Short stories from fifteen years of Lovecraft's career. The tales often reveal the obsessive nature of Lovecraft's mythology through repetition that can sometimes feel tiresome, but his imagination is darker and more fertile than many literary masters. There are real problems with the work. We dismiss these too easily by claiming an artist is of their time, but the racism in these works is as shocking and grotesque as any of his fantastical monsters. Women are pretty much as absent from his work as it seems they were from his life and we are left with a spiralling, nightmarish terror of everyone and everything that feels violently claustrophobic when read over a short period. The archaic purple prose adds power to the narrative by making them seem more esoteric and occult than could be achieved with modern writing styles. I loved and hated the collection equally, which might well be a testament to the man's genius after all.
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