Review of 'The Dunwich Horror & Other Stories' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I read this collection of stories shortly after completing 'The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories' (TCOCAOS) from the same imprint, you can read that review here.
I found this collection of four stories much more enjoyable overall than TCOCAOS, possibly in part because this collection of stories, what with it's inclusion of travel both temporal, inter-galactic, and inter-dimensional felt more Science Fiction orientated rather than the Horror orientation of the other collection and therefore more in-line with my general personal preferences. Also, while there is still an undercurrent of racism in places in these stories (and while still acknowledging that racism is always unacceptable and problematic) I found it less confrontational than in TCOCAOS.
As this book contains fewer stories, correspondingly they are longer stories, and they are the better for it. Of the stories contained, the first three, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer In The Darkness, and …
I read this collection of stories shortly after completing 'The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories' (TCOCAOS) from the same imprint, you can read that review here.
I found this collection of four stories much more enjoyable overall than TCOCAOS, possibly in part because this collection of stories, what with it's inclusion of travel both temporal, inter-galactic, and inter-dimensional felt more Science Fiction orientated rather than the Horror orientation of the other collection and therefore more in-line with my general personal preferences. Also, while there is still an undercurrent of racism in places in these stories (and while still acknowledging that racism is always unacceptable and problematic) I found it less confrontational than in TCOCAOS.
As this book contains fewer stories, correspondingly they are longer stories, and they are the better for it. Of the stories contained, the first three, The Dunwich Horror, The Whisperer In The Darkness, and The Shadow Out Of Time are perhaps the strongest. The final story, The Haunter Of The Dark was also enjoyable however it appears to have been written as a 'gift' to Robert Bloch (he of Hitchcock's 'Psycho' fame) and features a thinly disguised Bloch as the central character ("Robert Blake") and so feels a little too 'chummy' as a result. Of note here is Lovecraft's tendency to include contemporary news stories at time of writing into the tales, presumably to add some veneer of possiblity to the readers of the pulp magazines in which these tales first appeared. So it is that the newly discovered Pluto is designated as the possible origin of the malign alien forces that wish to dominate Earth in one tale, and that the catastrophic floods in Vermont in 1927 act as a point of entry for another - although it is hard to see how the survivors or families of victims of similar tragedies would take to someone trying to use a similar tactic today.
I would offer a qualified recommendation on this book, the qualifier being that any potential reader needs to be aware of Lovecraft's race and class politics before picking up one of his books.