Your Favourite Lovecraft.

Quote Originally Posted by ramonoski

That reminds me... there was a Lovecraft analogue in the Mystery Incorporated cartoon (a modern Scooby Doo, basically.) One of the jokes was that he wrote a book titled "Char-Gar Gothakon, The Beast That Hath No Name." I thought that was funny. (Incidentally, the character was voiced by actor Jeffrey Combs, who has a couple Lovecraftian connections to his name.)

Good ol' Professor Hatecraft. My favorite part about that episode, though, was the Harlan Ellison reference. Something along the lines of him being out of town attending a Misanthropes Convention. Needless to say, my children were a bit puzzled why Dad suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter.

Favorite Lovecraft, in rough order of preference: The Silver Key, The Whisperer in Darkness, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, The Colour Out of Space, The Festival, The Quest of Iranon (minor, I know, but I love it for the same reasons The Silver Key works for me, aptly explained below by Matt Cardin), The Call of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep. Ten is enough, I guess.

[Murony_Pyre]

In Order:

The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward (read it once every year or two), Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time.

If he'd only written just these tales, his reputation would still be cemented.

[Druidic]

I agree with Murony's choices although "The Shadow out of Time" has never made my Top Ten list. I tend to admire it intellectually as a remarkable achievement; it just doesn't touch me as deeply emotionally as do many of his other tales. Borges might well have written this story but it would be about 12 pages in length and the wonderful atmosphere of subterranean exploration at the story's end would be relegated to a few paragraphs. It would have worked though.

[Speaking Mute]

My favorite Lovecraft story is pretty unusual...I love the story "Hypnos". I think it's some of Lovecraft's best prose and a rather singular work. My interpretation of the story is one that roughly parallels"Fight Club" - an insomniac starts slumming after confronting an idealized projection of himself. Of course, rather than anarchism and hyper-masculinity, the narrator instead encounters the universe's ultimate void

[Druidic]

Hypnos is an interesting choice, Speaking Mute. That story always reminded me of a collaboration between Poe and Wilde!

[Autojector]

The Call of Cthulhu.

It's a valid answer. It's not one chosen based on popularity or ignorance of his other work. Sometimes you just like vanilla. I love the arrangement and using academic research as a literary device. It makes you wonder if Lovecraft was planning on releasing it as a hoax akin to Poe's Air Balloon news feature.

Other than that I'd say...

The Outsider.

It reminds me of my childhood, and my archetypal placement in this world no matter what I accomplish.

My list of favourites is as nebulous and amorphous as a shoggoth, but the upper echelon for me includes The Festival, The Colour Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time, Nyarlathotep, The Rats in the Walls, The Whisperer in Darkness, Pickman's Model, The Haunter of the Dark and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

However, if I had to single out two as my favourites, they'd be The Music of Erich Zann and The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Two very different tales, in that the former is a concise, meticulously built, 'classy' piece of accumulative dread, and the other is an an often ludicrously unsubtle – at times even amusingly so – extreme cartoon, with a febrile style that indulges in every excess of its conceit... yet it is constructed with precise mastery of suspense.

My first post on a Ligotti forum is one about Lovecraft. That's perhaps true madness.

[Coa]

Best stories from HPL are ones that are not polluted with science-fiction, which I despise.

A controversial opinion to be sure, but I have mine. I hate how the Cthulhu Mythos is frequently considered as some masterplan of HPL's. I hate how in every online Lovecraft conversation, he will be referred to as the founder of the Cthulhu Mythos (patently falsifiable as it's Derleth's pet), and the only thing people will refer to are his canon of Elder Gods/Great Old Ones – as if this was a primary focus of his artistry, rather than a backdrop leitmotif used to explore his philosophical preoccupations.

The popular vision of a typical Lovecraft story being one in which a tentacled supergod kills people or makes them go insane is.... utterly inaccurate. The Call of Cthulhu, with its kaiju enemy, is actually atypical in this manner, It's obvious Lovecraft had no real idea of what the hell Azathoth was, because that's the point. He's unknowable, and knowing him will mean oblivion.

Lovecraft is my favourite writer of horror fiction (along with Poe, Bierce, Campbell, Ligotti, and more choices others will find predictable), but I actively dislike talking about him some of the time, and I roll my eyes at pretty much every article about him. Props must go to Mike Davis of Lovecraft Ezine, for being one of the few players in current HPL fandom to actively express disinterest in his pantheon of deities, rather than painting them as the focus of his fiction.

The Call of a Cthulhu is a rightfully acclaimed masterpiece of horror literature, but pretty every other Mythos story I've read which included him as part of its events has been terrible.

[ramonoski]

I do feel that a lot of mythos fiction doesn't transcend the "eldritch abominations + tomes of forbidden lore" aspect of Lovecraft's fiction, and that has been what permeates the most into the so-called pop culture, which would indeed make you believe it's all about Cthulhu and the Necronomicon. Not a bad facet per se, but it's really just one of the many.