H.P. Lovecraft was a brilliant author who believed that "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strong kind of fear is fear of the unknown." ((1041)) Armed with this belief he went on to write some of the most compelling horror fiction, detailing (or not detailing as the case may be) horrors sometimes beyond comprehension. Lovecraft's work is surprising in the realm of horror fiction for not relying on the staples of the genre, such as vampires, ghosts and werewolves, instead he created a fantastic reality populated with alien beings from other worlds, times and dimensions. Some who have been here aeons before humanity arose, and others who just now have found their way to our world.

This complete collection of Lovecraft's writing is ordered chronologically, allowing the reader to start in the earliest days of Lovecraft's less inspired or refined writing, moving into the height of his mythos, a journey I found surprising and enjoyable. I really enjoyed Lovecraft's reality, and while it may seem cliche he created a truly cosmic world with a breadth of reality ambitious for his times, spanning galaxies, dimensions and unmeasurable ages.

Perhaps my favourites of his works are Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, Celephaïs, Under the Pyramids, The Call of Cthulhu, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charlses Dexter Ward, The Colour out of Space, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Shadow out of Time. Most of those being the ones with the most abstract celestial and otherworld feel I noticed.

Unfortunately I did have issues with the book, caused by the editing (Barnes and Noble publication) and the introductions by S. T. Joshi. The book contained a great many spelling errors, often the dropping of a single letter in a way that spell checking wouldn't pick up, but a human reading would. So there were far too many times when I had to reread a sentence to realize that "he" should be "the" or "the" should be "they." Beyond that Joshi introduced every story, giving a small paragraph explaining when it was written, what inspired it, where it was published, and occasionally opinions about the work. I felt some of the opinions were too harsh, apparently I love some of the most "clumsy" and poorly written stories of Lovecraft. But more troublesome and important than a value disagreement, is on several occasions Joshi would give away the entire story in his introduction, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, one of Lovecraft's longest works; before the story even began I knew exactly where the quest would take Carter, and how it would end.

Lovecraft really was a brilliant author with a cosmic scope, and this collection is a very handy book, just marred somewhat by the editing and the introductions to the stories. ( )

It is nice that Barnes & Noble went to such great lengths to reproduce the typos that characterized Lovecraft’s early publications in the non-professional press. Or maybe they just introduced new ones. Either way, Lovecraft’s work has always been better than his publisher’s ( )