Eldritch Tales

Aaand... Boom! Reading goal 1 out of 5 done for 2019!

I've gone through some stuff over the first months of the year, and one of the consequences of that 'stuff' is that it has left me with loads of downtime, and though I haven't exactly been productive, and have had enormous difficulties in focusing on pretty much anything outside of gaming, I did find that I had enough concentration to finish off a short story or two a day, and because of me finally playing Darkest Dungeon recently, I found that I had a hankering for some good old Lovecraftian madness.

And so, a book I thought wouldn't be finished for a while yet has already met with a swift demise.
I say demise because the short stories in Eldritch Tales weren't all that great and I frequently found myself irritated, baffled or just plain bored by some of them. This'll be a short little write-up as there's not much to really talk about. As anyone knows who has had some experience with plowing through short story collections, after a while everything will start to blur together.

So then, where the best of Lovecraft's stories had already been included in Gollancz' earlier Necronomicon (Big Black Book edition) Eldritch Tales is mostly made up out of the dredges of his work. That is not to say that it's all rubbish, merely that nothing much will stick because, compared to the power and imagination at play in the previous volume, most of the stories in here come across as run of the mill and don't leave much of an impression at the book's close.

There's a few exceptions to this, most notably the works that came about by a collaboration of Lovecraft and another author. I find that Lovecraft's worst literary qualities are somewhat mitigated, or at the very least reined in, in his collaborations. Of these it is the mysterious marine terror of The Horror at Martin's Beach and the Necromantic wizardy of Two Black Bottles I am most fond of.
The lengthy The Last Test is also worth a mention.

Of the Tales written solely by Lovecraft, the drafts and unfinished tales, it's probably The History of the Necronomicon, Memory and The Challenge from Beyond I found most memorable.
History is of course a short, but unfinished exploration, of the dreaded book made so famous by the Evil Dead series, and which indeed was thought up by Lovecraft. I found the fate of its author, the mad Arab, Abdul Al'Hazred fascinating to read about, but I do really wish that Lovecraft had taken more time to expand the little he actually set down. As the first 'story' in the collection it does serve as a good appetizer, making one eager to explore the rest of the tales to come.
The Challenge From Beyond was almost a perfect return to form for Lovecraft in its sheer compulsive readability, adding some very interesting concepts (though operating from a view on science that is now quite obviously outdated) to his usual formula, but it did suffer from a trite beginning which precluded immediate investment. Past that initial hurdle though, the story became intriguing enough to stand out from most of the other tales in this collection. Memory was short but good, in a very different way than is usual for Lovecraft.

Then there's a whole bunch of tales that weren't so great and likely didn't see much acclaim either during or after Lovecraft's lifetime. Of these I thought Ibid was notable, not because it was any good, or even entertaining, but rather because it seemed to me as if it was Lovecraft's dubious attempt at a humourous tale. Unfortunately it's a kind of humour that is only appealing to a certain breed of historians, and even among those the audience is probably quite niche. Also, if you don't have any knowledge of the subject matter at all, you might be forgiven to think that Lovecraft's chronicle of the journey of a roman skull has its basis in truth.

Mention must go to the Fungi From Yuggoth poem cycle as it is interesting for its imagery, especially as I could finally see the origins of a few of the more obvious inspirations for the more obscure references depicted in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' brilliant Providence graphic novel. Its rhyme, it must be said, is quite abhorrent though. But that is obviously just my opinion.

And I shouldn't really have to add that all of this is my opinion, but I do it nonetheless, because apart from the short stories, Eldritch Tales also includes Lovecraft's (by now quite dated) essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, in which the massively opinionated author will do his level best to spoil the endings to any and all of the gothics and the horror stories of the 19th and early 20th century that you might ever have thought about reading.

I'm not kidding here: he spoiled The Turn of the Screw for me, the book that was literally the next on my reading pile. The Haunting of Hill House season 2 will take its cues from the Henry James' story so I thought I'd get ahead of the curve and brush up on my want-to-read-horror novels at the same time.
That'll be a relatively short read and I'll finish it off this month, but first I'm going to have to finish watching an entire legion hurl themselves into an abyss of violence and blood from where they will never be able to return from, in Angron: Slave of Nuceira from the Warhammer 40k universe.