The Lovecraft Compendium

By my count, I've already read four different books that either touched on, danced around, or directly referenced Lovecraft's greater mythos, without ever actually giving the source material a shot. Figured it was time to finally rectify that.

This was an interesting collection in that the entries were sorted in chronological order of when they were written, and coincidentally I enjoyed the later pieces better than the earlier ones. It was all pretty uniformly dense to get through however; sentences ran long and used obscure and uncommon vocabulary for seemingly its own sake. Definitely a unique style, but not exactly one that I was a fan of. At times I could see the value of mimicking a character's descent into madness or trying to decipher true meaning from a complicated text (something that characters do a few times), but mostly it just felt like a book that actively resisted being read.

Quick synopses of the five works included in this collection:

Dagon - A sailor in the south Pacific during WWI escapes German captivity in a lifeboat and is adrift for days before finding some previously unknown island. On it, he sees things that eventually drive him to suicide.

The Call of Cthulu - The last surviving heir of an academic inherits his great-uncle's notes on an investigation into a secret cult that seemingly spans the world. The revelations make him fear for his own safety.

The Dunwich Horror - A familial cult in rural New England creates a monster that gets loose, and three academics have to decipher strange texts to figure out how to defeat it.

The Whisperer in Darkness - An university professor is a vocal skeptic against a spate of cryptid sightings in the New England countryside and gains the attention of a reclusive academic who lives out there. The hermit claims to have evidence of the creatures, and their back-and-forth correspondence escalates into a threatening climax.

The Haunter of the Dark - A writer seeking inspiration begins to investigate a massive abandoned cathedral in the center of a city that the locals steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. Cult shenanigans ensue.

Lots of scholarly protagonists, lots of cults, lots of esoteric texts. The idea of a single author utilizing the same setting and mythos for multiple different works was interesting and I could see the appeal. I just found that the prose and extremely sparse use of dialogue to be more of a struggle to get through than a more contemporary work would be.