85-87.
The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft (1916-1959)
**Note: There were five different H.P. Lovecraft books on the list (two of which I had already read) so I figured I'd just read through the entire fiction of Lovecraft as a catch all for all of them. Also note that this doesn't include collaborations like Lurker at the Threshold which August Derleth completed based on a Lovecraft story fragment.
This audiobook collection of over 50 hours of material courtesy of the H.P. Lovecraft Historyical Society starts with the relatively straightforward "The Alchemist", his first published story, before launching directly into a novella that's one of the cornerstones of the Lovecraftian mythos "At the Mountains of Madness". It's an appropriate story to kick things off proper with as it gives you almost everything Lovecraft is known for, both for good and bad: you have his elaborate descriptions of otherworldly architecture and culture, his excellence sense of mood and atmosphere, his ability to build to a an impressive finale, his long-windedness and tediousness in belaboring points that could've been made more efficiently... I mean, by the end of this one, you should be either totally bought in or completely alienated, so in that respect it's a smart move.
Of course this being a complete collection, all the major touchstones of Lovecraft's mythos are here including "Call of Cthulhu", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "Dagon", "The Nameless City", "The Dunwich Horror" and others. My personal favorites in the core Cthulhu mythos include "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" with its creepy fish people, the third section of "The Call of Cthulhu" (the only time we actually get the main god himself to make an appearance), "The Whisperer in the Darkness" (a macabre tale of alien mad science) and "The Thing on the Doorstep" (a strange tale of evil wizard body swapping).
Some of the ones I enjoy the most aren't actually tied to the overarching Cthulhu mythos at all like the creeping urban horror of "Pickman's Model" (I wonder if this was an influence on Fritz Leiber), the gruesome Frankenstein riff "Herbert West Reanimator" (which has a nice dark sense of humor to it), the amusingly self-referential "The Unnameable" and the more straightforward terror of "The Tomb" and "The Lurking Fear".
Not all of them are gems though. Honestly some of my least favorite are some of the longest like
The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward which feels like a short story idea extended to novel length and the obnoxiously self-indulgent
Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Also of lesser interest are ones that seem to exist solely to build out the mythos without offering much of an actual interesting narrative like "Nyarlathotep", "The Descendent", and "History of the Necronomicon".
It also contains some little curios that seem to stick out from the rest like "The Mysterious Ship","Sweet Ermengarde" (the rare straight up comedy with not even a little horror or mystery) and a discarded draft of "Shadow Over Innsmouth" that are really only of interest to completionists.
Of course this wouldn't be a write-up without mentioning Lovecraft's racism which is definitely there. You get touches of it in stories like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" with his distrust of "the other" but the notorious "Terror at Red Hook" is certainly his most blatant and unappealing (which is a shame since the story itself is actually told quite well). Even an otherwise nice little pulp exercise like "The Rats in the Walls" is spoiled by a very unfortunate pet name.
One last thing of note to this particular audiobook edition is that I quite liked the 5 minutes of outtakes at the end with the readers themselves cursing Lovecraft's at times labyrinthian, overly prosaic and dense dialogue.
Overall while I wouldn't say I am an unabashed massive fan of everything Lovecraft ever produced, he was undeniably a massive influence on horror fiction and a damn good writer when he reigned in his most over-indulgent impulses.
[| Title | Author |
| The Passage | Justin Cronin |
| We Have Always Lived in the Castle | Shirley Jackson |
| The Historian | Elizabeth Kostova |
| Silence of the Lambs | Thomas Harris |
| The Wasp Factory | Iain Banks |
| Hell House | Richard Matheson |
| The Silent Companions | Laura Purcell |
| Her Fearful Symmetry | Audrey Niffenegger |
| Fledgling | Octavia E. Butler |
| Whispers | Dean Koontz |
| The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket | Edgar Allan Poe |
| Carrion Comfort | Dan Simmons |
| Zone One | Colson Whitehead |
| Ring | Koji Suzuki |
| Broken Monsters | Lauren Beukes |
