H.P. Lovecraft

>>8532955
Herbert West: Reanimator is underrated

>>8532955
>Any suggested starting point(s)
A bin.

would have been better off eating the money you spent on those books

>>8532955
His early-mid non-mythos short stories e.g. The Hound, The Outsider, Pickman's Model, Cool Air.

They are good little ten pagers, better than some of his overblown stuff.

>>8532955
The case of Charles dexter ward

>>8532955
I started with Mountains of Madness.
Probably not what most would suggest, but it blew me away. This one has the fullest impact if you don't know anything else about the "lore".

>>8535379
MoM is a good place to start, but has a slow pacing and takes a while to get going.

I'd suggest OP start in this order:

1. Dagon
2. Beyond the Wall of Sleep
3. The Outsider
4. The Rats in the Walls
5. The Dunwich Horror
6. Mountains of Madness
7. Call of Cthulhu
You'll be gently familiarized with his dream cycle and his cthulhu mythos with those.

After that read whatever you want, you've got quite a few great tales of his left, but that list there is a good way to read his tales somewhat chronologically.

My favorite story by him is The Color Out of Space

A good starting point for what Lovecraft is a meme for now though is The Whisperer in Darkness.

>>8532955
Couldn't tell you where to start but the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadeth is a mindblowing weird adventure story. In the Walls of Eryx is a good short story.

>>8532955
aren't all his stories like six pages long? lmao just start reading anywhere you pleb. hope you don't have a 300 word report due tomorrow tho

Tbqh I wasn't super impressed.

Read Cthuhlu and Mountains of Madness and they do a good job of describing the absurd terror of existence but the writing tends to drag to nowhere.

Just what I thought though, make up your own mind.

>>8532955
Toss it aside and find some Clark Ashton Smith.

>>8532955
Dagon is proably the single best starting point. Short but it feels like a sledgehammer to your sanity.
Then just read all the other famous but short stories like Rats in the Walls, White Ship and Pickman's Model.
Then either gear up for the Dream Cycle or gear up for his longer monster mash stories like Cthulhu

>>8532955
Dunwhich Horror is ok though I just read the Great God Pan and its a rip off of that. Also the Shadow over Innsmouth is really good.

>>8536007
I thought Call of Cthuhlu was boring as shit and way overrated.

>>8532955
read Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen instead even Lovecraft admitted they were better than himself.

Pickmans Model is his best.

>>8532955
>Just bought the complete collections of H.P. Lovecraft.
why...?

you could've read it for free and bought something better instead

>>8536817

both better prose writers but neither as gooey or monsterish contentwise and lovecraft's prose is more idiosyncratic. blackwood is the best if we're talking a balance between horror/prose, machen, to me, reads like occult sherlock holmes stuff, his stuff is comfy not scary and he's my favorite of the three.

>>8532955

>just bought a book
>where should I start

Page 1? Maybe?

>>8537195
>A collection of unrelated stories
>Caring about the order of them

niggers

>>8536845
And he didn't even write it

>>8537253

So does that mean you're not going to read all of them? Because if the order doesn't matter, then why not start from the beginning?

And why would you want to start with the best, because after that you're left to go through nothing but mediocre fluff, instead of following the author's natural progress and being rewarded by the increase in experience.

OP here. Had a little bit of free time last night and read Dagon, which was pretty good. Then I read A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson just because it was short and immediately after Dagon in the book. A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson is definitely not one of his best works.

>>8532955
Dreams in the fucking witch house

>>8536811
Yeah, that one wasn't great save for the ship-on-squid ramming at the end.

OP, Dunwich Horror is really solid.

>>8537277
Not OP, but I also have the complete fiction and most of the early stuff is pretty shitty. There's a really bad story about how bad immigrants are that seems not only hilariously xenophobic but also hilariously quaint. This was before terrorism was a big thing, before the civil rights movement, before all the illegal Mexicans, even before all the Jews during WWII. He's basically just whining about the weird food Asians eat.

>>8532955
the trash

>>8537389
It's not a great idea to read Lovecraft chronologically and comprehensively. He wrote some stinkers, flawed pieces, experiments, collaborations, and stories that have not aged well. He is best approached firstly in a 'best of' volume.