I've recently taken an interest H.P. Lovecraft. I'd heard from various sources about the Cthulhu mythos and the Necronomicon, and even played a game that I loved (Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem) which I found out later was greatly inspired by his works. But I'd never read any of Lovecraft's material.
I found out that quite a lot of his work is in the public domain, and there's quite a bit of it available at
WikiSource.org.
So far I've read
The Call of Cthulhu and
The Whisperer in the Darkness. I'm not sure what to think about The Call of Cthulhu. It's a really short story, only 3 chapters long, and some of the events didn't make sense to me such as:
Spoiler
If Cthulhu was released from his millenia long slumber, why did he go back to sleep again instead of destroying the world or whatever?
The Whisperer in the Darkness, on the other hand, was longer and much more tense. It's kind of interesting how right at the beginning the narrator tells you that he never saw any strange creature, yet:
Spoiler
Towards the end when he's in the midst of them you forget all about that and think they're going to do horrible things to him.
So far I'm slightly disappointed, because I expected much more detailed descriptions of what the horrible creatures look like, but I suppose it's better this way, since Lovecraft lets your imagination do quite a bit of the work by simply saying the horrors are much too alien and terrible to describe (although he does make a good effort of giving a basic description).
I do like the "purer" use of the English language, that is, using words with their original meaning, although it can lead to a misunderstanding here and there (i.e. when he describes "nuclear chaos" in space, he's not talking about nuclear energy--which didn't really exist at that time--but rather the center, or nucleus). And he certainly had an extremely large vocabulary!
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