Get Access The Thing On The Doorstep And Other Weird Stories Conceived By H.P. Lovecraft Accessible Through Document

first introduction to HPL, It was without a doubt a difficult read for the numerous references as well as a century old language, Even though it took me at least three minutes to read a page, it was an interesting read, Very easy to get distracted but he is a great author, I like the type of horror he created, All the pieces in this hook were unique, and tying together with his imaginary places and people, All in all I look forward to the necronomicon, A definitive edition of stories by the master of supernatural fiction

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the earlys.
This Penguin Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master's talesfrom his early short stories "Under the Pyramids" originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini and "The Music of Erich Zann" which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favorites through his more fully developed works, "The Dunwich Horror," The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and At the Mountains of Madness.


The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S.
T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story,


Contains the following tales:
The Tomb
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The White Ship
The Temple
The Quest of Iranon
The Music of Erich Zann
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs aka Under the Pyramids
Pickman's Model
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Thing on the Doorstep So like, when I say "finished" I mean that I read all the stories in it that I wanted to.
Those parts were phenomenal though, Lovecraft is most definitely one of the BESTltbgt! Would have beenif I had just taken my average rating of the five stories included in this collection.
But a short story collection should have at least one story that I enjoy reading, And this one didn't. In the end I really had to fight through this book, which clearly meansstar for me,

The collection I've read in German contains the following stories:

Das Ding auf der Schwelle The Thing on the Doorstep
Der Außenseiter The Outsider
Die Farbe aus dem All The Colour Out of Space
Träume im Hexenhaus The Dreams in the WitchHouse
Der Schatten aus der Zeit The Shadow Out of Time

For me The Color Out of Space was the best of the five stories.
But even that one I wouldn't have given astar rating,

Maybe H. P. Lovecraft's weird tales are just not my cup of tea,

Also, I have to ask myself, why did I bring this book to Parookaville Seems like a weird thing to do,

Another one of his Lovraftian pleasures that makes you shiver, because the horror and phantasmagorical universe of the author are so deeply portrayed in it with Brio.

The thing on the threshold is a Lovecraft musthave, no matter how much I read and reread, I didn't find a negative point so I actually think the shorter it is the more intense the pleasure.
Even if we quickly get to the heart of the matter, Lovecraft still allows us to identify the main characters Dan Upton, Edward Derby, Asenath Waite.
. . to know their antecedents e, g. Asenath is the daughter of the old Ephraim Waite already in the new "Shadows over Innsmouth",
The very essence of his works is this gothic, terrifying, anguishing and even oppressive atmosphere without being gory, Although I have given up reading "the mountains of madness" because of the abusive description of the geological and preCambrian landscape, . . well, I would like to get back to it, especially because of the enthusiasm aroused or rather revived after this rich reading,
Like the other two Joshi Lovecraft anthologies, this collection is helpfully annotated, expertly introduced, and includes pieces Lovecraft wrote throughout his career, The two earliest"The Tomb" and "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"are crude, but characteristic of their author in the way they assume that true horror is born from the human mind's capacity for transcending space and time and the possibility that entities from beyond space and time can take advantage of this human capacity.
The two Dunsanian imitations"The White Ship" and "The Quest of Iranon"each have a distinctive Lovecraftian touch, "The Music of Eric Zann" and "Pickman's Model" are both masterpieces of Lovecraft's early maturity, short in length and economical in their effects, By far the worst piece of writing included in this volume is "Under the Pyramids," a fantastic firstperson narrative ghost written for Harry Houdini the prose is so overwrought it often seems like parody, but good parody is far more amusing than this is.


The anthology ends with three of the authors most effective works: "The Dunwich Horror" a powerful long short story marred by a conventional ending which dissipates that true horror of Wilbur Whateley's death and the revelation of his alien nature, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward a flawed but memorable novel which combines a Lovecraftlike protagonist with a Hawthorneian gothic atmosphere and a host of subterranean horrors, and The Mountains of Madness an impressionistic and abstract short novel which evokes horror primarily through the suggestive details of an antarctic landscape.
All in all, this is a fine representative anthology, Finally finished this! Had to skip the explanatory notes at the end, . What a chore to read, You dont get any points for treating pulp as serious literature, especially not with Lovecraft, And even if you did, disputations about genre are not a hill that anyone should want to die on, That being said I want to shout at the clouds about science fiction amp horror for a minute, Fans of the lowbrow often come off as defensive, ensconced in a slightly delusional persecution complex these days, there are far more defenders of popular art forms than there are snobs pillorying them.
So this is not another bellicose salvo in a tedious amp irrelevant debate, I'd just like to make some observations about the mechanics of the books themselves.
I think the question of genre is one of the more interesting endemic to Lovecrafts work and legacy, And I think it has become vexed in recent times,

