H.P. Lovecraft Rocks!

A couple months back I was perusing the bargain book section at the local Barnes & Noble and came across a rare gem, H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete and Unabridged. I was shocked when I saw it and started jumping for joy while thinking "Finally a publisher got it right! I must have it!".

This was like one of my all time luckiest finds. I snatched it up (make sure everything was in pristine condition) and ran to find J. Holding my soon to be treasure before me I said to J (totally unable to conceal my excitement) "Look what I found and it's only 10 bucks!." To which J just stared at me blankly like the crazy person I was and gave me a high five.

Back home in Canada I couldn't dream of finding a book like this. I swear it was like a conspiracy born with in the depths of the evil monolithic publishing houses to make sure that no Lovecraft fan could get all of Lovecraft's stories in one book.

You could buy piece-meal anthologies that covered parts of the Cthulhu Mythos (I was never able to find ones that covered the complete Mythos and I tried). I ended up with like seven Lovecraft books before I had an almost complete Cthulhu Mythos, but there was always some stories missing and lots of redundancy :(.

I remember one summer going to Van and trying to find orignal Weird Tales/Strange Tales pulps. That was when I learned that pulp magazines cost a small fortune. I did see a cool first edition of At the Mountains of Madness in my searches though (again small fortune).

When I was young, I used to read lots of horror stories. I started by reading Stephen King (To this day I still love Firestarter). But, where Stephen King really shone in my opinion was in his short stories. They always seemed to have an edginess that kept you reading until 3 o'clock in the morning (which is incidentally the best time to read horror stories).

After King I got into Clive Barker's writing (mainly because of the Hellraiser movies). He is really into gore and alternate worlds with all sorts of gruesome monsters. I stopped reading his stuff after Weaveworld though.

Both King and Barker both highly praised H.P. Lovecraft's work and so I decided to give it a try and boy was I not disappointed. The first book of Lovecraft's that I read was At the Mountains of Madness and it was just brillant. I've been hooked ever since.

So now I am bound and determined to read my Lovecraft book from cover to cover and go insane from the revelations that it holds (evil laugh follows).