Last week I got tempted by a very big book. This one. Yes, I know, it is Lovecraft. But if you want to deconstruct Lovecraft you have to know a bit about what he wrote, and this book looks invaluable from that point of view.
Also it is ridiculously good value at only £25.
Of course I have dipped into it. You know that thing when you have written a story around an actual sequence of historical events, and then some new research revels that a key date you had was wrong, and it blows a hole in your plot… Yeah, that.
I’m sorry he chose to omit Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. It is, hands-down, my favorite Lovecraft tale and as a homage a Dunsany, very different in character than the Cthulhu cycle books. You can get some of the feel from The Silver Key and The Statement of Randolph Carter (who is the protagonist of Dream-Quest), but they don’t quite hit the mark the way Dream-Quest does.
I love the story too, but I can see why he did it. Had I been in his position, I would probably have opted to stick to core texts too.
With any luck the book will sell well enough for him to produce a second volume.
I’ve got this on my wishlist for chrimble.
if it is good as the Annotated Sherlocks then it’ll be great, not exactly handy travel sized reading though…
favourite nugget : someone went through every mention of train travel in the Holmes stories and by crossreferencing to the actual timetables proved that none of them could actually have happened!
Brilliant! 🙂