Honestly I never really was all that into Shadow Over Innsmouth…it’s good and all, but when I compare it to the stories of his I consider the best, The Colour Out of Space or At The Mountains of Madness, Shadow just always felt to be one of his weaker entries. Still great by most standards, but kind of “meh” by lovecraft standards. Dark Corners of the Earth though was a great game…shame it’s followup was cancelled, the trailer floating around looks like it was going to be largely built around Call of Cthulhu…

They’re definitely an acquired taste, his prose style is incredibly overripe. You just know the guy sat for hours editing and re-editing his text just to get every little adjective down to the tee. There’s other authors that do much the same thing, Tolkien comes to mind, The Silmarillion is just a crazy heavy read, he literally was writing that from WW1 through to the day he died and his son ended up actually being the one to release it. I would highly recommend checking out The Call of Cthulhu, it’s no doubt just as verbose as At The Mountains of Madness, but it’s much, much shorter so it can be absorbed a little more readily.

Much of what Lovecraft’s quality was is that he pretty well invented a genre, things like Alien/Aliens, all the Hellboy stuff, the entire genre of cosmic horror, the idea of taking horror away from the familiar stock villains that had been largely the standard up to that point was all him. Until Lovecraft came along most horror was written from the framework of a generally hospitable universe, usually God or nature is kind of “looking out” for the good guy…he took it to a whole other place and influenced almost everything in the genre that came after him.

Both Poe and Lovecraft had writing styles that could be downright dreadful. They’re popular because of their ideas and the images they created.

Nice to hear you talk about books. Thanks James.

I grew up with this obsession on Poe and even now I fondly remember the stories even though I wouldn’t call him my favorite author anymore. I bet you really enjoyed the Pit and the Pendulum (1961) with Vincent Price. It was a great movie but it has almost nothing to do with the original story by Poe. Also, The Raven (1963) and Masque of the Red Death (1964) which both had Vincent Price as well. He must have been a real Poe fan!

Thanks again for sharing your collection with us.