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Rating: When, at eight years old, I discovered in my father's library "The Monsters at the Corner of the Street," one of the first Italian collections of Lovecraft, I fell in love with it immediately. Whether it was the strange cover or because the stories inside stimulated my imagination more than anything else up to that moment, the little anthology became a Bible for me, I never parted from it. Soon, however, after memorizing all the tales from the book, I began to desire something else to read by the Dark Prince of Providence, and I was gifted the work I now review.
The complete works of Lovecraft are divided into five volumes.
The first two volumes are dedicated to the Cthulhu cycle and contain the writer's most famous stories. We find the classics "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Dunwich Horror," which, when reread now, after several years, always evoke the same subtle fear of the unknown to which Lovecraft has accustomed us. The writer keeps the horrors unknown to us, mentioning them just enough, leaving us to imagine them as we prefer. In the same volumes, we also find lesser-known stories like "The Hound," "Medusa," and "The Festival," little gems that are a pleasure to read. The great highlights of the anthology, however, are "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," both short novels. "At the Mountains of Madness" is quite well-known and will soon be seen in theaters, so I won't waste many words describing it other than to say that from Lovecraft will birth the genre of expeditions to Antarctica with the consequent discovery of ancient or alien civilizations. "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," on the other hand, is more classically styled. The protagonist, Ward, is the usual man passionate about the occult, who gets involved in matters beyond him, a theme that we will often find in Lovecraft's stories, and the story, very well constructed, manages to keep us on the edge of our seats until the end. Strangely, it has a happy ending, unusual for a story by the Prince.
The following two volumes, "Pure Horror Stories," are a collection of mysterious/horror stories that are unrelated to the Cthulhu cycle. Worth mentioning are "Pickman's Model," the terrifying "Herbert West, Reanimator" that haunted my dreams as a child, and the peculiar "The Rats in the Walls." These two volumes, though both very enjoyable to read, are perhaps the most tedious part of the writer's production, except for some stories like the ones mentioned above.
But the collection I liked the most is undoubtedly the one represented by the last volume, "All the Dream and Fantastic Stories." Here we discover the real Lovecraft, the tormented man who lived in two worlds, the real and the dreamlike. We go from short but impactful stories like "Polaris," the evocative "The Memory" (which I enjoyed a lot and highly recommend) to brilliant works like "The White Ship" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep." We then reach the Randolph Carter saga, one of the writer's best works. The terrifying "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Silver Key," the novel "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" represent the adventures of Lovecraft's alter ego, transporting us through a magical world. We then proceed to fragmentary transcriptions of dreams and fantasies, from the "Night Gaunts" to vampires.
In conclusion, the complete works of the writer from Providence are highly recommended to everyone.
Evocative.
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