Your Favourite Lovecraft.

[Doctor Dugald Eldritch]

To express my love for Lovecraft, I have compiled a selection of my favourite Lovecraft tales. It is quite short yet these tales hold for me an unholy fascination that no other story has.

1- The Festival. For some reason beyond me, this remains my personal favourite story that Lovecraft ever penned. For me, it is the quintessential Lovecraftian tale. A lonesome and outsider protagonist returns to his ancient and world-shunned ancestral town where he is unwillingly lured into fantastic and daemonic rites practiced by his witch-condemned ancestors. I shall never forget the grotesque imagery of the unnamed narrator's return to the snow-drowned and bleak mountain that overlooks Kingsport and the graveyard with the gravestones that 'stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.'

2- The Hound. Another great tale of the macabre that shews Lovecraft's morbid imagination at its most powerful and expressive. It also borrows from another great idol of mine; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The deviant and abhorrent acts that St John and the narrator commit are epick and almost make me want to collect ancient corpses and store them in a nameless subterranean museum whence connoisseurs of the frightful and horrible may observe at their leisure. The settings, in particular the decrepit and fear-haunted Dutch churchyard where the doomed grave-robbers steal that accursed amulet from a certain skeleton, are wonderfully and vividly evoked. As an experiment in pure deathly atmosphere over coherent plot, The Hound towers from the earth like an re-animated corpse and refuses to return to the grave.

3- Nyarlathotep. A demented and delirious fable of the End as the fabled and antique Pharaoh Nyarlathotep returns from 'the blackness of twenty-seven centuries' and shews strange and frightful cosmic wonders to an enticed mankind. The terrifying visions experienced by the narrator, predating the Surrealists by a few years, are amongst the most potent and imaginative that I have encountered in horror-fiction. It is often said that horror works better if presented in a calm, subtle, scholarly and matter-of-fact tone, that may work for traditional ghost stories of the Jamesian school yet, in my honest opinion, visionary horror works best if everything is shown. 'Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods- the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.'

4- The Shunned House. Lovecraft was not one to be constrained by conventions, hence he created this creative and shocking tale of the loathsome vampiric evil that lurks underneath one 135 Benefit Street of Providence. The descriptions of the hellish entity, and the hideous fate that befell the narrator's unfortunate uncle, are gloriously ghastly. I even wrote a short tale at school once inspired by The Shunned House.

[hopfrog]

It is impossible for me to say, because my favourites always change. Because writing Lovecraftian weird fiction is my full-time job, I am always returning to HPL's fiction and poetry, week after week. I have gone beyond being an obsessive fan to ye point where, nigh, Lovecraft is my Lifestyle. That's why new editions of the fiction and poetry enthrall me, because I gets to have my addiction in a shiny new bottle, and when I drinks it anew, it tastes even better than before!

"The Outsider" has to be one my wee list. It is the first story by Grandpa that really got to me, to which I had a kind of emotional response. It may, in fact, be the first story by E'ch-Pi-El that I read, in the first collection that I owned. While I was a Mormon missionary in Omagh, Northern Ireland, I found an early beat-up 2nd-hand copy of a Panther Horror pb called THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK AND OTHER TALES. "The Outsider" was ye opening story. But -- I had HEARD the story before, cos as a kid I own'd a record of Roddy McDowall reading "The Outsider" and "The Hound."

"The Hound" is a particular favourite, and is one of the few tales by Lovecraft to which I have written a DIRECT sequel, being an actual continuation the his story as told by his narrative, on whom I perform'd a bit of gender surgery. I've just reread James Goho's "The Sickness Unto Death in H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Hound'" in LOVECRAFT ANNUAL No. 2, and I love that essay because he considers the story a serious work, not a self-parody as is the common scholarly consensus. Lovecraft was so severely critical of the tale in his twilight years, as he was with so much of his fiction; and yet I consider "The Hound" a complete success and an absolute macabre delight.

"Pickman's Model" has always been a favourite, and that was before I actually visited ye North End of Boston and could FEEL the effect of the story as I explored the neighborhood and hung out at Copp's Hill Burying Ground and sat in one of ye cubicles in the Old North Church. Being at the places evoked in Lovecraft's fiction is an entirely magical experience. Lovecraft, who could indeed create fascinating and realistic characters, gives us one of his most compelling freaks in the sinister portrait he paints of Richard Upton Pickman.

"The Haunter of the Dark" is perhaps my favourite single story. I consider it a classic of Gothic horror.

I am just now doing a slow first reading of THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, having borrow'd S. T.'s Joshi's arc of ye tome. It is an AMAZING WONDERFUL MAGNIFICENT ENTHRALLING EDITION and I am enjoying Lovecraft's excellent fiction more than ever! Ia!

[Robin Davies]

As we seem to be choosing the top four I would go for:
1) The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Fabulously evocative, drenched in fishy atmosphere, with a gripping plot and a superb ending which manages to be genuinely surprising, disturbing, beautiful and open to many interpretations.
2) The Festival. Hell-Ghost has already said it all.
3) The Hound. Ditto.
4) The Dreams in the Witch-House. Many people have criticised this one (August Derleth, S. T. Joshi, Lin Carter, Donald Burleson...) but I think it's a wonderful blend of his gothic and science-fiction themes. I particularly love the idea of being pulled towards a particular part of the sky. And the name "Brown Jenkin" is just perfect.

[Sagapharmakis]

This really takes me back!
Haunter of the Dark, The Festival and Dreams in the Witch House were great favourites, but I remember many of HPL's earliest tales having an especially strong effect on me. One rather non-canonical tale of his that moved me deeply was The Quest of Iranon. I also have particularly fond memories of reading Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, The Other Gods and the prose poem Memory.

[Nicole Cushing]

"The Music of Erich Zann" -- all the best stuff in Lovecraft (the nightmarish quality, the vertigo-inducing unreality) without a lot of the drawbacks.

[waffles]

In no particular order ...

The Dreams in the Witch House

At the Mountains of Madness

The Picture in the House

The Festival

I'm sure sure I'm forgetting many others, but these are the ones I've reread the most.

[bendk]

The Festival
The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
The Shadow Over Innsmouth

[njhorror]

I've got to reread all of my Arkham editions of good old H.P.!

[ramonoski]

The Music of Erich Zann is hands down my favourite Lovecraft story—it might not be his best, but it speaks to me in a very peculiar and particular way. The Outsider, The Festival and The Dunwich Horror would come next in a short list of favourites.

[Hideous Name]

The music of Erich Zann
The festival
The rats in the walls
Pickman´s model
The shadow out of time
The shadow over Innsmouth
The colour out of space