Book Review - H.P. Lovecraft's Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

 

Tales of H.P. Lovecraft by H.P. Lovecraft
Published by: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Publication Date: 1935
Format: Paperback, 346 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

The world is stranger than it seems. No one knows this better than those who have been to Miskatonic University. But then, if you've been to this Ivy League school you've probably been there to catch a glimpse of their extensive collection of occult books and are therefore used to the strange. Perhaps you are even hoping to see the famous Necronomicon, capable of summoning the Old Ones. If that is the case, stories of ancient creatures plaguing the dreams of artists and poets are probably your bread and butter. Meteorite's bringing luminosity and madness to a small valley might seem plebeian. But at least you are forewarned. At least you know of the dangers that can be had on a street that can never be found again where you listened to the most haunting of music played on a viol. You know that sounds within the walls might bring a sleepless night or they might bring death to those you care for. You know that there are aliens and creatures beyond man's knowing and that sometimes this knowledge brings madness. Perhaps you yourself are mad. Maybe you were a professor at Miskatonic University who was called to a strange happening and your eyes were opened to the depravities that are possible when man and beast unite. Or maybe you went on an expedition, nothing more simple or academic than that. Then something went wrong. Someone went missing. Your worldview was forever changed and you were left with one purpose, to conceal the discovery of this horror from the rest of the world forever. Here's hoping you succeed and don't get in league with evil. But evil is so persuasive...

While most readers would probably place Lovecraft in the horror or fantasy sections of their bookshelves, he was distinctly influenced by the Gothic and in my mind that is where he belongs. Such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert W. Chambers helped lay the groundwork for Lovecraft and all three of these men straddled genres. If you keeping going backwards in classification you'll see that Gothic is the only way to encapsulate all of them, because horror eventually arose out of the Gothic tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet Lovecraft has almost defied classification, he has become a byword for cosmic horror and knowledge beyond the ken of man, knowledge that often leads to insanity. His greatest creation, Cthulhu, is known by those who don't even know who Lovecraft or Arkham or Miskatonic University is. His imagery has become a part of popular culture and his influence is still felt. For me his influence is felt even closer to home in that my family owns Stanton and Lee Publishers which started as an imprint of Arkham House, which was founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to publish Lovecraft's work in beautiful hardcover editions. Therefore it's kind of embarrassing to admit that while familiar with Lovecraft's work I had actually never read it until now. What struck me most about this collection of his short stories is you can instantly see why his writing is classic. It's not just looking beyond his work and seeing how much influence he has had on other writers from August Derleth to Terry Pratchett to Bruce Campbell to the Duffer Brothers, but it's how his work was so original. His work feels so modern, so fresh, so out of it's time. His legacy might be great, but it's endured because he was a gifted writer who saw the world differently, much like the afflicted artists who people his stories.

As for this collection hand-picked by Joyce Carol Oates after all the copyright issues were settled... without having read any of Lovecraft's stories not included here, I'd say it's a very solid collection that should have left "At the Mountains of Madness" out. Now I know those who are fans of Lovecraft are wondering why I would omit his most famous work. Well it's because a novella has no business being included in a collection of short stories, it creates an imbalance in the book's flow. Also, his writing style works better on a smaller scale. I'm not talking worldbuilding, I'm talking length. He has a way of packing such a punch with his shorter stories that having the time to search miles and miles of Antarctica AND see giant penguins who actually have nothing to do with the plot makes the punch lose it's impact. It's true, shorter is sweeter. As a reader I'm not a fan of short story collections. One really badly picked or placed piece can throw off my entire opinion of the book, IE "At the Mountains of Madness." Though in fairness to this collection I didn't hold the novella inclusion against it, that's Joyce Carol Oates's fault. But I did have issues with Lovecraft's writing, and not just with the occasional out-of-touch reference that is the product of his time that he expressed through his continued use of inbreeding as a plot point, but through his repetitive use of certain words, phrases, stylistic elements, and plot twists. That's the problem with a writer who has certain ticks when stories that weren't meant to be presented together are, you see where he repeats. You think perhaps you should start a drinking game for every time he uses the word "cyclopean" but then worry that you will die of blood alcohol poisoning. But I think that if you were to just space out the reading of his work you wouldn't find this as annoying as someone who reads right through.

