The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

I'm done. Such pains me, but not to the degree of this prose. I had thought of an italicized voice-over about some hardscrabble researcher reporting from Tahrir Square about unearthing a noisome text from a "mad Arab" ... I was going to punctuate such with the researcher's support staff being gunned down in the backlash against the Muslim Brotherhood by the el-Sisi forces. Then I would twist the question: what do you find terrifying?

But I can't do it.

Between this tome and the Annotated Lovecraft I've read a dozen pieces now and hated nearly all of them. HPL was a racist, two-trick scribbler. When he ventured away from his Yoknapatawpha County snd its froggy fish people, he could prove interesting -- well, for a pulpster anway. I kept plowing away to no avail. Lovecraft crafted interesting stories about cannibals and madness but his mytho-poetics proved a Meh of the Black Shirt set. ( )

Like most Lovecraft collections, this contains the most well-known stories with lesser-known works mixed in. At 500+ pages, it's well worth the purchase. Unfortunately, it doesn't contain one of my favorite tales, "The Dunwich Horror."

As an added benefit, the Appendix contains a short four-page essay written by (I believe) Lovecraft on how and why he wrote Fantasy and Science Fiction.

If you're a new Lovecraft fan who's yet to purchase any collections of his stories, this is a definite purchase. However, if you've purchased other collections already, you'd best look to make sure you don't already own three-fourths of the stories within it. ( )

Very wordy. Seems to ramble with complex sentances and vocabulary. Some of the stories are pretty good, but most get a little repetitive. ( )

I've never been a huge fan of Lovecraft, but some of his stuff is pretty good. I loved "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and "The Colour out of Space". ( )