Your Favourite Lovecraft.

[faliol]

I do not really have a best best fav, but I always been drawn to The Colour Out of Space....for it's mounting dread and atmosphere.

kevin

[Waffiesnaq]

Glad to see so much love for the early Lovecraft. I had to dig up parts of a school essay I wrote on Grandpa for this list, but it was a joy being reminded of just how freakishly imaginative a writer the man was.

1) "The Festival." I've thought of this story on many wintry nightwalks, and channeled its imagery for my mind's eye: the graveyard of the colossus, Kingsport's twinkling windows and their mirrored stars above, all the blackness in between, the deathly clock of the fate-spinning hag, the Necronomicon cameo, the demonic trail of worshipers, the threshold of the desecrated church, the darkness beyond and beneath, the flying beasts above running waters. Unlike S. T. Joshi I always found it really satisfying that we never journey with the narrator over to the other side of the chasm; he simply can't take that leap of faith, and we're left all the more affected as a result of that. Kenneth Hite said it well: “‘The Festival’ is Lovecraft’s cosmic fatalism in miniature: all humanity is trapped in the patterns of entropy, evolution, and geology, to be destroyed by sudden unknowable catastrophe or erased in slow grinding erosion."

2) "The Music of Erich Zann." I can only read this at night with low-key light. The tragic zombification of Zann, that terrific crescendo that describes the old man wrestling with the void "twisted like a monkey" with eyes "bulging, glassy, and sightless" and his head moving in "mechanical nodding" is, I think, the most Ligottian image in all of Lovecraft. Zann's link to the droning blackness of the mythical Rue d’Auseil infects him with a hollow gnosis that renders him a puppet, and the student narrator a Ligottian lifetime wanderer. The void in "Zann" is like a faceless, intangible Cthulhu, and in my view his greatest monster. After rereading it I thought of this passage in Poe's "The Raven":

—here I opened wide the door;
—Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;

The black emptiness that faces Poe’s protagonist is Zann’s void, illimitable and all-consuming. Poe personifies it with a bird, Lovecraft with a drone then a gust of wind. Later, Cthulhu.

3) "The Shadow over Innsmouth." Anyone who has visited a secluded fishing town will testify to the atmospheric authenticities of this tale: the inhuman ambiance of places left alone, the reeking aroma of cerulean industries, the crusty drunkards yammering on about coins with pictures of monsters on them, the squalor and dilapidation. That was a bad vacation, but it was all ameliorated when I read Lovecraft's story. It's also an astounding blending of all his previous themes and concerns: the atavism and degeneracy of "Arthur Jermyn" and "The Rats in the Walls" is coupled with his mature cosmicism to forge an apocalyptic racist warning. I have to say, though, that the theory that this story's conclusion is in any way a "happy ending" intended by Lovecraft, as put forth by Sean Elliot Martin and others, is utterly ridiculous given Grandpa's track record in portrayals of the alien.

4) "The Colour out of Space." Definitely Lovecraft's most spiritually outrageous story; a total subversion of the Christian mythos, much more explicitly so than "The Festival." The biblical parallels to Nahum Gardner’s suffering are legion: his Job status, not of Yahweh but an indifferent and chaos-unleashing universe; the “three professors” or “wise men” visiting the farm to inspect “the weird visitor from unknown stellar space” is a twisted revision of the Magi, or the Three Wise Men, visiting infant Jesus after his inception onto earth (Matthew 2:1-12); the rampage of locust swarms mirroring the punishment of Egypt by God (Exodus 10:12-15); the shibboleth babbling of Nahum’s wife and son, resulting in an alienating distortion of language, reflecting the linguistic punishment on Babel (Genesis 11:6-9); and finally, the return of the “colour” from its cultivated hell on earth to the starry void, from whence it came, denotes a nightmarish reversal of the Son of God’s ascension to heaven following his redemption of man (Acts 1:9-12). I studied this story in a college class on science fiction (!) two years ago and got to put Lovecraft's pessimism into context with a lot of the utopian, onanistic sci-fi fiction at the time. Lovecraft's cynicism was a breath of fresh air. The narrator's hopes that "city men and college chemists" will stay the hell away from Gardner's land only serves to slightly temper his conviction that the "rural tales" will grow "even queerer" if this will actually come to pass. As Graham Harman notes, “Oddly enough, we learn here that the queerness of the rural tales would be increased if chemists and botanists would do research in the area, flouting the usual principle that scientists are called in to eliminate rumor and superstition.” The "colour" remains forever unknown as all evidence of its existence slips through the fingers of the secular Magi. The story uses biblical allegory and unorthodox portrayals of science to alienate readers in their certainty that anything is even slightly knowable. It ain't. All we can do, book-learn'd metropolitans and rural villagers alike, is leave the Gardner grounds for good, alone, after the fact, shake our heads moralistically, and call that empty place "evil".

