Warning, major spoilers up ahead because this story made me cranky.

Doooooooooooooom!

I know that it was cool in the first half of the 20th century for authors to use the word DOOM, but to modern eyes it’s unbelievably cheesy.  When I read the above quote, I snapped my fingers and said, “Oh no he didn’t!”.

Firstly, an antiquarian like Lovecraft ought to know that DOOM simply means fate, and for all his professed hatred of what he calls “debased language”, you’d think he’d know that.  Traditionally, you could say “His doom was to become a great scientist” as a perfectly non-ominous sentence.   The problem is that DOOM just sounds ominous, making it an absolutely perfect target for what Lovecraft called “debasement” and I called “Evolution” of English.

Oh right, I’m reviewing fiction, not writing a linguistics paper.  My bad.

The Doom That Came to Sarnath is about the rise and fall of a great city (guess what its name is?).  The story begins with primitive humans and a pre-human race of squishy nasty things that worship a squishy nasty God.  Fortunately though, the human tribes that found Sarnath have a very pre-1940s xenophobia, and lay down some unholy smite.  Then they decide to build a big city near the place those nasty evil things were.  Great idea.  That won’t come back to haunt you at all.

1,000 years later, Sarnath is the regional superpower and on the 1,000th year anniversary, as the citizens and dignitaries from everywhere around are celebrating, Sarnath is destroyed, and no one ever comes back to the city, despite the mineral wealth of the nearby hills.

My first problem with this story is that Lovecraft CAPITALIZES DOOM FOR EMPHASIS.  I’m not sure about the conventions of his time, but this comes across as loud even if the word he used wasn’t DOOM.  Fully capitalized words are completely jarring.  That’s why we hate it when people type in all caps, and it’s shorthand for online shouting.  Also… seriously?  You’re a professional writer CAPITALIZING FOR EMPHASIS?  I thought that the prose’s style and diction was supposed to provide that.  I mean, every time I see the word doom in text, it’s pretty much already capitalized.  The word sticks out on its own.

Now there are times where all capital letters cane be done well.  I’m referring to when Death speaks in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, or the encounter between Barrick Eddon and a demigod in the Shadowmarch series by Tad Williams.  Both cases use capital letters to emphasize the peculiar manner in which the characters speak.  This is what tvtropes.org calls Painting The Fourth Wall.  However, using capital letter in descriptive prose is NOT COOL and serves only as a cheap method of emphasis.

The dark fairy-tale feel of  the story is great though, and despite my ranting, other than overusing DOOM, this one isn’t a bad read.  The pacing is good, the narrative structure solid.  The characterization is lackluster, but of course, it’s kind of hard to cover 1,000 years of a city’s history through one character without bending longevity laws, which would completely shift the thematic emphasis of the story to “wow, this immortal guy watched it all.”  We’d be focused on him being immortal, not the doom of a mighty city.

Altogether, I’d say there are better Lovecraft stories to read first, but if you absolutely love his writing, this is a fairly short, pretty good read.

Also, this is a rare Lovecraft story without a singular occurrence of the word singular.  Bravo.

What is there, appears to be the introduction to a horror story, written in a style mildly different from Lovecraft’s norm but citing the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

My biggest problem with this short story aside from its incompleteness is its utter lack of characterization, character arcs, or narrative tension.  What I’m reading must be a fragment of the whole thing, because it cuts off at the end of a paragraph that doesn’t resolve things at all.

I have relatively few complaints about this short story. It is lean and muscular. He does use the word “singular” once, but for Lovecraft this is like eating only one potato chip. I admire his restraint.

I especially enjoy the ending, which finishes out the story in a way that’s completely realistic for a Lovecraft protagonist while still letting us in on his fears.

Dagon is about a thirty minute read, so it also doesn’t really have time to drag. Because of its short length, I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants a taste of Lovecraft without the hefty word count.

Cool Air is a story about a hard-up magazine writer and a mysterious doctor, whose utter mastery of the medical craft astounds the writer. He becomes the doctor’s helper in doing various tasks, including maintaining the ammonia cooling system that keeps the doctor’s quarters frigid.

He notes a strange smell in the air early on, and notes that after one ominous day, whenever it’s cold, he feels horrified. This is because the doctor had died 18 years ago and the tissues were holding together as long as he kept his body cold, as revealed by the climax.

