Necronomicon Review 2

Like most of my favourite authors, I stumbled upon H P Lovecraft by accident. I'd heard about him through reading about other horror authors and Lovecraft's name kept cropping up. I found one of his books in a car boot sale, and the rest -as they say - is history.

The stories that feature in this lovingly collected edition show the width and depth that was Howard Philips Lovecraft fantastical fiction. Why fantastical? Lovecraft managed to walk the knife edge between the genres of horror; fantasy and science-fiction like no other author.

The Dreams In The Witch House focus on the relationship between quantum physics and witch-craft; Cool Air about using intense cold to preserve a living body long since past it's use-by date and The Temple which uses the claustrophobic confines of a submarine to chilling effect.

The key to Lovecraft's writing was the dark mythic resonances his stories carried; they seemed to tap into something far deeper than many of his contemporaries - even now, the only writer that is even close to Lovecrafts genius is Clive Barker. For me, the irony with Lovecraft was that he was a "Tell, don't show" writer - where he would recount the story as if he was observing it happening (whether this was from a first or third person perspective). In many cases, this distance alienated the reader and added an extra dimension - a creepiness to the stories, as if the reader was powerless to intervene. A sense of the inevitable horror that lurks behind our everyday world. In this sense, Lovecraft is timeless.

Thanks must go to Stephen Jones who has done such a superb job of collecting these classic stories and tales. The presentation is stunning and sombre; the illustrations classic and disturbing and the afterword is an exceptional mini-biography of this lesser known genius of the horror world.