H.P. Lovecraft

Which Lovecraft stories are worth reading Veeky Forums?
So far I've only read Call of Cthulhu

I thought that Shadow over Innsmouth was pretty fun.

bump

The Horror in the Museum

The Rats in the Walls is pretty good imo

I think At the Mountains of Madness is a decent staple.

Personal favourite: The Dreams in the Witch House

Good evening, I'm also looking for some Lovecraft recommendations, not sure where to start.

Dagon is a good short, and it really shook me.

>Which Lovecraft stories are worth reading Veeky Forums?


All of them, start with the short ones and warm your way up to the longer ones.

>The cat named Nigger Man
What the shit? Why?

You see user, I have this crazy theory that it might be because the cat was, for all intents and purposes, you know, black.

But why user? It's just about a 2spooky4me seamonster

Probably didn't pay any rent to it's owner nor work for it. But most likely because Lovecraft was just a racist.

Pleb choice: Call of Cthulhu

Contrarian choice: Cool Air

Patrician choice: Colour out of Space

colour out of space and at the mountains of madness are the best spooky ones, but the dream cycle stories are super underated and super good

Lovecraft's starter kit :

Call of Cthulhu
Colour out of Space
At the Mountains of Madness
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Shadow Over Innsmouth

I'm thinking of ordering Necronomicon. His entire work is made of 60-odd stories and this compilation purportedly has the best 30 ones. The other 30 are collected under Eldritch Stories but I hear those are not as good. So get that one I guess

Dunwich Horror is surprisingly good.

This is a pretty shit list for a starter kit.

The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
Pickman's Model

Herbert West: Re-Animator for pulpy fun

You should rahter ask which ones aren't worth reading.

Most of his collaboration works or ghost-writings aren't terrific due to the shortcomings of the base work, so you can fit those in-between good stories or not read them at all. The glaring exceptions are Under the Pyramids/Imprisoned With the Pharaohs (written in collaboration with H. Houdini of all people), In the Walls of Eryx and The Night Ocean, all of which are great all around. Through the Gates of the Silver Key should also be read for completeness' sake IMO, it's a bit stupid but has come cool stuff in it. The Challenge from Beyond is pretty fun too.
The serious Lovecraft reader should also read Collapsing Cosmoses and The Battle that Ended the Century, but keeping in mind that both have been written as jokes.
As far as stories go the only truly terrible one is the infamous The Street, it's literally only good for going "wew lad" at the end. Fragments like The Book or Azathoth obviously fall short due to their nature, but still make interesting reading.

Because when HPL was a kid the Lovecraft family owned a black cat who was named Nigger Man; Lovecraft loved it dearly and honored its memory years later like that.

At the Mountains of Madness is his greatest work, but it's very dense. Colour out of Space is better for a newbie.

CoC is a good choice though.
It's not the best written but it has all the ideas and themes that are central to his work. It's got everything key about his vision and all the later works focused on the individual parts of it.

THIS is the only Lovecraft story worth reading

Do better?

The Whisperer in Darkness is a great read and is one of the more science-fiction based of his works

The Nameless City is a good place to start, very short and has a lot of the themes he developed in later stories.

For a less usual one I'd recommend The Other Gods, set in the ancient past.

Haunter of the Dark is one of my personal favourites, I love how it starts off very grounded and builds the usual sense of dread before anything out of the ordinary happens, so that when it got to the spoopy stuff there was a real feeling of the genie being out of the bottle and paranoia about what will happen next. It's a shame Lovecraft died so young because I think he seriously started improving in his last few stories like this one.

At the moment I am working my way through DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath. Every sentence seems overly stuffed with imagry and I find myself rereading paragraphs to let the density of the text permeate my understanding before moving onwards. This may be a good thing;certainly a necessary thing.

this. idk why this one always seems to get overlooked

Pretty much just pick and choose different short stories, preferably all the famous ones so you can follow the obscure memes. Here was my reading order:
Dagon
Cats of Uthar
The Hound
The Festival
Pickman's Model
Nameless City
Call of Cthulhu
Shadow over Inssmouth

And thats were I forgot the order because I spent something like 3 months reading the entirety of his work. I had some pretty funky dreams for awhile there so you might want to take breaks in between. However, I highly recommend supplementing it with some horror literature, even if its just creepypasta, just to make your brain all gooey and keep it primed and fearful for Lovecraft.

His pet cat was named Nigger Man when he was a kid.

Under the Pyramids was fucking amazing.

To add to this there is generally a few streams or genres to Lovecraft.

There's the pretty basic "and then the spooky thing happened" horror storyline you see in some of his earlier work and when he ghost wrote stuff (Old Bugs, The Tomb)

Then there's the "weird" version of this which are better written will have you asking wtf is going on (Polaris, Memory, Beyond The Wall of Sleep)

Then there are the progenitors to his later works that are well structured and very cosmological (The Festival, The Outsider, Pickman's Model) with bits and pieces of ordinary horror which nevertheless deal with insanity or graphic subject matter in some way(The Hound, Rats in the Walls)

Then there are the long, intricate stories (although never novel length) that depict the slow unmasking of the mystery and the eventual destruction of the main character's mind (Call of Cthluhu, Shadows of Inssmounth. Mountains of Madness, Charles Dexter Ward, Dun-which Horror) these are where most of the famous monsters come from.

But in amongst all these we have dream-cycle stories which are either short (Cats of Uthar, The White Ship, Celaphis) or long (Dream Quest for Kadath, Silver Keys) but nonetheless are all interconnected and depict an almost fantasy like world. There is a recommended reading list for this cycle on wikipedia which is how I read it.