This was a good book (i.e., a 3 on a 5 point scale), which is what I expect when I buy a book.
It contains 22 of his short stories (from 7 to 129 pages in length).
He writes what is called 'weird fiction'.
He is a competent writer and his vocabulary is very good. His plots and characters are well developed.
Only a few stories had me deeply involved.

Positives:
This is a Library of America book.
In a few stories, there are some recurring themes ('The Necromicon' book, the 'old ones').

Negatives:
I'm not a fan of the weird fiction genre. ( )

I'd read a number of Lovecraft stories before, in horror anthologies, and something always bugged me about his writing. I finally realized what it was while reading this volume: the sources of horror in his stories are nearly always given the art-speak treatment of preceding every single noun with an adjective for form's sake than rather than for any compositional benefit; and, unfortunately for Lovecraft, there are only so many horror-evoking adjectives in the English language. This list was made from a single five-page selection:

abnormal, alien, blasphemous, damnable, fantastically, fiendish, frightful, grotesquely, hellishly, hideous, menacing, monstrous, morbid, nightmarish, preternatural, sinister, terrible.

And that's pretty much it. He used his entire vocabulary of one-word horror adjectives in five pages, and then he used them again, and again, and again. This reminds one of another word – overkill – and of a second, which describes the effect it had on me: laughable. Dude simply did not write well enough to evoke a sense of horror from straightforward description, so he tried to force it upon the reader through adverbs. Or perhaps I've got it backwards: he tried to evoke horror through straightforward description employing those words, but that's not how it works. I don't know. I can only say I quickly found his word choice to be distracting.

Somewhat related (in the sense of not-best-practice) is the (to early 21st-century minds) hilariously bad science made use of: at one point he mentioned evil creatures having lived "vigintillions" of years ago. That's basically "20-illions" but of course the universe is merely billions (2-illions) of years old. On the other hand, in the 1920s the predominant cosmological theory was Steady State, which was virtually indistinguishable from Eternal. Still, it reads glaringly wrong. Likewise the idea of a cosmic 'ether' (current at the time Lovecraft wrote) through which aliens propelled themselves with wings. And that said aliens lived on the (newly-discovered-but-even-then-known-to-be-all-but-absolute-zero) ex-planet Pluto. And the notion that two guys could spend hours above 30,000 feet engaging in sea-level levels of activity without bottled oxygen. (And those are just my favorites.) It seems like dude got his science out of the newspaper, and we know how well that works today, let alone the 1910s and '20s.

HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT, the stories – some of them, at any rate – can be pretty good. It seemed to me that his earlier stories, the ones making less use of his then-undeveloped mythos, were more in the straight-up horror vein. The later stories, the ones wherein his mythos is developed, are the ones that use the bad science, and are to my mind more like science fiction than horror. I do like some science fiction, especially from the 1930s through '60s, but I guess Lovecraft's is just too dated for my tastes. ( )

What can one really say about Lovecraft? It is easy to see why some people hate him, but the truth is, you just have to give into his style and go with the flow. At his best, in the Shadow Over Innsmouth, he creates an atmosphere of dread and tension that you can't escape. And in this story, he doesn't have to trot out the monsters -- it is more subtle than much of his other work. But the other work is a lot of fun, too.

Perhaps you really have to read some of Lovecraft's mini imitators in the 70 years since his death to appreciate that it is not easy to write this kind of story well. Lovecraft succeeds--most others don't. ( )

This is the best collection of the horror stories and novellas of HP Lovecraft. It includes all of his best work, and the physical quality of the book itself is amazing (which is ironic since during his time Lovecraft was a pulp magazine writer). This is the edition if you want to keep Lovecraft's work for a lifetime.

Lovecraft opened vistas to the horror genre that are still being explored, and are still ahead of their time. He tapped into base xenophobic fears that came alive in the modern age, fears of isolated rural towns and urban slums, and the fear of what lies in the vast unknown of space.

Most interestingly his work was revealing of the man's private neurosis. From his fears of lower classes and foreigners that came from his family's fall into financial ruin, to his fixation with insanity that stemmed from his mother and father's nervous breakdowns, to the Freudian nature of his monsters (they are basically big vaginae), Lovecraft's private obsessions figure largely into his work, and show a man largely isolated from human society; which is a fear beyond that of monsters and black magic. ( )

The stories aren't for everyone because they can be a bit dense, but overall this is good old fashioned horror. It has plenty of creepiness without resorting to gore as a lot of newer horror tales do. Basically the stories create an impending sense of doom for the characters that makes the reader unable to put the book down. Most of the stories are winners and considering the huge number of stories in this volume that is pretty impressive. ( )