Yet this repetition isn't all bad. Yes, it can be irksome, but it also helps his stories to have an inter-connectivity. It's interesting to me, reading these stories almost a hundred years after they were written that he is obviously setting all these stories within the same universe of his creation. He's worldbuilding on a level that, as time goes on, is becoming more and more popular. How many tie-ins, prequels, sequels, what-have-yous are now out there in the world? Characters from Miskatonic University reappear or are referenced in other stories. Events that have happened in an earlier story with say a University expedition have consequences in a story that was written later about a different expedition. This more than anything else is why people have latched onto his work. He has created his own universe and while his longest story is nowhere near a sizable book if you put them all together you have one heck of a story. I think this is why so many authors are drawn to writing stories within his world. It's not just that it's iconic, it's that it's so specific, so well built that to write within these confines gives you a freedom and the hope that a little of his genius will rub off on you. While I'm not going to debate the difference between true literature and fanfic here, because that is too thorny an issue, there has to be something said to the freedom of writing in someone else's voice. Even Neil Gaiman has gone all out fanboy with his Sherlock Holmes pastiche set in Lovecraft's universe, "A Study in Emerald" which should be noted isn't the only time Sherlock has fought with Cthulhu in various other authors work. But it is very interesting to muse on the fact that Conan Doyle and Lovecraft are contemporaries... makes you think, doesn't it?

Though, for me there were two stories that really struck home, "The Rats in the Walls" and "The Shunned House." Both stories deal with houses that have weird effects on the residents. Needless to say these homes have death within their walls yet hint at "the other." Be it cannibalism, paganism, werewolves, these stories work because not only are they suspenseful, but they are also left open ended enough that you have to draw your own conclusions. With the mysterious, sometimes having everything tied up neatly in a bow is dissatisfying. The hints, the surmises you reach, they can scare you more then knowing exactly what was going on. These two stories need to be read in one sitting, the pages turned as fast as your eyes can take in the words. These stories go for the tropes of traditional Gothic stories, and yet, Lovecraft knows how to tweak the narrative just enough to make the genre all his own. That is why I think so many people shy from calling him a Gothic writer, he has made the genre his bitch. While "The Shunned House" is slightly predictable, following genre conventions, I defy anyone to see that ending coming in "The Rats in the Walls!" A story about a man restoring his ancestral home, you expect a bit of ghosts and ghouls, you don't expect him to become a cannibal and eat his son's best friend after dreaming that he was a pig now do you? Right there is the essence of Lovecraft. Serving up the unexpected in a very macabre way. He's fused his own weird notions of aliens and outer space with what people expect from the Gothic and created what is and will always be Lovecraftian.

Drawing Next Month's Book!

 The Winner is Unnatural Creatures Stories Selected by Neil Gaiman. But other titles in the "hat" were:

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

Laura by Vera Caspary 

The Fold by Peter Clines

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (or The Silkworm if we all have read it)

The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak (but meant to put in One More Thing by B.J. Novak) 

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (with an apology)

Miss Eliza's Book Review - Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
Published by: William Morrow
Publication Date: June 18th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 192 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

He came for the funeral, but on his way to the wake he wanders the lanes of his childhood. He doesn't know where he's going until he is there, at the Hempstock's farm. There he remembers his friend Lettie, who lived there with her mother and grandmother, until she left for Australia. But his memories are coming back. She didn't go to Australia, she disappeared in the little pond behind her house that she insisted on calling the ocean. He would have never met the Hempstocks if not for the opal miner. The miner came into their house as a boarder and took the family car down to the end of the lane and ended his life. That was the day he first met the three women. Weird things started to happen after the suicide. Money started randomly appearing and he learned that an otherworldly being used the death of the miner to access our world. Lettie tried to stop this threat, but she made a mistake they all will pay for. The being manifests in our world as Ursula Monkton, a new nanny for the boy and his sister. He needed Lettie's help to get her back to where she came from, but that might be very dangerous indeed. They might need help from more otherworldly beings, and their arrival might be more dangerous than Ursula's. The struggle will be fierce, and in the end innocence might not be it's only victim.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is an odd little book. It's too long to be a short story, yet too short to really be a novel, instead it's a little meditation on what it is to look back on your childhood. All the muddled memories and half forgotten things that went into shaping who we are. Is this a perfect book? Far from it. Is this Gaiman's best work? No, it's not. But does it connect to something deep within you? Yes it does. It's like a fever dream of your childhood where something triggers a memory and all that emotion floods back into you. All the fears of our childhood. That one nightmare you had where Doctor Octopus killed your parents and no matter how many times they told you that it was nothing but a dream it somehow still feels real. In some reality somewhere your parents died and you were alone. The memory sneaks up on you and for a short time you remember every vivid detail, but over time it fades until you stumble upon it again. When you learn that the narrator has gone back and had his past revealed to him more than once only to forget, you realize the truth at what Gaiman is hinting at. Time, memory, it's mutable. Emotions even change. That which we felt so important as a child is somehow small, but at the same time is still important. As we grow older things disappear and we forget. To regain those memories only to lose them again is bittersweet, much how you will struggle to remember this book.

