The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft

This book titled Necronomicon was written by H.P Lovecraft . It is all of his stories in one book. His way of writing for his time was unheard of his ventures onto the dark side!!!! Some of his wording in his storys were kind of confusing but that is what a dictionary is for. I recomend this book if you are into stories that are dark and evil.

My copy had come in the mail right on time and the book (while it did have some scuffing) was in good condition and was had no damage to the spine. The book I bought was used and was obviously a previous library book with a bookmark still inside.

Mr. Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors and this collection is a worthy tome. My most beloved tales of incomprehensible horrors lie within these pages, accompanied by fitting illustrations and the best Lovecraft book cover to date.

I bought this book in the belief that it was a complete collection of HPL's works (or close to it). Instead it's pretty much just the major stuff found in most big collections, missing a few of my notable favorites (Arthur Jermyn, The Temple, He, The Festival, etc ) as well as missing a lot of the obscure stuff (The Evil Clergymen for instance, plus his really early stuff).

And please note that the description is wrong, it's not over a 1000 pages, it's only 880, including a 50 page essay on Lovecraft. While interesting, I wish that space had been used for some of his missing stories. It could be the regular UK version has more, but the store.com seems to be selling the shorter, "Export" edition.

It's got a few stories that the Library of America collection doesn't (but not that many), most notably more of the Dreamlands stuff. But you also don't have any annotations or notes like the Library of America collection. There are some illustrations

This is pretty cheap, but at the same time, it's not the best Lovecraft experience, nor complete. I was really hoping to get all his stories in one big book (as it had been billed in some quarters). But this was a complete waste of my money. The paper and binding is also very cheap.

Only if you are completely new to Lovecraft is it worth a look.

Got this book for my boyfriend he seems to like it very much however the book came in bad condition there is scratches all over the front and back of the book there is a tear on the spine of the book and the edges of the cover are very worn. This book was suppose to come as new and it did not.

A lot of the stories in here are not very interesting, or use terminology and names of places/things that are not common to, well, most people I'm sure. Every once in a while you'll catch a good story, but it ends within a few pages and then you have a whole bunch more uninteresting stories that I tend to read a little bit of and then pass over...

Lovecraft has to be broken down into his constituent parts in order to be comprehensible.

1. Man
2. Mythographer
3. Writer

The man, by far, is easily the most reprehensible and unforgivable. This may take a little explanation for those unfamiliar with the man and the writer. Firstly, HPL believed in a crude Social Darwinism/Eugenics married to a virulent racism/xenophobia and a despicable classism. When reading Necronomicon or any of his works all of these elements become impossible to ignore and are, virtually, shouted from the pages/screens. It is popular to dismiss these beliefs as being a part of the society he was raised in. Of course, he was raised in a racist, classist, xenophobic time, as well as a time when Social Darwinism, and especially eugenics, were very popular...amongst intellectuals. Still, other writers came out of such belief systems and their work was not penetrated by hate in the manner that HPL's work is. There is something almost infantile about this, which raises the specter of a facile Freudian reading of the man's character. The latter would not be very useful because it is culturally limited and scientifically invalid. It is enough to say that hate drives much of HPL's work and it makes this of limited value.

The writer is another level that needs to be looked at because it suggests the same infantile and superficial understanding of the world as well. Firstly, there is very limited character development; the attitude of HPL to women is at best ambivalent; exposition is shaky; HPL had a tin ear for dialogue. The prose is almost exclusively purple--even for his creaky, gothic constructions. No writer or reader will find anything at this level to learn from HPL. The only element of HPL's writing worth the reader's attention is that he may be the first Horror/Science-Fantasy writer to leave the big-bad alive and well and man's position relative to this as tenuous.

The last element of HPL that should be looked at is his mythos. Here is the one place where HPL shines. His creation of an ante-diluvian world of races not human on earth and others that came from off of earth is fascinating and worthy of study. Given the amount of fiction and 'fan-fiction' which his 'Cthulian' mythos has generated, this is significant in the world of genre fiction--and, yes, there is a difference between genre and literature. For this reason, and this reason alone, HPL remains a writer worth revisiting.

However, the reader needs to be prepared for the moral vacuity and hate which they will encounter in the work of HPL. Not to mention, the horrific writing, which is often responsible for some of the worst published writing I have ever come across.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Not recommended for morally sensitive readers...or aesthetically inclined ones either.

