I finished Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

On the shelf AT LAST!!!

Alright, I finished the 880 page Necronomicon. It was a read that might've taken me as long as 6 years, I'm guessing. Mostly because, for the longest time, I didn't care to read the last 200 pages on account of I didn't have much interest in actually doing so. The bulk of what was in those pages were the Curious case of Charles Dexter Ward which I was reasonably sure I had read before (but needed to re-read anyway because damn my compulsions, and good that I did at any rate because it's indeed a good one) and together with the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which I hadn't yet and which seemed incredibly dull reading, I held off for the longest time. Last year somewhere I read the first, and earlier today, I finished the latter. I also read the To a Dreamer poem and the rather extensive, and increasingly list-like the further that you get, Afterword: A gentleman of Providence.

The To a Dreamer Poem was nice, if short but the main reason for this post is that I did want to say something about the Kadath story.

At times monotonous with turgid, fabricated prose and at other times (though not often) surprisingly poetic, the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath's most interesting achievement is that it seems to rather explicitly tie together several stories in Lovecraft's oeuvre, mostly just by name-dropping, but in some cases reintroducing characters from other short stories. Mountains of Madness and Pickman's Model are pretty noteworthy in this, with references to the locales in and surrounding Leng from the first and the ghoulified character of Pickman from the latter.

Something else that I found pleasant was that after having forced myself to read through it, it gave me more of an understanding of why Moore's Providence turned out the way it did.
With an apocalyptic end-of-the world scenario you usually expect something violent will happen. A terrible, cataclysmic event: the coming of Cthulhu, baptizing the world in blood and fire. But I expect not many people would've foreseen the course those final issues took. An ending not nearly as (explicitly) violent as supposed.
And maybe, most interestingly: Not madness-inducing at all and maybe this was the only way in which such radical changes to the world could come about. Madness or suicide: that's the way Lovecraft's characters usually go and it's Providence writ large. But Moore, by using The Dream-Quest's hints as a guideline and as a tool, provides an alternative. Acceptance through a paradigm shift, the altering of reality from one state into another; one operating (partially at least) on dream logic, hence: acceptance of things that can't be rationally accepted leading to preservation of sanity.
Though I guess I would be curious to see how the dreamworld would look after the closing of the Neonomicon-Providence storyline. Would it still exist as it was, or would it be altered as like when above becomes below, with sane and rational dreaming being the abhorrent thing in a reality of madness.

This is of course provided you take The Dream Quest, Pickman's Model and others as part of the Cthulhu mythos, which I guess is what Providence made me accept.

(If you need more hints to go and read Providence I'll give you one. Go buy it. It's horrific and will likely put you off of eating for a while, but it's an incredibly well realized and researched bit of work. It requires a lot of effort to read, but it's brilliant and messed-up and likely one of the best adaptations/looks at/critiques of  Lovecraft's work and character ever. It does require you to have at least read a lot of his fiction though, or else everything will just go right over your head.)

And yes, of course, instead of picking up any of the books I was planning to read I immediately went and started reading the Eldritch Tales book, because hey, if I'm doing ok now, might as well keep it up. For a little while, at least. First impressions are that this one is filled with a lot of shorter Lovecraft works, which works out just fine as it will give me something to dip in and out without much hassle in the near future.

Read only 2 fragments; History of the Necronomicon, which I also had extensive background in in Providence and a short story called The Alchemist.
That last seemed to be a Poe pastiche, which is always welcome, and it was far better written than the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which makes it doubly welcome. It's nice to remember that Lovecraft, with his work honed and properly revised, is actually quite good. Mind you, I'm not saying the story was very good, just that the writing was pleasant enough to make me breeze through it.
It's also not very long, which is another reason why I'm pretty sure this book won't take as long to finish.
Eldritch Tales is made up, barring a few exceptions, of short stories ranging between 1 and 10 pages. It's a far more pleasing prospect to peruse through bite-sized tales, rather than 80 page dream-quests without comprehensive editing and without a clear plot drive.
Though I must admit some of those final 40 pages were very bloody good. I don't mind telling you, I read more today than I did all week. A huge sense of scale and there was actually some universe-ending brilliance along the lines of The House on the Borderlands in there.

I guess I'm of two minds about the story. It's hugely flawed and is riddled with casual contradictions and typing errors and at its worst bogs down the reading with some of the worst prose that Lovecraft penned down (with a fountain pen. As a casual aside, for those interested about this sort of thing). And then at its best... Yeah... at its best; it reminds me of the House on the Borderlands.

"So, I watched through the fleeting ages..."