Neil writes best when writing for children. He has some magical connection to his own inner child that speaks to that within us all. While this book isn't for children, it's about them. The Ocean at the End of the Lane feels like a snapshot of Neil's own childhood, but it has a universality to all reader's childhoods. There's a nostalgia with the time period. Even if you aren't of his generation, there is still that feeling of looking back, when your imagination ran riot and a clearing in the woods was a home you built and the rocks a fireplace, or when the roots of a tree were a vast city for people to live in, or even when a pond was an ocean. So while the book relies heavily on the fantastical, there's another reading of the text. That the fantastical is nothing more then a way for a child to process ideas they don't quite yet understand. This can be seen most with the relationship between the father and Ursula. They are obviously attracted to each other and the younger sister even hints later in life that perhaps their father had an affair. So even if you find the evil that is Ursula a little fantastical, with her otherworldly attributes, look at it another way. She is an outsider with the power to break up the family by her relationship with the father. Everything "other" can have a more mundane explanation. And that is what I really connected to re-reading this book. That the text has these multiple layers, that it isn't just the supernatural, but the natural hidden underneath.

The problem with the book is that it overstays it's welcome. When Ursula has been vanquished and the hunger birds remain you can't help but feel that the story should have ended. The hunger birds are varmints that serve no real purpose in the story and lack the originality of everything that has come before. The narrative seems to have gotten away from Neil and we are just biding our time. This is where you realize that the "book" might have been better served as a short story. Or even interlinked short stories that completely skipped over the hunger birds. This lackluster ending more than anything else makes the book very forgettable. You have an immediate connection, but that connection is slowly severed as you care less and less for what is happening. But in a way, it works. Because you are left with the same problem as our unknown protagonist. You have vague impressions of what you have read, but no real memory. This, of course, doesn't aid in the writing of a review. Trying to catch your feelings for this book is like trying to bottle lightning. The words are running through your hands like water and you're not sure if you have anything to say. After reading this book twice I feel like I have a better grasp on it, but still, it's floating away even as I type this.

Neil wrote this book for his wife Amanda. To dig deep and create not just his typical story, but something different, something brimming with emotion. What I find interesting is that his end result reminds me very much of Terry Pratchett. Seeing as Terry and Neil have been friends for years and years and wrote Good Omens together, there is an overlap in their writing style. But whereas Neil has always struck a more solid narrative line, Terry has always had looser narratives that flow with emotion, that are very dreamlike and profound in their way. Good Omens is an odd little book because I'm not sure it feels very collaborative, with Terry's voice being more prominent, much like his later writing with Stephen Baxter. Prior to picking up The Ocean at the End of the Lane for a second time I was immersing myself in Terry's Tiffany Aching books. Going from those specific stories to The Ocean at the End of the Lane and the Hempstocks, one can't help but feel the similarities between the Hempstocks and the witches, though they are anything but. Therefore I was left with this interesting feeling. By having Neil dig deep and write a book more rooted in painful truth and emotion he has created a book that is, in my mind, the most true collaboration between the two writers, though it's all Gaiman. Terry somehow helped him see another way to write and his wife made him open up and you get this book that cuts to the quick like Terry, but is a wonderful new kind of story.

Though what I connected to most was the sense of loss in the book. Not just the loss of innocence and memory and our childhood, but true devastating loss. When the little kitten is killed by the cap driver the day the opal miner arrives my heart broke as well. This I think, more than the opal miner's death, is when this little boy's life starts to change. Everyone has some time in their life when the happy dream of childhood is shattered forever. It could be the death of a friend or family member, your parent's divorce, a friend moving away, something comes into your perfect golden bubble and shatters your world and you have to start to face the reality of the harshness of existence. For me I had to face reality young, like the narrator, with my mother getting sick. Yet I still look back on my childhood as sunny days playing with my dolls and making up adventures. Though loss has changed me, I'm not the same person I was. This book was like a mainline to all those feels. Things I hadn't thought of in years came back, but nothing hurt more than that little kitten's demise. My best friend was a little black and white cat. We had twenty-two years together and it still hurts everyday that he is gone, and I know that perhaps I can never move on. Neil got straight to the heart of the matter, "the ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not." I will never see his like again. Like my childhood it is gone forever.