H.P. Lovecraft

Even Stephen King had a crack at writing on the Cthulu Mythos in his short story, Crouch End; not a bad stab at it, but nowhere near HPL of course.

Alberto - if you want a great place to start with HPL & you can get it in your neck of the woods, I'd recommend this:



900 page leather bound collection of his best works; on Amazon.co.uk it's at a ridiculously low price too:

Necronomicon @ Amazon

Good luck (and don't forget to look behind you in the dark.....)

Jim: I agree with you on "Crouch End"... Fairly good story, though not on the same level as HPL, of course.

Alberto: since your English is very good, try to read Lovecraft in the original. Many translations are not up to scratch, and his prose is anything but easy to translate anyway. When his stories were first published in Italy, the translators edited them massively, and they ended up missing large chunks.

Jim Garten wrote: Even Stephen King had a crack at writing on the Cthulu Mythos in his short story, Crouch End; not a bad stab at it, but nowhere near HPL of course. Alberto - if you want a great place to start with HPL & you can get it in your neck of the woods, I'd recommend this: 900 page leather bound collection of his best works; on Amazon.co.uk it's at a ridiculously low price too: Necronomicon @ Amazon Good luck (and don't forget to look behind you in the dark.....)

I do think that you should get your hands on a chronological comp, if only because in the earlier stories Lovecraft's prose tends to run away from him (see "The Lurking Fear" for a prime example of that). I'd say start with the shorter stuff ("Rats in the Walls" is one of his finest; if you can stand the name of his cat, of course), and work your way up the longer stuff, like "Dreams in a Witchhouse" and...crap, sorry Raff, "Mountains of Madness," which I personally found enthralling enough to finish in a day.

Those of you into Lovecraft may want to check out another author that influenced him; although not as influential as Poe stories like "The Cats of Ulthar" show clear signs of influence by British author Lord Dunsany; who wrote a number of short stories and a few novels with a fantasy setting; some of which had elements of horror as well.