I’ve been reading, and re-reading, Lovecraft short stories recently, and finding the experience very different from what I thought I remembered of the works by the author of the Cthulhu mythos. I hadn’t previously noticed the dramatic racism that seems to taint almost every story – possibly partly because at the time I wrote such things off as mere foibles of the era, like reading older stories where people thought the earth was flat, or the sun went around the earth, or some such.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you have fond memories of Cthulhu-horror stories, and don’t want to be disillusioned just yet, maybe don’t read this book.

I found Hambly’s introduction charming in its frank admission of Lovecraft’s deeply problematic racism. In a very readable couple of pages, she introduces his style and some of its effect on popular culture, gives a little context to each of the stories, and otherwise provides an articulate and contemporary launching point for new and returning HPL readers alike.

Unlike many short story collections, this one opens with some youthful works, pieces written in his late teens mostly. From the first of them, The Cave, to the last story, The Evil Clergyman, the journey is fairly direct, or at least the landscape feels fairly contiguous: themes of bad blood, whether human or otherwise (as a New Yorker I found his treatment of the Catskills particularly amusing); unimaginable horrors; unexplorable depths; and especially ancient evils, all abound. A few of the stories felt familiar (and a few I’d also just read in The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories). After a while they all sort of run together … neurotic white men in creepy New England or New York settings ever so slowly working out problems with horrible and sometimes messy endings. (Women rarely figure in the tales, and when they do it’s generally as objects of pity, derision, or villainy.)

Reading Lovecraft as an adult is sobering. Even given some wiggle room for hyperbole befitting the horror genre, the way he describes human races and classes is ugly and unworthy. It’s important to revisit such works though, and not to hide them away, because they are part of our culture, and their poisons are in us, and until we acknowledge that we cannot repair the damage.