** spoiler alert ** Rating this book seems to be a math problem of sorts. For one, I think the creativness of the stories alone deserve a five. The actual writing, depending on the story, seems to fluctuate between a 4 and a 5.
However, I had to subtract a MINIMUM of two stars, and honestly I think I'm still being too kind, for the aggressive sexism and racism. I would have only removed one if I could justify it as the casual viewpoints of the day, but he goes far beyond that. Not just in descriptions of appearance, but even on the (incredibly rare) points from other's perspective shows anyone who is not white male to be not even evil, but actually unable to understand the world around them. As if they were little more than stupid beasts. The only exceptions I saw was; One Maternal Figure (she mated with the beast to create a monster and as the child grew he shunned her, no longer need her.) One Villainess (though the plot twist in that one reveals that she was under the control of her father pretty much the whole time.) And One Local Egyptian Guide. That last one actually was the least offensive of all. He still wasn't the most tactful, and they were the villians, but it seemed less like 'evil out of ignorance' and more because they actually outsmarted him. The story is a fictional account about Houdini's time in Egypt entitled 'Imprisioned with the Pharaohs'. Probably one of my favorite stories of the book and apparently well liked by Houdini himself!

So overall, while I'm glad I personally read it, I can not recommend it, or anything else by him.

I haven't read the complete works of Lovecraft since I was probably fourteen years old, and I have to say they are great fun. As an adult, and one who has gone through two literature and writing degrees twenty years later, I have a whole new perspective on his works I a lot of ways. So while I don't feel the need to go through all of the stories one by one and rehash all of the reasons he was pretty awesome, he should be remembered for his masterful prose and for creating an entirely new mythology that has stuck in our culture and our minds (which is a pretty unique thing to the 20th century; see: George Lucas, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George A. Romero, J.R.R.Tolkein, et al).

So rather than talk about the things that particularly stood out to me about the works themselves, I thought that waxing on some new perspective is in order.

One thing that is interesting is that I have learned through my studies that Lovecraft was somewhat of a white supremacist. While much of his work doesn't necessarily reflect this directly (although there were a couple of his stories that do), looking at his work from a postcolonial perspective after my education does lend to some interesting interpretations of the overall menaces that seemed to be humming below the surface in just about all of his stories. Some predominately white characters are living their normal lives when they learn of some part of their world that has hitherto been hidden from view that threatens to destroy civilization, or that walks among us and has never come forth until now. This menace will destroy and burden all of human civilization, or make us slaves, or to create some inter-dimensional revenge for no reason but to get us to worship and bow down to this powerful, uncontrollable force. As a kid, of course I didn't think about any of this, but today it seems like such a blatant underlying part of the thematic execution of the work that I felt like the intolerance bashed me over the head the entire time.

That said, I totally still enjoyed the stories, and it was easy to return to the mindframe of my adolescence.

The other thing that I found incredibly interesting is the geography of the stories. I grew up in Boston, and while Boston comes up a couple times in the stories, central and western Massacusetts show up a lot, as does southern New Hampshire. As a kid, I had always just assumed that most of the places that were discussed were as fictional as Arkham. As an adult, however, I moved to Northampton and studied in Amherst and Fitchburg. I was absolutely shocked to learn that all of the settings were real, and I had been to most of them since I was a child! In the book, locations like Athol, Gardner, Ayer, Leominster, Greenfield, Fitchburg, Orange, and other cities in Massachusetts were vague, whimsical places. Same went for Keene, Peterborough, Marlborough, and others in New Hampshire. But to read these texts with their interestingly accurate locales (“Hey! I have been to that train stations! That restaurant and post office is still in the same spot!”) was a great deal of fun. It was like a special feature that I wasn't aware existed, and it took on a more magnetic and three-dimensional quality.

I enjoyed revisiting these as an adult. They are well-written and unique in the world. Learning about Lovecraft's personal views and history added a somewhat blackened quality to what he was writing, but the stories still present some really interesting and brilliant perspectives on humanity and what threats exist just under the surface, whether it is a monstrous invasion, an underworld we are ignorant to, or perhaps the most fictional of all, the threat presented by a particular race of humans.

This book is too big for it's own good. It's neat the book shares the name of a reoccurring item in Lovecraft's stories but it doesn't work well in real life. It's heavy and bulky. Lugging this thing around to read short stories is silly.

On top of that, the paperback version was not built to last. It's almost like it was completely painted or heavily repaired using a sharpie. Very low quality cover for such a large book.

Another small complaint... Some of the illustrations spoil the story. The worst one so far was page 143 in The Outsider.

