I first read Lovecraft as a teen and was instantly smitten. The Rats in the Wall? OMG! So creepy! So it’s fun, lo these many years later, to read Lovecraft again, seeing a little more behind the curtain, as it were.
But I was amused to find the setting of most of these sinister tales in this collection were in obscure bits of the mid-Atlantic states (not the standard setting of gothic tales of horror) such as upstate New York. OK, I’ll give you Rip von Winkle but the depraved streets of Providence, Rhode Island? Who knew? Then there is the obsession with color. Tentacles, OK, creepy, but unnatural colors? What exactly is an unnatural color? Fluorescent? Day-glo orange? Hard to imagine.
But the stories are fun. At the Mountains of Madness about an earlier version of Antarctica turned out to be based on the then-new theory of plate tectonics. Why, yes, all land on earth was originally in one lump, which then started to break up and move around. Those of us from earthquake country have no doubts about that. Then there’s Under the Pyramids about vast underground lairs, ghost-written for Henry Houdini (!). And of course all sorts of unnatural goings-on in The Dunwich Horror (shout out to south-central Massachusetts!).
I must give a bow to the excellent and illuminating footnotes in this Penguin edition, something that I, for the most part, don’t read. In this case, they were very much worth-while. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I will don my tie-dye tee shirt in solidarity with the weird colors contingent. Tekeli-li!