| The Changeling | Victor LaValle |
| Dark Matter | Michelle Paver |
| HEX | Thomas Olde Heuvelt |
| The Drowning Girl | Caitlin R. Kiernan |
| Pandemonium | Daryl Gregory |
| Frankenstein in Baghdad | Ahmed Saadawi |
tr][td] Winter Tide [/td][td] Ruthanna Emrys [/td][/tr]
| Last Days | Brian Evenson |
| Heart-Shaped Box | Joe Hill |
| The Snowman | Jo Nesbø |
| The Case Against Satan | Ray Russell |
| Night Film | Marissa Pessl |
| Drawing Blood | Poppy Z. Brite |
| The Last Werewolf | Glen Duncan |
| Lovecraft Country | Matt Ruff |
| Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories | China Miéville |
| The Bad Seed | William March |
| The Walls Around Us | Nova Ren Suma |
tr][td] Maplecroft [/td][td] Cherie Priest [/td][/tr]
| The Good House | Tananarive Due |
| Mr. Shivers | Robert Jackson Bennett |
| Hammers on Bone | Cassandra Khaw |
| Shutter | Courtney Alameda |
| Fiend: A Novel | Peter Stenson |
| The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction | Violet Kupersmith |
| Obscura | Joe Hart |
| Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier |
| Rosemary's Baby | Ira Levin |
| Those Across the River | Christpher Buehlman |
| The Hunger | Alma Katsu |
| Let the Right One In | John Ajvide Lindqvist |
| Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories | Mariana Enriquez |
| Feed | Mira Grant |
tr][td] The Handmaid's Tale [/td][td] Margaret Atwood [/td][/tr]
| The Other | Thomas Tryon |
| The Collector | John Fowles |
| Queen of the Damned | Anne Rice |
| World War Z | Max Brooks |
| The House with a Clock in its Walls | John Bellairs |
| "Young Goodman Brown" | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Shadowland | Peter Straub |
| Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation | Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings and Damian Duffy |
| Down a Dark Hall | Lois Duncan |
| Intensity | Dean Koontz |
| The Elementals | Michael McDowell |
| The Atrocity Archives | Charles Stross |
| The Ballad of Black Tom | Victor LaValle |
| The Cipher | Kathe Koja |
| Bloodchild | Octavia E. Butler |
| The Screwfly Solution | James Tiptree Jr. |
| Elizabeth | Ken Greenhall |
| The Red Tree | Caitlin R. Kiernan |
| "The Willows" | Algernon Blackwood |
| "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" | Joyce Carol Oates |
| "It's a Good Life" | Jerome Bixby |
| Goosebumps (The Complete Series #1-#62) | R.L. Stine |
| Lunar Park | Bret Easton Ellis |
| Minion | L.A. Banks |
| The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories | Edited by Ann VanderMeer |
| The Bone Key | Sarah Monette |
| The Imago Sequence and Other Stories | Laird Barron |
| The Jumbles | Tracey Baptiste |
| Alone with the Horrors | Ramsey Campbell |
| The Werewolf of Paris | Guy Endore |
| Spirit Hunters | Ellen Oh |
| Furnace | Livia Llewellyn |
| "Left Foot, Right Foot" | Nalo Hopkinson |
| John Dies at the End | David Wong |
| The Girl Next Door | Jack Ketchum |
| Communion | Whitley Strieber |
| The House of Souls*** | Arthur Machen |
| Grendel | John Gardner |
| Northanger Abbey | Jane Austen |
| Uncle Silas | Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
| Out of Space and Time | Clark Ashton Smith |
| Conjure Wife | Fritz Lieber |
| The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Ambrose Bierce |
| The Best Tales of Hoffmann | E. T. A. Hoffmann |
| The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch | Phillip K. Dick |
| Worse Things Waiting | Manly Wade Wellman |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka |
| Murgunstrumm and Others | Hugh B. Cave |
| The Land of Laughs | Jonathan Carroll |
| She | H. Rider Haggard |
| The Painted Bird | Jerzy Kosiński |
| The Pmrivate Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner | James Hogg |
tr][td] Hawksmoor [/td][td] Peter Ackroyd [/td][/tr]
| Song of Kali | Dan Simmons |
| The Sheep Look Up | John Brunner |
| The Keep | F. Paul Wilson |
| Caleb Williams | William Godwin |
| A Voyage to Arcturus | Dave Lindsay |
| The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade | Herman Melville |
| The Crystal World | J.G. Ballard |
| The Dark Tower and Other Stories | C.S. Lewis |
| The Green Man | Kingsley Amis |
| The Lurker at the Threshold | H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth |
| Falling Angel | William Hjortsberg |
| The Black Spider | Jeremias Gotthelf |
| The Wolfen | Whitley Strieber |
| The Ceremonies | T. E. D. Klein |
| The Arabian Nightmare | Robert Irwin |
| The White Devil | John Webster |
| Something about Eve : a comedy of fig-leaves | James Branch Cabell |
| The Totem | David Morrell |
| The Wandering Jew | Eugène Sue |
| All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By | John Farris |