This was a fantastic Christmas Gift. I love H.P LoveCraft a lot and also being a fan of 'Bloodborne' a FromSoftware Game, helped a lot with the incentive to retrieve this book. I read a few of the stories already but I definitively wanted to read them all again.

Only downside is the size of the Hardcover; not easy to carry around as well as the fact that your finger prints will smudge the text in the book. I noticed this after I got to the Herbert West story. It smudges easily as you run your finger down the page. Not a lot, just you will see smears and traces of black running under the word you just touched.

Besides those instances, I love the book and its my fault its smearing anyways.

Neil Gaiman once said that people should read Lovecraft because that is where the darkness started.

And he's not wrong.

This collection of short stories is a wonderful array of the strange, the very strange, and the "oh my god, what is that?!" It is wholly entertaining and original.

That said, I've marked one star down because there seems to be a problem with the editing - quite a few silly little errors seems to have slipped though, and it feels like Gollancz have rushed this.

That said, these stories are just great and it is easy to see where the Twilight Zone, X-Files and Lost got their inspiration. Even on to expanded literature like Stephen King's The Mist and the amazing A Gathering of Twine (The Spirals of Danu), all take their cue from the master.

Well worth a read on a cold and stormy night.

I wanted to read about the stories that inspired the cooperative game, Arkham Horror, so I bought this book. H.P. Lovecraft is very descriptive and has an amazingly macabre vocabulary. Now I know how the ancient, evil Cthulhu was born. Lovecraft's tales intensify towards the end and the frail nerves of the characters are sorely tested when they encounter unspeakable situations and monsters that cannot possibly be described and yet they are. What cannot be described leaves a lot to the imagination and it is amazing how descriptive Lovecraft can be about things that are too terrible and impossible to describe! It is fascinating how much love and creativity can be put into tales of utter horror! No wonder people love Lovecraft!
From Erren Grey Wolf, author of Beneath the Surface: The Lost Boy (Volume 1).
[ISBN-10: 148020045X and ISBN-13: 978-1480200456]
[...]

I love the edition. Black with golden letters.
It's not too heavy: just 880 pages, well woven.
I don't understand why people thought it was the COMPLETE edition. It says cleary: the BEST weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft.
So, except for the illustrations, I found them to be weird, yes, and appropriate for the book. The Frontispice is fine and mysterious. I like illustrations and find these of a high sensitivity to the contents.
I don't have to critique the stories, they are among the best of Lovecraft and his particular brand of occult and horror.
If someone can tell me, how Gollancz numbers its first editions, I'll be grateful. My British Import actually says (cased-meaning what?
slip cased? I have not seen any so far) and the number under ISBN is
9-8. A second printing?
Usually 1-0 or 10-0 denotes a first printing.
Any one care of use their expertise and elucidate?
Thanks.Impute: Fall to Sin

I'm not going to bother reviewing the fiction in the volume. It's by H.P. Lovecraft, it's absolutely fantastic horror fiction that transcends the genre and what's included is all of his best stuff. I will assume, that like any literary type (or horror fan), you are not here to decide - "Should I buy Lovecraft's books?". I'm assuming you know that like Poe, you need a Lovecraft selected (or complete) works on your shelf - the question then is "Which edition is best suited to my needs?"

So, I'm going to focus on why this book is a good purchase - it has 36 stories, including the big ones. It's affordably priced. It looks really nice on a shelf and it's very pleasant to read in the hands and on the eyes. The drawback is it's big and the binding is so-so. The only one-volume competition is really the Library of America "Tales" collection with 22 tales. It has better binding and a better critical apparatus (e.g. footnotes). That one's a bit more expensive though and has some other problems.

I would recommend either this volume or the Library of America to someone looking for a single volume collection. If you're a collector or own the Library of America "Tales" book, this probably isn't worth a purchase because you have most of the stories.

Personally, I prefer this one because the pages are thicker and I find the text easier on my eyes. The Library of America edition is much smaller and has ultra-thin pages with relatively small text. If you have good eyesight, that might be a better choice since physically it's smaller, but I had difficulty reading it. This edition sits like a Bible on the shelf towering above other books. The gold ink on the spine looks very classy and ominous and it's easy to find amongst my bookshelves. The binding is not great, but it's good enough and on par with most oversized mass market paperbacks.

