“After all that, you came here and brought a woman as well. Could it be, sir, that you are not too bright?” “I didn’t believe all them stories then.” “But you do now?” “I do."
-From "The Crawling Sky" by Joe R. Lansdale
There's a lot of things you can say about H.P. Lovecraft, many of them negative. I ended up getting a copy of his complete works during the sale when Borders went out of business. It's a pretty nice book, too, hardbound with a built-in bookmark and fancy pagework, with some editorial commentary in there to help make sense of it all. I couldn't afford the edition bound in human flesh, but that's okay since they don't really do basements in North Texas and I couldn't give such a volume the solemn, freaky crypt that it deserves. And so it sat, for some time, as I found excuses to do many other things rather than read it. Finally, back in July 2015, I actually read through it. And . . . it was pretty okay? I guess? I mean, I'd read "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour Out of Space" before, so I knew what I was getting into there, and some of the others were about as tedious as I expected. But although I wouldn't end up describing myself as a fan, I found some of the stories ended up growing on me.
I don't really think that I have much to say on the subject of Lovecraft himself, aside from just a few generalities. That field has been plowed and planted and replowed, and I have very little to add to the work of actual scholars and literary critics. There's really two things everyone has heard about him: first, even by the standards of the era in which he lived and worked, Lovecraft had really outlandish views on race; and second, he was prone to write prose which skips right through "purple" and into ultraviolet, possibly even into the X-ray spectrum on occasion. Both of these things are, in fact, absolutely true. There was a third thing which I didn't know about him before reading this omnibus, and that's that he could actually display a sense of humor when he set his mind to it - the story "Sweet Ermengarde" is legitimately funny.
That said, it's possible to read this stuff and come away with inspiration quite aside from the flaws of the source material. He was writing at the right time to have a theme about a pitiless and indifferent universe. I don't know if there's really a fine dividing line between horror and cosmic horror, but serial killers and your basic monsters are horror; fighting them may be tough, but you can see your angle. The ocean or the force of gravity are cosmic horror; if the ocean drowns you it's not like it hates you, it doesn't even have what you could regard as a mind to hate you with. It just doesn't care. Lovecraft mined that feeling so well, everyone who's anyone in the fantasy/SF field has written at least one Lovecraft pastiche and many of them are better at it than he was himself.
But, you know, Sturgeon's Law applies to that as well as to anything else. There's a possibly undeserved reputation that Lovecraft-style horror stories will be narrated by a protagonist writing to a journal just before they commit suicide, go mad, or are slain by a horrible cult, about how they ended up in the situation that they are in. I say "possibly" because that actually does happen a bit. It even ends up a bit here, in this two-volume collection of various stories by a wide variety of authors. Despite the title, the stories aren't all about Cthulhu or even about named monsters from the Mythos, although many are.
The authors here run the gamut and so do the stories themselves. There are some that are pure horror. Some that take a different tack and go for pure comedy. Others go for both (Joe R. Lansdale's story, quoted above, is a prime example of that.) They take place in many settings - dead cities on alien worlds, live cities on alien worlds, dead cities on Earth, Mexico in the 1950s, post-Civil War East Texas, present day New York City, Massachusetts in Lovecraft's time, a futuristic interplanetary space pirate ship. Some name-drop H.P. himself as an author, or as a visionary; some don't have anything to say about him at all. You get some that delve into where exactly all these evil cults come from, some that take them as a given, some that ignore them entirely. And of course there's some that end humanity when the stars come right - and some that give humans another day to carry on.
I can't say that every story in the collections is a complete winner, but there are some extremely good ones overall and even the more disappointing ones are usually only that way by comparison. I didn't really know that I was in the mood to read something like this, but I ended up having more fun reading these stories than pretty much anything else I've been trying to get through lately. In short, if this remotely sounds like something you'd be interested in, you probably will be.
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