The H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science.
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilization, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the show more earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

I have been reading the stories of H. P. Lovecraft one or two at a time, in more or less chronological order, as they came up in the H. P. Lovecraft Literary podcast. "The Haunter of the Dark" was the last of his stories to be covered in the podcast, so I have finally finished all three volumes of the omnibus.

According to the introduction by August Derlath , the stories in the third volume are some of Lovecraft's best, and it does include one of my favourites, "The Color Out of Space", which features a truly alien extraterrestrial being, one that couldn't be played by an actor in a rubber suit.. Another of the stories I really enjoyed is "The Shadow Out of Time", with it's time-travelling, body-switching aliens. On the other hand I didn't really like The Thing on the Doorstep", whose narrator tells the tale of his weak-willed friend's downfall at the hands of a scheming fellow-student. show less

A collection of the gothic horror tales of New England's precursor to Stephen King. The scariest special effects are the ones in your imagination: Lovecraft simply calls everything "horrifying" or "soul-chilling" and lets your own mind fill in the worst things it can imagine. A neat trick and, if you let it work, these books are just...horrifying. I bought this book around age twelve, and I've never found much to match it in print.

In intelligent and discerning selection of Lovecraft's best and/or most important short stories, this is the best jumping on point I've found for anyone wanting to discover one of Horror's most influential authors. Certainly a better route than trying to wade through one of the many complete collections on the market.

These stories deserve a place on the shelves of any horror fan.

This is the third omnibus volume in a series of three, and contains all Lovecraft's best short stories. As typical with this genre, my rating of five stars really depends on one's task for pulp.
The volume contains 14 short stories, the stand outs being The Call of Cthulhu itself (the foundation for leagions of imitators, and very popular role-playing game; The Colour of of Space; The Thing on the Doorstep (possibly my favourite); and The Whisperer i Darkness