There are better Lovecraft collections out there. I believe the Arkham has Lovecraft in his entirety, there are the Joshi volumes edited from the original proofs rather than the published editions - of note to the purists, but this is the best one for most people, myself included. $18 for 36 Lovecraft stories and short fiction! It's an uncanny deal. It towers, cyclopean, above other such editions at that price.

If you want a shorter volume (admittedly this is quite large physically) - the Del-Rey's might fit your needs. It's cheaper, too. The collectors and completists love the Arkham ones. If you're buying for a library, the Library of America is a better pick, both because of its standard size, because it's bound better and because of the critical apparatus and lastly because of snob appeal - the tales were "selected" by Joyce Carol Oates (the tales selected aren't much different than this volume though).

I think this is the best single volume reading edition because it's easy to read, it has the best selection of stories and it's an attractive volume. Recommended.

This Black Book is a curious thing - its not a complete collection of H P Lovecraft (HPL), and there are cheaper ways to get a start on HPL's work. Still, for a lover of horror stories, who may have read a little HPL before, or is new to "cosmic terror" it's an excellent volume for a bookshelf. Its nearly 900 pages long, and my copy is well made, readable, and has some effectively simple line art here and there.

The stories include The Silver Key, The Call of Cthulhu and the novel-length At the Mountains of Madness, among others. The stories are presented in rough order of composition, and there is a biograhpical note at the end of the volume.

I'm not a fanatical HPL devotee - I enjoyed reading the stories, but I'm happy to leave my collection of HPL works with this one volume. In part, that's because of how good this volume is.

It seriously took a publisher how much of a century to title a collection of Lovecraft's stories "Necronomicon"? Like seventy years? Did it really just not occur to anyone? Shouldn't the first collected volume of his stories have been called that? I blame August Derleth.

Speaking of whom, I don't believe this edition features the re-edited versions of the texts available in the more comprehensive Library of America edition of Lovecraft. Necronomicon includes the older editions as published by Derleth's Arkham House, featuring Derleth's... let's call them "bold typographical choices", including italicizing the second half of the final sentence in many stories to heighten tension and irritate me.

Oh also! There's a rather nice map of Arkham, Massachusetts printed on the front and back endpapers. Admittedly it's very similar to the map accompanying the Arkham entry in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, but never mind that. Endpaper maps! Whooooo. At least it's rather better than Necronomicon's other illustrations, which are for some reason the same three pictures of a shifty-lookin' guy, a pile of old books and papers, and a megalith, repeated fairly randomly at the first and last pages of many stories. Why not? Also it's bound really poorly, basically a paperbound book with hard boards, but this is true of virtually all hardcover editions published these days, which is lamentable but hardly unique to this book.

I sound like I'm being pretty hard on Necronomicon, but I was totally pleased with it. I like having a single-volume hardcover edition of many of Lovecraft's main stories with the single most appropriate title possible. Not all stories are included--notable omissions include "Nyarlathotep" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"--but it includes most important works, such as "The Call of Cthulhu", "At the Mountains of Madness", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", and so on. That's really all I ask of a Necronomicon.

Also the italics are kinda like eldritch alien text, yeah? Sure.

Ok, looking back, there are more than just those three repeating illustrations.

There are also pictures of some houses.

'Necronomicon: the complete Weird Tales' of H.P Lovecraft in its hardcover edition is a beautiful book - a bibliophiles dream. Suitably tome-like, all it really needed was a tassel to complete the look. The typeset and illustrations are really appropriate and unlike some I appreciated the biography on H.P Lovercraft contained in the rear of the book. Reviewers have also noted that 'Necronomicon: the complete Weird Tales' is not a complete collection of Lovecraft's work - but it never claimed to be, instead it collects those works written for legendary pulp magazine 'Weird Tales.' At 878 pages there's plenty of material for readers to sink their teeth into, and all the classics, such as 'The Dunwich Horror,' 'The Shadow Out of Time,' and 'Call of Cthulhu' are included.

Buy this book and saraband yourself across aeons of time into the curious, antique world of H.P Lovecraft. Park yourself under a gibbous moon and read these eldritch tales of cyclopean architecture and primordial terrors. You will traverse dimensions of time and space and have an indescribably sinister experience of unspeakable horror.

LOVE LOVE LOVE Lovecraft. This book has 36 stories altogether. I enjoy The Thing on the Doorstep the most, and that was the reason why I bought this book, because I couldnt find this story anywhere else, except in the PB books, that were $15 for only 5 stories. I own quite an extensive, collection of Lovecraft stories.....and plan on getting a few more books that has his stories in it, along with various other authors of horror short stories genre.
I highly recommend The Horror in the Museum by HP Lovecraft and Others, Tales of HP Lovecraft:selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, The Dream Cycle of HP Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, and The Transition of HP Lovecraft: The Road to Madness.