This is kind of an interesting idea, but like The Beast in the Cave before it, the climactic epiphany is about as strong as rotten sackcloth. That he was talking to a walking corpse that behaved completely like a normal human is hardly chilling worrisome… not like one that hungers for your brains. What’s so horrifying about a guy in a dead meatsuit if he’s completely beneficial to the living? There’s no tension there. The doctor wasn’t even that sinister, he had utter mastery of the healing arts, and gladly used his skill to save others. Why the big freak-out at the end?

I can only conclude that this guy, like some of Lovecraft’s other protagonists, have all the grit of a Disney movie. Comparing this protagonist to Willett from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I have to say that this protagonist’s weak, cowardly reaction towards something as simple as a friendly ghost is not deserving of any sympathy. In fact, the whole story, in that final moment, just seems silly. And not in a giant blind albino penguin way.

Surgeon General’s Warning: Certain Colours can drive you MAD. Most colors, however, are safe. Except Agent Orange, which can cause cancer.

Okay. So the story is framed by some guy from the hydroelectric company who’s talking to people around Arkham (a small town/municipality) about the troubles that happened several decades ago. The townspeople say not to go talk to Ammi, one of the old men still alive from that time, so of course he does, but only after seeing for himself the wasteland that people call the Blasted Heath. The new dam will drown that location, which is a good thing according to the narrator because the Heath is creepy and Ammi’s story makes it creepier.

The story inside the frame is more interesting, but unfortunately has the indefinite, rambling weakness that defines second-hand fictional accounts. A comet fell to earth near a farmer’s house. Its colour creeped people out.

So of course scientists from the nearby university come out to examine it, except the material is fading away even as they run tests, including the strange globules inside of it, which we find out later are seeds. Seeds of EVIL. The horror. After a year or two of unnatural events like crops being lush but inedible, vegetation blooming in eerie unnatural colors, trees that move without wind, livestock dying in grisly ways, the farmer’s family starts going nutcase too.

Ammi, the old man telling the story to the narrator, is the farmer’s friend and soon becomes that farm’s only visitor. He watches his friend and the family go slowly nuts and then die, and decides to gather a group to investigate. Bad idea. The thing that was driving the farmers nuts, poisoning the vegetation and sickening the livestock stalks them for a while before shooting off into space while they watch, helpless maddened by the very colour of the thing.

To top it off, we find out that the thing that left the planet was only one of multiple, and another yet slumbers in the abandoned heath, the taint it causes growing slowly every year.

Don’t misread my snark as disdain, this story is good, but the tension is utterly purged by having Ammi, a live person, tell the narrator about what happened. Reading a dead man’s journal is far more tense, or even a live man’s so long as we don’t see Ammi until after the story’s done. In that way, Ammi’s fate is up in the air throughout the climax. This is a similar, but even more glaring mistake to the Call of Cthulhu’s climactic chase, when we know beforehand that the sailor survived the chase. How am I supposed to be immersed when the text tells me what happened before I read what happened?

Gripes aside, the visuals are strong, gruesome, eerie and powerful. While not as sound from a narrative standpoint as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, this story is still enjoyable for those who like vivid description. The pseudo-folksiness of Ammi’s stories really pull on my rural-born-and-raised heartstrings too. While reading this, it’s probably best to focus on the pretty pictures and the mystery, rather than on tension and climax, both of which are comparatively weak.

This still gets a “Recommended Read” for me.

The Call of Cthulhu, perhaps the most iconic and recognizable of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror stories, is also at once a let down and a wonder of literature.

It is a wonder because there are so many beautiful turns of phrases and poetic terms interspersed into the prose, but at the same time, despite the tense and ominous prose, H.P. Lovecraft made certain narrative choices that I would consider poor.

The protagonist is never in the center of the action, for example.  He hears all of his stories secondhand, first from his uncle’s notes, then from other men.  While this works very very well as a hook for the story, it had unfortunate consequences when the climax of the story, a possibly terrifying flight from the titular Elder God, is read from the manuscript of a Norwegian Sailor, rather than experienced by the narrator.  This distancing, while certainly easier on the protagonist, utterly ruins the sense of suspense at that point in the narrative.  I did not care for the Norwegian Sailor, even after he is introduced, quite as I did the nameless narrator, however bigoted and stuffy he is.  This narrative flaw is enough alone for me to gripe about.