5) "The Dreams in the Witch House." Brown Jenkin.

[ChildofOldLeech]

- I won't win any prizes for variety, but my top ten in no particular order are:
Dreams in the Witch House
The Dunwich Horror
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Rats in the Walls
The Outsider
Pickman's Model
The Music of Erich Zann
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
At the Mountains of Madness

-And I agree with the earlier evaluation of 'Colour'; it also, to my mind, has the benefit of containing both one of the greatest opening and closing lines HPL ever wrote.

[Michael]

No particular order
1. The Music of Erich Zann (was such a brilliant use of imagery that I had never run across from any other writer)

2. The Outsider (perhaps the most existentially accurate tale of what I think a lot of us felt at some point and perhaps at the present. Also, best first line ever "Unhappy is he for whom the memories of childhood are filled with pain and sadness")

3. The Shadow Out of Time (For some reason this story even more so than Call of Cthulu was epic on a scale that I found frightening. It was the massive understatement of such vastness across space and time that I think accomplished this.)

4. Fungi From Yuggoth (I thought Poe was alone in accomplishing "weird poetry." This taught me I was wrong and opened a whole new world for me.)

5. And of course . . . At The Mountains of Madness (My personal pick for best Lovecraft tale ever. This holds an incredibly special place in my heart for a lot of reasons and my opinion is that it is the Cthulu Mythos tale with the most depth out of a number of effective tales.)

[Cnev]

I'll second Nyarlathotep mainly because....................it's the only Lovecraft story I've ever read! *runs for the hills*

[Draugen]

I'm so glad to see The Festival getting some appreciation here. I get the impression stories like The Festival or The Hound are sometimes considered relatively minor compared to his 'big guns' - the latter sci-fi/mythos stories. But I always return to them.

Here's a few of my favourites from memory:

The Festival
The Rats in the Walls
The Haunter of the Dark
The Hound
The Outsider
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Music of Erich Zann

[MTC]

I seem to be in the minority in preferring the mid to late texts above all. Listed here along with the date of their composition:

The Call of Cthulhu, 1926
The Colour Out of Space, 1927
The Dunwich Horror, 1928
The Whisperer in Darkness, 1930
At the Mountains of Madness, 1931
The Shadow Over Innsmouth, 1931
The Dreams in the Witch House, 1932
The Shadow Out of Time, 1934

[ChildofOldLeech]

MTC: I will freely admit, although I love stories from throughout the entirety of Lovecraft's oeuvre, overall I tend to prefer his work from that same period as well. It was those stories that made up the contents of del rey's 'Best of Lovecraft' collection, which constituted my first serious encounter with HPL, and had a profound impact upon me, so there is a layer of nostalgia and personal meaning involved with those particular stories as well. It isn't all nostalgia however, these tales do resonate the most with me. The first Lovecraft book I personally owned was a yellowed Ballantine 'adult fantasy' edition of Doom that Came to Sarnath discovered in my father's old footlocker of paperbacks and textbooks in the garage, but despite my long-lasting love of such pieces as 'What the Moon Brings' and 'Memory' (the latter I once recited during middle school english for a poetry project), the earlier stories of Lovecraft's, the Dunsanian ones in particular, for me never had the impact of what I would, bias admitted, call his mature work.
(To be fair, I've never really gotten into Dunsany; I will always love Unknown Kadath, though.)

[njhorror]

For those needing a quick reference . . . http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/

[hopfrog]

This is so interesting, to see the wide spectrum of favourites. I am curious to know how long it has been since most of y'all have actually read the stories. I seem to see a lot of people here remembering the stories from distant readings of years ago. Do any of you actually return to Lovecraft now and reread his stories? Lovecraft. like Ligotti, is an author I need to return to constantly, because the work is so compelling and rich and hypnotic that I never tire of it. I am doing a very slow, careful reading of the advance reading copy of THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, and I love all of the new stuff like Klinger's excellent Notes and such--but it is still the Lovecraft texts that pull me in and command my attention. I am at this moment reading "The Hound," very slowly and out-loud, and I admire it more and more, this "dead dog" as E'ch-Pi-El called it. Part of my growing admiration and obsession with Lovecraft comes from my constant reading of Lovecraft scholarship. In preparing to reread "The Hound," I have read James Goho's "The Sickness unto Death in H. P. Lovecraft's 'The Hound'" in LOVECRAFT ANNUAL No. 2, and such essays open up Lovecraft's texts for me and help shew me aspects that I am too dull-witted to discover or realise on my own. It all adds to the richness of the experience of reading Lovecraft, and experiencing that overwhelming sense of wonder, and then trying to capture it all in my own Lovecraftian weird fiction. How queer, to have this as my continual existence and lifestyle. I love it.