I had been trying to obtain a worthy volume of HPL's works for quite sometime. I'm never satisfied with what is out there, to my surprise, I discovered this publication! It's as close as you are going to get to having a 'full' collection, as it includes most of his major works. The cover is impressive for a softcover and the artwork that accompanies each story is fantastic!

Great ideas, no doubt, but the writing style is actually rather wooden w/ some of the longest damned sentences I've ever read. Had a hard time keeping track of the subject by the time the predicate was done. But I shouldn't complain as Lovecraft is a forerunner of the genre and, of course, most fiction from that time period was similar in nature. The monsters are 4- & 5-Star caliber. The prose is more like a 2 or 3.

Lovecraft is the master of horror. His short stories and books are the foundation of any good horror that you find today. This being said, the reason that Lovecraft doesn't receive as many accolades as some horror writers is due to his legendary racism. The horror is really good, just don't look too close at the author.

Being an owner of the Arkham House collection of his works (which is prolly the closest you'll ever have to all of his published works) I was skeptical of this tome. Most of the ones out there now select some of his better stories and leave others out. So while this one was a temptation, I decided to check it out before buying. Suffice to say, it doesn't come close to the Arkham House collection. So I decided to not buy it. So until a book or collection of books can match the works put out in the 4 volumes that AH puts out, I'll just have to wait. A nice illustrated volume would be fantastic! But, alas, such is life. So I would recommend checking out the Arkham House volumes (all 4). From what I can find, those 4 volumes contain all that Lovecraft published (including his letters, essays, fragments and very early works).

When I happened upon this book, the reviews set me up to expect an extremely well-put together compilation of Lovecraft's greatest works. Apparently, these people have never held a properly produced hardcover book, because the Necronomicon is anything but.

Looking at the cover, you'll notice that, if you're savvy with computer design, that the title's font is that generic "I'm ye olde" font that you might see around town. It's extremely off-putting and amateurish for a book to do this, especially if this is the most common Lovecraft compilation on both the store and Chapters, driving away potential readers. And no, the font isn't as illegible nor is it off-centre as the cover image on the the store page suggests, but with that pretentious font style, that's the least of your worries.

If you're planning on collecting this, you better handle that book with more care than nitroglycerin, because the actual cover is astonishingly thin. This cover is thinner than most hardcovers you can find when you walk in a Chapters, which is worrying for a book of this size compared to considerably smaller books. And to boot, the cover's not springy, nor is there marbling on the cover pages, which are both endemic to old books and the source material. OK, so you're just going to put it on your bookshelf? Not with the off-centre font and art, you won't!

Fine, so you want to read this and possibly pass this on to your grandkids to traumatize them? Good luck with that! The binding on this book is possibly the worst and most disappointing feature ever to plague a book of this size. The actual glue is white, so you can pretend there's no binding at all and wonder why you spent ~$20 on this. But get this: no backing to the binding other than the spine! Come on! Even a short book like William Shakespeare's Star Wars has backing, along with some sewing. Now when I crack the spine, which I'm extremely hesitant to do, I have to do so very carefully lest this thing falls in half and breaks my floor. The task of reading this book is a nightmare in and of itself, as the pages are shockingly thin so you can see the text on the next page. Either that, or the ink seeped through the page. Neither possibilities are suitable.

If you do handle this book like a nuke, then you will be happy to find that yes, this book DOES have Call of Cthulu and the other popular Lovecraft stories that you're dying to put down ~$20 for. It's just, the book is so poorly put together, that you just have to ask yourself just like I did: is this really worth it?

I dub thee: the Samsung of books, for your pretentiously flimsy build quality and remarkable popularity.

The content in this book is great. H.P. Lovecraft is a brilliant author and this is the first time I've really exposed myself to his work. However, the book itself is falling apart despite constant babying and excessive care, but I guess thats what you can expect when buying paperback.

Sci Fi is not usually my cup of tea but having been told that Lovecraft was a classic amongst writers for the genre, I thought I'd take the plunge.

Sadly, in retrospect, I'm not convinced the plunge was a good idea for me. I give credit particularly for well written fiction and it was clear that Lovecraft, himself does - if you'll forgive the pun - love his craft, but this edition shocked me for its infelicities of grammar, spelling and punctuation.