I think HP Lovecraft did it better. The Cthulhu Mythos (or Yog-Sothery, as HPL put it) were not about good vs. evil or distorted retellings of the fall of Satan/Lucifer, so that whole schtick which Derleth repeated in every story was kind of annoying. Ditto the focus on the elemental classifications of Cthulhu et al. As HPL described these cosmic beings, they were beyond the understanding or judgement of mere humans, certainly beyond matter, space, and time as we know it.

The third annoying thing in these stories was the listing of every entity in the pantheon in every story. It's almost as though Derleth didn't have confidence in his own ability to write a creepy story without seasoning it with a large dollop of HPL sprinkles.

Having said all that, some of the stories were quite good (shorn of the derivative trappings). I enjoyed The Whippoorwills in the Hills especially, and the stories set in Wisconsin. These seemed to be good additions to the canon, expanding the scene from the New England settlements to the darksome forests of the north. I also liked the focus on Ithaqua in these stories.

The last part, the novel "The Trail of Cthulhu" was told by five different narrators, but each one was essentially the same type of character, and because they each had to learn about the cosmic nastiness of Cthulhu, there was a lot of repetition.

So, overall, worth reading if you like Yog-Sothery (as I do), but definitely of a different flavor. ( )

Better than his Sherlock Holmes knock-off Solar Pons, this attempts to carry on Lovecraft's series of horror. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to have Lovecraft's knack for characterization and keeping the reader off-balance. Derleth also works in clumsy marketing attempts (having characters discuss a Lovecraft collection he published and sold alongside other fictional books as required reading). He also feels the need to re-interpret some of Lovecraft's stuff, classifying the ancient evil creatures in terms of "elementals".

I couldn't get enough Lovecraft while I was reading him, but this... I got partially through this collection and kept putting off picking it up again. I'll shelve it for now, partially read, in the hopes that I'll soldier through the rest one day.

It's not that it's all that bad; it's just not all that good and pales in comparison to Lovecraft's stuff. ( )

http://cjkarr.vox.com/library/post/the-reviews-at-the-threshold-not-a-real-story... ( )