Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lovecraft revisions offering some enjoyable reads, 15 April 2003
The Loved Dead assembles a number of stories that H.P. Lovecraft revised for less talented would-be authors of weird tales. While it is quite impossible to know just how much of himself Lovecraft inserted into these tales, they are by no means to be assigned to his creative endeavors. Personally, I don't see a lot of Lovecraft at all in these tales despite the sorts of cryptic, Mythos-related references made in a number of the selections. Examining these stories in and of themselves, on their own merit, I must say I rather enjoyed a number of them, however. Adolphe de Castro's The Last Test manages to insert a nice little aura of creepiness into what is essentially an unremarkable pulp horror tale. Zealia Bishop, one of the better writers of Lovecraft-revised fiction, sets the story of Medusa's Coil in such an atmospheric setting that its far-fetched plot does only minimal damage to one's enjoyment. Two entries from Hazel Heald are really quite good indeed; not only are The Man of Stone and Out of the Aeons compelling stories, they come closer than all of the other revised stories to capturing the spirit of Lovecraft himself. Duane W. Rimel's The Tree on the Hill lacks an original ending but does succeed in tapping a small vein into the cosmological realm so richly mined by Lovecraft. Rimel's The Disinterment also shows potential but is more seriously weakened by a far too predictable plot.The remaining stories seem to decline in quality as one progresses through them. 1922's The Horror at Martin's Beach is remarkable not for its rather ineffective craftsmanship so much as its attribution to Sonia H. Greene, Lovecraft's wife of some two years. C.M. Eddy, Jr. contributes four short stories to this collection: Ashes, The Ghost-Eater, The Loved Dead, and Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. These tales just fall too much in line with standard, pulp horror themes that they become caricatures of themselves and of the weird tales in vogue at the time; a Lovecraft would have been able to make the ideas come out in an effective way, but nothing really seems to click in the revised words of Eddy himself. Henry S. Whitehead makes a valiant effort in The Trap, but the story of a magical mirror capable of pulling someone into it and thus freeing that person from time and space just never finds a plane of plausibility upon which it might flourish. The only two stories I did not care for at all in this book are R.H. Barlow's Till A' the Seas and The Night Ocean, both of which seem to be exercises in over-description lacking any discernible backbone of an actual plot. While many of these stories possess an unmistakably amateurish quality and can by no means be associated with the literary genius and fruitful imagination of H.P. Lovecraft himself, I did get a lot of enjoyment from reading most of them. Lovers of weird tales in all their sundry fashions should find several pleasant diversions in the pages of this book. Those looking for Lovecraft-quality fiction, however, must never forget the fact that H.P. Lovecraft revised but did not actually write these tales. I would not consider The Loved Dead a must-buy for casual Lovecraft fans because I don't detect much of his influence in these pages; of course, fanatical admirers of the master of the macabre will naturally want to add these revised stories to their collection.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unspeakable rites, nameless orgies and Houdini, 2 Sep 2008
This is a collective review for "The Whisperer in Darkness" and "The Loved Dead", volumes 1 and 2 of Lovecraft's collected short stories. "The Whisperer in Darkness" comprises his own work, including some very early stories; "The Loved Dead" is made up of collaborative and ghost-written ventures (including one under Houdini's name), in which Lovecraft developed other writers' ideas and to a greater or lesser extent made them his own.
My spur to exploring Lovecraft at last, years after I first heard of him, was the discovery that Michel Houellebecq was a fan. (To be honest, he's probably a writer that it's easier to love in translation, but more of that later.) For Houellebecq the appeal, apparently, lies in Lovecraft's presentation of a hostile or indifferent universe, of immense age and size, in which humankind is a footnote and the individual human being even more insignificant. Humankind is preyed upon by huge malevolent forces, either powerful extraterrestrials or cruel gods (sometimes it is unclear which they are), that do so with as little compunction as homo sapiens preys upon the animals. Human civilisation and morality are a thin covering for the universe's hostility or indifference and an abiding motif is the portal that allows malevolent forces through that crust. In "The Whisperer in Darkness" Lovecraft generally locates that portal within his native New England; in "The Loved Dead" the locations vary more widely, from the prairies of the American West to the Pyramids of Egypt, as the presence of collaborators causes Lovecraft to diverge from his usual sources of inspiration.
There are some genuinely neck-prickling moments in here and some stories that make one uncomfortable when read late at night - "At the Mountains of Madness", for instance, which concludes "The Whisperer in Darkness", or "The Night Ocean", which concludes "The Loved Dead". There are also, however, serious weaknesses. The relative weight you give to these will depend on your personal taste, just as my marking of these volumes in terms of stars awarded reflects mine: make up your own mind.
The first weakness is repetitiveness. Perhaps unfair in that these were written as free-standing stories rather than as things to be read at a sitting; however, there does come a point at which one begins to count the moments until one of Lovecraft's pantheon of Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath and so forth rears his or her tentacled head, someone brandishes a manuscript of the accursed "Necronomicon" or talks of the nightmare city of Leng, and so on.
A more major caveat, I think, is the style, and here we return to him being easier to love in translation. Lovecraft, it's clear from the first volume, couldn't or wouldn't write dialogue; the collaborative works in this volume offer more attempts, but more common is the long monologue or the lavish use of free indirect speech. This does lead to a certain monotony of tone. This is exacerbated by the nature of that tone: we hear a lot about nameless rites, unspeakable orgies, indescribable horrors and so forth.
Related to this is a third weakness: the question of whether he can deliver the horror when needed, after the build-up. In some of the early works the conclusion is pretty weak - we have long creepy descriptions of mounting horror, then a quick concluding paragraph that tells us the narrator then saw the crowning horror but has been driven mad by it, or has decided to spare the world the full details - a long build-up to a damp squib ending. Perhaps this is implicit in Lovecraft's scenarios - when you build up towards the collapse of the world as humankind sees it and the unleashing of forces that will bring death and destruction to everything, rendering that in words (and, obeying normal conventions about the use of the past tense in narrative, in retrospect) is almost bound to be unconvincing. Better are the stories that keep something in reserve. In particular, "The Night Ocean" perhaps comes closest to Houellebecq's template. A painter rents a cottage by the sea and spends long hours walking along the shore; at first he enjoys it but as the summer ends and the weather turns hostile the alien nature of the ocean begins to oppress him, standing as it does for inanimate, indifferent matter that was here millions of years before him and would be unchanged by his extinction; meanwhile something unidentified is possibly preying on swimmers and at the end of the story the narrator has seen something a little like a man swimming (too well) in a stormy sea, carrying something over its shoulder. With that the story ends: a nicely-paced, genuinely chilling miniature that gets across the indifference to homo sapiens of a huge, godless universe, without any need for the usual tentacle-headed creatures and unpronounceable gods whose names are log-jams of consonants and random apostrophes.
Each volume has something to offer: some moments of genuine creepiness, some unintentional comedy and fuel for parody, and some moments where you realise where a band or song got its name. Whether these outweigh the undoubted longueurs is one for personal taste. Although I have quite a tolerance for late 19th / early 20th century pulp, I think that this is likely to be my lot with Lovecraft; but I don't doubt that, to use the time-honoured expression, people who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like. "The Loved Dead" is for completists only, containing as it does collaborations of wildly varying quality (whatever Lovecraft was paid for revising tosh like "Poetry and the Gods", it can't have been enough). Start with "The Whisperer in Darkness": Lovecraft fans will find some core material in the development of his mythology, and casual readers will get the gist of his vision and can decide whether they want to read more. Over to you...
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by H.P. Lovecraft
by Galbraith
by Rosemary Gray
by Sheridan Le Fanu