| Night has a Thousand Eyes | Carnell Woolrich |
| The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction | Anthony Boucher |
[| Sweetheart, Sweetheart | Bernard Taylor |
| The Dark Country | Dennis Etchison |
| Quatermass and the Pit | Nigel Kneale |
| Who Made Stevie Crye? | Michael Bishop |
| In a Lonely Place | Karl Edward Wagner |
| A Nest of Nightmares | Lisa Tuttle |
| The Track of the Cat | Walter Van Tilburg Clark |
| The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck | Alexander Lang |
| Nine Horrors and a Dream | Joseph Payne Brennan |
| John Silence, Physician Extraordinary | Algernon Blackwood |
| Sub Rosa: Strange Tales | Robert Aikman |
| Dark Feasts | Ramsey Campbell |
| Medusa : a Story of Mystery, and Ecstasy & Strange Horror | E. H. Visiak |
| And the Darkness Falls | Edited by Boris Karloff |
| The Second Century of Creepy Stories | Sir Hugh Walpole |
| Deliver Me from Eva | Paul Bailey |
| The Last Bouquet: Some Twilight Tales | Marjorie Bowen |
| The Sleeping and the Dead | August Derleth |
| The Monk | Matthew Lewis |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| Lost Worlds | Clark Ashton Smith |
| The Talented Mr. Ripley | Patricia Highsmith |
| Gormenghast | Mervyn Peake |
| Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street | Stephen Sondheim |
| Edge of Running Water | William Sloane |
| Harvest Home | Thomas Tryon |
| The Weirdstone of Brisingamen | Alan Garner |
| Who Fears the Devil? | Manly Wade Wellman |
| The Book of Skulls | Robert Silverberg |
| The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" | William Hope Hodgson |
| The Midwich Cuckoos | John Wyndham |
| The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen | Elizabeth Bowen |
| Tales from the Nightside | Charles L. Grant |
| The Hunger and Other Stories | Charles Beaumont |
tr][td] The Cement Garden [/td][td] Ian McEwan [/td][/tr]
| Lost Souls | Poppy Z. Brite |
| Outer Dark | Cormac McCarthy |
| The Manuscript Found in Saragossa | Jan Potocki |
| New Grub Street | George Gissing |
| A Sight for Sore Eyes | Ruth Rendell |
| A Stir of Echoes | Richard Matheson |
| Peace | Gene Wolfe |
| They Thirst | Robert McCammon |
| The Dark Descent | David G. Hartwell |
| Fantômas | Marcel Allain |
| Darker Than You Think | Jack Williamson |
| Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural | Edited by Phyllis Fraser, Herbert Wise |
| Prime Evil: New Stories by the Masters of Modern Horror | Edited by Douglas E. Winter |
| Flicker | Theodore Roszak |
| Carnacki, the Ghost Finder | William Hope Hodgson |
| Some of Your Blood | Theodore Sturgeon |
| The Grotesque | Patrick McGrath |
| The Devil Rides Out | Dennis Wheatley |
| The Revenger's Tragedy | Thomas Middleton |
| The Course of the Heart | M. John Harrison |
| Darkness Weaves | Karl Edward Wagner |
| The Nightmare Factory | Thomas Ligotti |
| The Face That Must Die | Ramsey Campbell |
| A Wrinkle in the Skin | John Christopher |
| Skin | Kathe Koja |
| The Trail of Fu Manchu | Sax Rohmer |
| Tales of Horror and the Supernatural | Arthur Machen |
| Strange Toys | Patricia Geary |
| By Bizarre Hands | Joe R. Lansdale |
| A Scent of New-Mown Hay | John Blackburn |
| Finishing Touches | Thomas Tessler |
| The Opener of the Way | Robert Bloch |
| The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural | Editors of Playboy |
| The Night Stalker | Jeff Rice |
| X,Y | Michael Blumlein |
| More Tomorrow & Other Stories | Michael Marshall Smith |
| The Third Ghost Book | Edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith |
| The Off Season | Jack Cady |
| Blood Sport | Robert F. Jones |
| Creep, Shadow! | Abraham Merritt |
| Sleep No More | August Derleth |
| Reprisal | Mitchell Smith |
| Feesters in the Lake | Bob Leman |
| They Return at Evening | H. Russell Wakefield |
| Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales | Henry S. Whitehead |
| House of Flesh | Bruno Fischer |
| A Haunting Beauty | Charles Birkin |
| Year of the Sex Olympics: Three Television Plays | Nigel Kneale |
| Fancies and Goodnights | John Collier |
| Throat Sprockets | Tim Lucas |
| Title | Author |
| "The Lottery" | Shirley Jackson |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| "The Body" | Stephen King |
| "The Monkey's Paw" | W.W. Jacobs |
| Sandman | Neil Gaiman |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James |
| "The Tell-Tale Heart" | Edgar Allan Poe |
| The House Next Door | Anne Rivers Siddons |
| "Shadow Over Innsmouth" | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The October Country | Ray Bradbury |
| Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark | Alvin Schwartz |
| 30 Days of Night | Steve Niles, Ben Templesmith |
| Ghost Story | Peter Straub |
