Books of 2008, Part VII

Earlier this week I (finally) finished The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft. This is a collection of 25 short stories pertaining to Lovecraft's fictionalized dream world. This one took me a while, folks, because, though I liked the stories, Lovecraft's prose is a little...archaic, and it can be a little on the dense side, so I needed a little forward momentum to get through some of them.

Most of the stories are only a few pages long, but two of them--"The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"--are novellas. Both stories take elements and characters that are common throughout the other Dream Cycle stories and use them to construct a fully-realized world, with its own inhabitants and rules. Sort of like an early 20th-century Edgar Allen Poe meets J.R.R. Tolkein.

Neat stuff. Lovecraft liked the idea that the scariest, most unnerving things are never seen outright, but they lurk just out of sight of his characters, and it's the uncertainty that drives people mad. I liked, too, his fascination with space as the great unknown. Obviously. The guy was a real innovator and he's at his most enjoyable when he's writing his more epic stories ("Kadath") that give him room to really describe the blasted landscape of his own imagination.