Where to start with Lovecraft?

[Barendd Nobeard]

I'd pick a longer story, which tend to have a more gradual descent into Lovecraft's world. The shorter stories may seem a little less plausible as they quickly move into the "weird."

So, I'd go for "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (my personal favorite), "Call of Cthulhu" (which is, ultimately, a little unsatisfying in my opinion), or "Shadow Out of Time" which are all a nice length. I think "The Dunwich Horror" is a little long, but I haven't read it in a while.

 

[Desdichado]

The first Lovecraft story I ever heard of, ever read and still think is his best work is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.. Beyond that, I think The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness are the best of his other stories. The last of the bunch is the only one that's really, truly "Lovecraftian" in the sense that most people around here mean when they say the word.

As a horror writer, Lovecraft is actually pretty weak. His stories simply aren't scary. They can be weird, and interesting, at least, but for that, I'd still recommend the Dream-Quest as the best of the lot.

 

[billd91]

I wouldn't sweat anything about the order in which you read the stories. They're all short stories and not serial narratives. Just start with whatever you can get your hands on first at the local library (and if they don't have any, don't forget to ask the librarian for interlibrary loan).

Also, keep in mind that the Cthulhu mythos laid out in gaming materials like CoC includes the works of many other writers including August Derleth (anybody else here driven over the August Derleth bridge?), Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Brian Lumley, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and many others. They contributed various different parts of the whole mythos and not everything fits together tidily. But that's OK because the stories are still fun to read.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Everyone has already given good suggestions, but I'll just chime in with a few of my own random musings.

The first Lovecraft story that I read was At the Mountains of Madness, which is really more of a novella than a short story. At the time, the setting (Antarctica) appealed to me greatly, as I was also reading Endurance, Mawson's Will, etc. But I digress.... AtMoM bears a passing resemblance to the movie "The Thing", in that there is a group of scientists up against something inexplicably weird and alien. There is a very slow buildup to the eventual pay-off.

Thereafter I continued on to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which is pretty atypical of Lovecraft stories, actually. It's very structured and linear, and lacks the utterly bleak ending of many of HPL's other works. If I had it to do over again, I would've saved this one for later.

The real gems, which have already been mentioned: Shadow Over Innsmouth (my favorite, also), Call of Cthulhu, and Colour out of Space. But I have to give props to Shadow Out of Time as one of the most compelling. I think the main character / narrator is a lot easier to identify with than many of Lovecraft's more bland first-person victims.

Final note to Joshua Dyal: If you are not scared by the intellectual horror of Lovecraft's stories, then you're made of sterner stuff than me. After reading HPL, I've slept with the lights many a time.

 

[Desdichado]

Final note to Joshua Dyal: If you are not scared by the intellectual horror of Lovecraft's stories, then you're made of sterner stuff than me. After reading HPL, I've slept with the lights many a time.

Beats sleeping with the fishes, which seemed to have been another literal fear of Lovecraft's. Lovecraft was scared of weird things; like fish men, and cosmic starfish, and things that don't really scare most folks. Intellectually, if you think about the underlying message interwoven into the "Cthulhu Mythos" then that's pretty bleak, but not exactly scary.

 

[milotha]

You can pretty much start anywhere with Lovecraft's stuff. They are all fairly self-contained stories. I started with the Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It's a good stand alone read, requires no mythos knowledge, and provides a good intro to the flavor of Lovecraft. Another good one is The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. It's tends more towards the surreal/Dunsany side.

Some other good short stories are:
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Coulour out of Space
The Call of Cthulhu
The Shadow out of Time

Try to find a book with these in them. I have one entitled The Best of HP Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.

Though my favorite Lovecraft story is The Quest of Iranon. It's a sad tale for all of us dreamers.

 

[Celtavian]

re

I just started reading and was drawn in. If you are able, I recommend finding his complete collection online (all public domain) and start reading. The first few paragraphs of a Lovecraft story are usually enough to keep you reading.

 

[Rackhir]

Beats sleeping with the fishes, which seemed to have been another literal fear of Lovecraft's. Lovecraft was scared of weird things; like fish men, and cosmic starfish, and things that don't really scare most folks. Intellectually, if you think about the underlying message interwoven into the "Cthulhu Mythos" then that's pretty bleak, but not exactly scary.

I've never found HP Lovecrafts stories to be scary in the "Make you jump" sense, but they are somewhat unnerving at an intelectual level because of the kind of universe they present. His universe is a very cold, dangerous and indiffrent place. We're incapable of understanding that universe because trying to do so will drive you mad and essentially we are just ants scurring around the feet of the Old Ones, hoping that they won't accidentally squash us.

There's an old saying that the thing about Aliens is that, they're Alien. HP was one of the few writers who ever really seemed to be able to capture that feeling. His Old Ones are alien. Which is one of the reasons why his stories occupy a place of respect for me.

Personally, I would avoid any of the stories that were written by the other writers of the Mythos. It's incredibly easy to write a bad Mythos story, like most good horror movies what is suggested and implied is far scarier than what is laid out for you. A lesson that none of the other writers I've read seem to have figured out.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

When studying Lovecraft in a Horror literature class in college, his work was the only one that the students felt to be actually "scary." To quote one of my classmates:

"I was laying in bed reading a little before I went to sleep. I put the book down, turned out the lights, and tried to sleep but I just kept thinking, 'damn, that's real scary stuff!'"

Everyone else in the class agreed.

The unknown is the most frightening thing to human psychology and Lovecraft does a good job of evoking it.

Personally, he is one of my favorite authors, not because of the structure of his stories but because of his ability with prose. Read Call of Cthulu, when he is describing the inspector Legrasse creeping through the swamp and hearing the ominous drumming of the natives drifting through the night like "a pestilential tempest from the gulfs of hell."

Good lovecraft stories include the many that have been mentioned already, but I would also add The Doom That Came to Sarnath. That's a great story for anyone who plays DnD. Its all about racism, genocide, fear, and disaster.

 

[Desdichado]

There's an old saying that the thing about Aliens is that, they're Alien. HP was one of the few writers who ever really seemed to be able to capture that feeling. His Old Ones are alien. Which is one of the reasons why his stories occupy a place of respect for me.

Eh, I've never thought so. In fact, in At the Mountains of Madness he made the point after a while that the Old Ones were just men, albeit alien in appearance. That started off really creepy but then backed off from that mood when it turned into a history lecture about the very human foibles and attitudes of the Old Ones.