| The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales | Edgar Allan Poe |
| Carrie | Stephen King |
| It | Stephen King |
| Something Wicked This Way Comes | Ray Bradbury |
| Books of Blood 1 - 3 | Clive Barker |
| House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski |
| Carmilla | Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
| Uzumaki | Junji Ito |
| "At the Mountains of Madness" | H.P. Lovecraft |
| Haunting of Hill House | Shirley Jackson |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| The Shining | Stephen King |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker |
| A Head Full of Ghosts | Paul Tremblay |
| The Ruins | Scott Smith |
| MacBeth | William Shakespeare |
| The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad |
| Salem's Lot | Stephen King |
| The Man Who Was Thursday | G.K. Chesterton |
| The Lurking Fear and Other Stories | H.P. Lovecraft |
| Deathbird Stories | Harlan Ellison |
| Johnny Got His Gun | Dalton Trumbo |
| The Damnation Game | Clive Barker |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens |
| The War of the Worlds | H.G. Wells |
| 1984 | George Orwell |
| American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis |
| Pet Sematary | Stephen King |
| Misery | Stephen King |
| The Phantom of the Opera | Gaston Leroux |
| Coraline | Neil Gaiman |
| Horrorstör | Grady Hendrix |
| The Jewel of Seven Stars | Bram Stoker |
| "The Yellow Wallpaper" | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| Doctor Faustus | Christopher Marlowe |
| Twice-Told Tales | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| Red Dragon | Thomas Harris |
| "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" | Harlan Ellison |
| Penpal | Dathan Auerbach |
| Widdershins | Oliver Onions |
| The Island of Dr. Moreau | H.G. Wells |
| Goblin Market | Christina Rossetti |
| Burnt Offerings | Robert Marasco |
| The Road | Cormac McCarthy |
| Invasion of the Body Snatchers | Jack Finney |
| The Devil in America | Kai Ashante Wilson |
| "Please Momma" | Cheysa Burke |
| Meddling Kids | Edgar Cantero |
| Wylding Hall | Elizabeth Hand |
| From Hell | Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| Melmoth the Wanderer | Charles Maturin |
| Infidel | Pornsak Pichetshote |
| The Terror | Dan Simmons |
| The Night They Missed the Horror Show | Joe R. Lansdale |
| Anna Dressed in Blood | Kendare Blake |
| Skin Folk | Nalo Hopkinson |
| Interview with the Vampire | Anne Rice |
| Come Closer | Sara Gran |
| The Blind Owl | Sadegh Heydayat |
| The Exorcist | William Peter Blatty |
| City of Glass | Paul Auster |
| The Devil in Silver | Victor LaValle |
| The Fisherman | John Langan |
| The Mask | Dean Koontz |
| Psycho | Robert Bloch |
| Gothic Tales | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| The Queen of Spades | Alexander Pushkin |
| NOS4A2: A Novel | Joe Hill |
| The Beauty | Aliya Whiteley |
| The Fifth Child | Doris Lessing |
| The Six-Gun Tarot | R.S. Belcher |
| Tales of Terror | Charles Higham |
| The Bloody Chamber | Angela Carter |
| The House on the Borderland | William Hope Hodgson |
| The Girl with All the Gifts | M.R. Carey |
| Experimental Film | Gemma Files |
| I Am Legend | Richard Matheson |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| Horror Horn | E. F. Benson |
| Our Lady of Darkness | Fritz Lieber |
| The Killer Inside Me | Jim Thompson |
| Dark Forces | Edited by Kirby McCauley |
| Dread Nation | Justina Ireland |
| Mongrels: A Novel | Stephen Graham Jones |
| The Grip of It | Jac Jemc |
| The King in Yellow | Robert W. Chambers |
| The Woman In Black | Susan Hill |
| The Anubis Gates | Tim Powers |
| Pages from Cold Point | Paul Bowles |
| The Pet | Charles L. Grant |
| Swan Song | Robert McCammon |
| Her Body and Other Parties: Stories | Carmen Maria Machado |
| Perfume: The Story of a Murderer | Patrick Süskind |
| Parasite Eve | Hideaki Sena |
| The Lesser Dead | Christopher Buehlman |
| Fever Dream | Samanta Schweblin |
| Bird Box | Josh Malerman |
| Exquisite Corpse | Poppy Z. Brite |
| Rotters | Daniel Kraus |
| The Croning | Laird Barron |
| The Cellar | Richard Laymon |
| Collected Ghost Stories* | M.R. James |
| Nightshade | Derek Marlowe |
| The Vampire Lestat | Anne Rice |
| The Troop | Nick Cutter |
tr][td] The Sound of his Horn [/td][td] Sarban [/td][/tr]
| White is for Witching | Helen Oyeyemi |
| The Haunted Omnibus | Edited by Alexander Laing |
| Through the Woods | Emily Carroll |
| Mythago Wood | Robert Holdstock |
[| "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts" | Sonya Taaffe |
| The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The Outsider, and Others | H.P. Lovecraft |
| The Case of Charles Dexter Ward | H.P. Lovecraft |
[
