Starting Lovecraft - need some advice

[Desdichado]

This thread is a good place to start, although it does go into a bit of a tangent on how talented Lovecraft was (or wasn't, depending on your point of view.)

 

[Kesh]

Skip the Del Rey editions. While they may be the most popular editions, they have some bad edits in them and are not the definitive corrected texts that later printings of the stories use for publication. (I'm not trying to be disagreeable with others here, but if you want to read the stories, you might as well read them the way Lovecraft meant for them to be read without several generations of editors changes to the stories).

Really? How badly are they edited?

 

[aurance]

Hm... cool. Thanks very much everyone.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Really? How badly are they edited?

When compared to the definitive, corrected editions (the latest editions published by Arkham House, stories reprinted in the 2 Penguin editions I posted above), there are some noticable differences. Nothing that is going to change the stories themselves, but there are some major differences. S.T. Joshi went back to the original manuscripts when available, and to the original publication and Lovecrafts notes, and compared them to later publications. He reconstructed the stories that Lovecraft wrote, vs. what was published in the pulps. The pulp editors were fairly loose when editing, in some cases dropping whole paragraphs or cutting down long descriptions to fit the page length they needed. Upon later publication, further edits were made over time. These are the edits that were used in even later publications, including the Del Rey editions that came out in the 80s & early 90s. When Joshi began working on the corrected stories for Arkham House, the paperback reprint rights to those editions of the stories went to Penguin, along with Joshis notes on the corrected text, which are collected in the back of the books, and are very interesting in their own right.

So, if the Del Rey editions are all you can get, there is nothing terribly wrong with them (heck, thats where I read all the stories the first time, and I still have them on the shelf), but you might as well get the other editions since they are just as readily available, and are how the stories were meant to be published in the first place.

 

[Desdichado]

While the pulp editors were probably not the best in the business, it's worth pointing out that, despite popular belief, unedited stories are not necessarily better. Editors are good, especially for writers like HPL who tended to ramble into pretty bad prose from time to time.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

While the pulp editors were probably not the best in the business, it's worth pointing out that, despite popular belief, unedited stories are not necessarily better. Editors are good, especially for writers like HPL who tended to ramble into pretty bad prose from time to time.

True enough, but have you read the stories side by side? I have with several of them, and I think the corrected texts are better, as do many other readers.

There is a difference between a good editor and an editor who is cutting things down to fit a page size. The stories are edited, just not chopped down for arbitrary reasons. Some things were edited for good reason, and those edits stand for the better. It is the mistakes that are propagated through multiple reprints without ever being caught that were finally excised.

 

[Desdichado]

I have not, and I'm not confident in the abilities of the pulp editors to make the stories better. Then again, I'm not confident in the abilities of most pulp authors to write stories that are better unedited either.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

I have not, and I'm not confident in the abilities of the pulp editors to make the stories better. Then again, I'm not confident in the abilities of most pulp authors to write stories that are better unedited either.

So Joshua, are you a Lovecraft and/or pulp fan or not? I haven't been able to figure that out through the various threads over the past few months. You seem to have read a lot of pulp stories, but don't seem to like them very much, or at least you don't care for the writing style.

I'm not trying to pick on you, just curious what you do or don't like.

 

[papa_laz]

What was the name of the one where a bunch of explorers trek in to some arctic wasteland and find the ruins of an ancient city? Easily the scariest thing I've ever read. I was actually pretty dissapointed with Call of Cthulu, nowhere near as good as most of his other work.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

I'm very intrigued about HP Lovecraft's stories, but I'd like to know if there are any opinions on a good collection/book to start with. He wrote a lot of stories!

(Sorry if this has been asked before.)

Go here:
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/

All his stuff is in the public domain, now. Read at your leisure (with the lights on and a big, pointy stick handy).