “The Shadow out of Time.” It also features six collaborative “revisions” through which Lovecraft expanded the scope of his dark mythology.
In these stories, monstrous entities traverse the gulfs of time and space and humankind cowers in fright at the havoc they wreak. The Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is your passport to realms of unimaginable horror.
My Thoughts
H.P. Lovecraft has a fascinating writing style. I was taken aback by his unique sense of pacing and use of vocabulary upon my first reading of one of his short stories. He has a way of creating an atmosphere of subdued tension, a low but intense burn that persists throughout the progression of the story. Though the events of the story may ebb and flow, a certain baseline level of pressure is ever-present, serving as the foundation upon which imaginative and potentially horrifying sequences of events are built. He uses sophisticated vocabulary, especially in comparison with other authors. This is enjoyable in the sense that it allows him to paint rich, vibrant fictional landscapes and pique the reader’s fascination within these landscapes, but it may be problematic for those who are not avid readers, as they may find themselves googling words repeatedly. If you’re a writer, reading H.P. Lovecraft may help you improve your writing vocabulary, as I suspect it has begun to do for mine.
Complete Cthulhu Mythos Tales is a compilation of some of Lovecraft’s best works. When I first purchased a copy, I was excited to delve into the world of Cthulhu, as my only prior exposure to this mythos was the occasional pop culture reference and a recent reading of The Call of Cthulhu, one of the short stories included in this book. To my disappointment, this compilation didn’t include stories that focused on Cthulhu, but mostly included stories that contained off-hand references to the character, and a few stories that didn’t reference it at all. That is my only complaint about this book. In my opinion, everything else was phenomenal.
Lovecraft’s stories introduced me to the world of fictional horror. Prior to reading this book, my only exposure to this was in the form of the occasional horror movie I’d casually watched every now and then over the years. What an introduction it was! I’d always been skeptical about the possibility of experiencing horror from a fictional book, and I still am even after reading this book, but in the place of horror, Lovecraft has instilled another feeling, something I can’t quite describe. Perhaps it’s an analogue of a scary image as seen on a computer monitor: any fear it inspires is nominal compared to actual fear of danger to yourself, but it still evokes something, deep in the unconscious mind, however small that evocation may be.
These stories are the product of a brilliant imagination, one that reaches into the realms of incomprehensible size and aeonic time. As I read through the stories in this book, I witnessed a definite increase in the magnitude of this fictional universe and in the ambition of imaginative speculation. The order of stories in this compilation is roughly chronological, so I suspect that as the author improved in his craft over the years, he pushed his own boundaries to write longer, more challenging stories.
This is heavy reading, especially if you follow my recommendation of reading the entire book front-to-back, instead of jumping around stories. It’s six hundred pages, large pages, of dense writing. Density isn’t a bad thing, so long as it’s masterfully executed, but it does mean that the book will take longer to read than your typical book, even of the same size. I read the entire thing cover to cover in roughly 15 days, most of it during my daily commutes on the train, but let me say, that was an intense, fatiguing 15 days. In comparison, I read the entirety trilogy of The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a combined 1,515 pages, in just under two weeks, an almost-equally intense exercise. I have a habit of doing that with books that resonate with me, perhaps the old-fashioned version of Netflix binging, which I’ve also done once or twice.
H.P. Lovecraft is a classic author with timeless works of art. I recommend that you, and everyone, give at least a small handful of his short stories a chance, even if you’re skeptical about the genre or time period of his writings, as it will be an immensely rewarding experience.
