There were times that Lovecraft caught my interest, but overall his dark flowery language usually bores me to sleep. It helped me on my nights of waking in early hours to return to slumber dreams of my own that made much more sense than his. ( )

Of the "stories" in this book I would only call The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath a classic. Even so, Kadath itself meanders all over the place and parts of it vary greatly in quality. I admittedly am not a big fan of Lovecraft's "prose poem" dream-cycle stuff, preferring his horror and scifi stuff (yes, The Whisperer in Darkness is a scifi story, not a horror story). It's better than his poetry, but... Writers like Dunsany and Eddison and Machen did this sort of thing much better than Lovecraft.

One thing you can see in this collection is a working out of themes and ideas that he used again and again in his dream-cycle stories. At the same time I think way too much is made of Lovecraft's conception of his dream-cycle works as a connected whole at all. A lot of this has been tacked on by later reviewers and analyzers, August Derleth being probably the worst offender. Also, seeing the Cthulhu Mythos as an intentionally consistent and coherent whole was probably not foremost in Lovecraft's mind either. Instead you see a writer working and reworking ideas and themes (including characters and character names) until the truly classic stories evolve. ( )

Of the "stories" in this book I would only call The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath a classic. Even so, Kadath itself meanders all over the place and parts of it vary greatly in quality. I admittedly am not a big fan of Lovecraft's "prose poem" dream-cycle stuff, preferring his horror and scifi stuff (yes, The Whisperer in Darkness is a scifi story, not a horror story). It's better than his poetry, but... Writers like Dunsany and Eddison and Machen did this sort of thing much better than Lovecraft.

One thing you can see in this collection is a working out of themes and ideas that he used again and again in his dream-cycle stories. At the same time I think way too much is made of Lovecraft's conception of his dream-cycle works as a connected whole at all. A lot of this has been tacked on by later reviewers and analyzers, August Derleth being probably the worst offender. Also, seeing the Cthulhu Mythos as an intentionally consistent and coherent whole was probably not foremost in Lovecraft's mind either. Instead you see a writer working and reworking ideas and themes (including characters and character names) until the truly classic stories evolve. ( )

I got about a third of the way through the walls of text Lovecraft threw up at me, and I simply didn't have the heart to go on.

This is one of the unreadable Lovecraft stories, in my opinion. In it, there's no real discernable plot, just Randolph Carter moving from one location to the next, wildly observing things. Meanwhile, Lovecraft's imagination is in overdrive, and he's slinging names and locations and infernal beasts three, four, or five to a page. Unfortunately, while the imagination was firing on all cylinders, his storytelling/pacing/plotting abilities were nonexistent.

There is no dialogue to be found in this 40 K-word story, so, we are honestly treated to walls of text. And that text is dense. Like, for example, this single sentence gem:

And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their souls and messenger Nyarlathotep.

And no, I didn't skip any commas or anything. That's precisely how it's presented. Try reading that aloud. Like, Howard, dude, take a damn breath now and again, would ya?

So, yeah, three stars for the book's packaging and artwork, etc. 0 stars for the story, such as it is. ( )

Good. Freaking. Grief. For a while there, I actually thought this one was going to take me another year to read. On the one hand, I was delighted as Lovecraft suddenly took the opportunity to begin twining all this threads together around Randolph Carter, presenting a sort of world tour of the mythos, including the warrior cats. On the other hand, good freaking grief this is long and full of blatheration. Also, there's no excuse for that ending, really. ( )