By my count, I've already read four different books that either touched on, danced around, or directly referenced Lovecraft's greater mythos, without ever actually giving the source material a shot. Figured it was time to finally rectify that.

This was an interesting collection in that the entries were sorted in chronological order of when they were written, and coincidentally I enjoyed the later pieces better than the earlier ones. It was all pretty uniformly dense to get through however; sentences ran long and used obscure and uncommon vocabulary for seemingly its own sake. Definitely a unique style, but not exactly one that I was a fan of. At times I could see the value of mimicking a character's descent into madness or trying to decipher true meaning from a complicated text (something that characters do a few times), but mostly it just felt like a book that actively resisted being read.

Quick synopses of the five works included in this collection:

Dagon - A sailor in the south Pacific during WWI escapes German captivity in a lifeboat and is adrift for days before finding some previously unknown island. On it, he sees things that eventually drive him to suicide.

The Call of Cthulu - The last surviving heir of an academic inherits his great-uncle's notes on an investigation into a secret cult that seemingly spans the world. The revelations make him fear for his own safety.

The Dunwich Horror - A familial cult in rural New England creates a monster that gets loose, and three academics have to decipher strange texts to figure out how to defeat it.

The Whisperer in Darkness - An university professor is a vocal skeptic against a spate of cryptid sightings in the New England countryside and gains the attention of a reclusive academic who lives out there. The hermit claims to have evidence of the creatures, and their back-and-forth correspondence escalates into a threatening climax.

The Haunter of the Dark - A writer seeking inspiration begins to investigate a massive abandoned cathedral in the center of a city that the locals steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Cult shenanigans ensue.

Lots of scholarly protagonists, lots of cults, lots of esoteric texts. The idea of a single author utilizing the same setting and mythos for multiple different works was interesting and I could see the appeal. I just found that the prose and extremely sparse use of dialogue to be more of a struggle to get through than a more contemporary work would be.