But worse still is the fact that other than carvings, the protagonist has no association whatsoever to anyone researching or experiencing the Cthulhu Cult’s activities.  The vague implications that the Cult may find him, and kill him too, are hardly a terrifying idea, since it seems difficult to imagine how any of them would know of his involvement.  As I’ve said, the protagonist-narrator is hardly involved in the action at all.

Complaints aside, the imagery and description is chilling, if excessively intellectualized, and Lovecraft’s typically lengthy sentences seem almost light in this story, at the least I did not find myself tripping over them and his extensive vocabulary in this work, as opposed to other works of his I have read recently.  The opening paragraph has to be the most chilling and epic opening to any short story I can recall reading as well.

I think that I have seen better works from him, but for horror fans looking to connect to their intellectual tradition, I still think that this story is a decent read.

Warning, possible spoilers ahead.  I do my best not to ruin the stories I review too much, but some discussion of plot is necessary.

H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness concerns the arrival of a fictional expedition to the Antarctic and their fate from the perspective of the second most traumatized member of the group.  The tension is perfectly maintained from the second chapter onward, although the first chapter, I will admit, started rather slowly.

One difficulty of H.P. Lovecraft’s prose is the sheer density of it.  Although if I were a modern-day editor, I would find only a few places to cut without damaging the texture, it is still cumbrous and difficult to read.  I find myself getting lost in clauses,  stumbling over some sentences that should not have been penned.  Snark aside though, some of these uberlong sentences are charming, beautifully written and almost lyrical.  The extent of description, even of the mundane, serves well to anchor us in the setting and plot even when things start to get weird.  The long sentence length even adds another layer of depth to the prose when the author decides to pen a sentence with an incredibly short word count, or interjecting highly charged statements like the one that started off this post.  I doubt that if every sentence were as succint as the one above that the story would have benefited from it.

I’ve heard from other sources that At The Mountains of Madness is one of Lovecraft’s best, and though my experience with this author is limited, I am inclined to agree that this work is masterful.  From the visual descriptions he provides of even the most odd of creatures from the depths of his nightmares, to the blind albino penguins (so awesome), to the psychological effects of seeing That Which Should Not Be Seen, Lovecraft invokes a sense of terrible awe, wonder, and creeping madness into the text at every turn.

Lovecraft’s narrative is strengthened by his intimates familiarity with the science of his time.  The concept of continental drift, so new in his time period, served very well to establish his protagonist as a man of science and to add an element of reality to a modern reader that seems uncanny when the narrator stumbles on murals depicting the world across millions of years.  At other times, his science was later disproved, such as the concept of evolutionary levels or that evolution has an eventual end goal, but that shaky science was popular at his time, and still too often finds its way into modern-day narratives, much to my dismay.

Finally, this novella addresses a very very heavy theme, the nature of humanity, with a deft hand and nuanced answer that left me astounded.  As the above quote showed, Lovecraft considers men not as creatures, not as shells of flesh or animals, but rather as the intellect and capacity for accomplishment and rational thought.  In this, the Old Ones prove just as human as humanity is, a difficult point utterly sold to me despite the fact that the Old Ones are bizarre winged, tentacled monstrosities.

Despite the hefty prose (lighter than The Alchemist, at least!) I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a good SF/F/Horror story, although it took me 5.5 hrs to read it today.  A word of advice: Break this one up over a couple of days.

Good day to you, Mr. Lovecraft!  I started today with The Alchemist. (Warning, plot spoilers ahead)

The story’s narrator is a young man who grows progressively older throughout the narrative.  He comes from a family cursed hundreds of years past by an Alchemist, and he knows that he will die before 32.  Near the ending, he meets the Alchemist, who had discovered the secret to immortality, and more through luck than anything, ends the man’s immortal life.

A sense of gloom and doom hangs over this whole narrative, which is insanely difficult to read not because of the horror, but because of the lengthy sentences and the particular words chosen by the author.  Much of the impact of the piece is blunted when I have to stop and reread a critical sentence through again in order to appreciate its meaning.  That said, this style does work for the author.  When I’m not reaching for the dictionary to look up what ‘wainscot’ means, or a particularly florid sentence, I am absolutely riveted by his sentences.  I only wish that I could manage to maintain tension while delivering a detailed description of an old house.

The Alchemist is a good read for anyone who likes horror and doesn’t mind reading with a dictionary close at hand, but despite its short length, it is not a good story for anyone with a limited attention span.