Lovecraft's Monsters

Lovecraft's Monsters by Ellen Datlow
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Lovecraft's Monsters is a short story anthology of tales featuring monsters created by H.P. Lovecraft.

First off, H.P. Lovecraft, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle, is a writer that I'm much more interested in the works they inspired rather than their own writings. I know it's akin to liking a remake better than the original but HPL's prose has always been hard to digest for me and his character read like they were written by someone who never leaves his house. However, his Cthulhu Mythos is pretty special so I snatched this up when it appeared on Netgalley.

The introduction gives a brief overview and then goes to say the stories were either commissioned or picked because they haven't appeared in many anthologies. And then the first story was a Neil Gaiman one I've seen in at least two other books. Not a good sign, although it was the one where a werewolf is going up against the Cthulhu mythos so it wasn't terrible.

Like all books of this type, the stories vary in quality and enjoyment level. The stories by Laird Barron and Joe Lansdale were both really good. Noir and Lovecraft go really well together for me.

The Same Deep Waters as You by Brian Hodge was by far my favorite tale in the collection. The psychic star of The Animal Whisperer gets taken to an island off the coast of Washington to converse with citizens of a little place called Innsmouth, who have been imprisoned there since 1928...

All things considered, it's a pretty satisfying collection of homages to H.P. Lovecraft's monsters. Three out of Five stars.




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