The gothic is the pulp arm of romanticism Lovecrafts own genre, the Weird, is the pulp arm of modernism and of surrealism to whatever extent it has a separate identity, but it is not modern or antimodern so much as metamodern.
Both the modernist genre products meant for mass consumption amp the highbrow, avant garde or countercultural niches are dynamic conceptual poles amp most novels, stories, poems amp whatever else, exist somewhere on a spectrum between them and at the risk of sounding like a dilettantish DeleuzoDerridean, this is a continuum of variously assembled protocols, each with its own hybrid atomic structure which determines the thematic or narratological coordinates the work itself receives.


So the genre categories Im referring to are by way of reference diachronic or etiological, a historicized family tree sutured together by influence amp inheritance rather than an overdetermined natural essence.
I tilt toward lowbrow genre pulp, an aspecific but pragmatic pattern for the combination of these tropes, because I instinctively feel that theres more room for creativity and vision within their loose but instantaneously recognizable structuration.
And, well, literary theory is mostly ex post facto rationalization for intuitive claims, Or so my intuition tells me, But lately I'm not sure what the point of it is, except as a rubric for periodization,

Some of the better postmodern writers, at least the ones with an interest in pulp like Thomas Pynchon amp JG Ballard, worked to blur these distinctions, to show that high and low art existed symbiotically, that they are never fully independent of one another.
And comics, horror movies amp science fiction have become raw ore for postpostmodernist, lyrical realist, new sincere and slipstream attempts to eclipse the logic of postmodernism.
They are fully integrated into the deep grammar of selfstyled serious art, I think the problem with many of these approaches is that an internal condition of postmodernism is the occlusion of broad consensus, so its lineage is necessarily multifarious.
But these nascent pretenderstothethrone are still beholden to the grand narrative structure of modernism, usually replete with their own manifestos, that odd hangover from industrial age organizing credos.
A friend sent me the manifesto for the AltWoke movement the other day and despite the freshness of its declarations, I couldn't believe how outdated it felt.
How can you have a manifesto after Derrida and Baudrillard These thinkers can and in my opinion should be supplanted, but their accomplishments still call for new forms of resistance.
More to the point, returning to an inflexible binary of high and low art or any kind of strict genre demarcation is a pointless and reactionary move.


Heres something to think on when did the inclusion of ghosts, monsters, battles, etc, become the Master Signifiers of genre work, irreconcilable with serious literature except via irony or pastiche And why is the horror genre until WWII, which is usually about the neurosis of the emergent petit bourgeois professional class a subject universal to novels of every stripe since medievalism, suddenly warded off as a lowbrow deviation from literary canonicity Shelley, Radcliffe, Poe, De Fanu, Machen, Blackwood amp many, many others were at least as gifted as their contemporaries in the realist traditions.


But lapsing into relativism is callow and uninteresting, so how do we prosecute ast century cartography of genre That is, without writing a manifesto.
I don't actually know the answer to this question but I'm sure that it must be done amp the enduring vitality of certain genre works is a good place to start.


I think Ive rambled headlong into H, P. Lovecraft himself. Lovecrafts abilities as a writer were immense, Even his worst stories contain all the quality of the novelistic tradition in style, composition and structure, And his best work approaches the classics, both in merit and longterm cultural resonance, But as with any artist broadly imitated, his lineage of influence has not always been positive, Not everyone learned the right lessons from Lovecraft,

Modern authors of horror are too character focused, I think, You can probably blame this on the popularity of someone like Stephen King, who pilfered cosmic abominations from Lovecraft but left at the doorway the context which made them horrifying in the first place.
Creating sympathetic characters in cozy domestic settings only to maim amp kill them is a cheap bit, But it has proven endlessly popular amp was enthusiastically picked up by the mostly unimpressive horror movie machine in hollywood, The only reason for authors of horror to forge a sympathetic character is to evoke a gratuitous

or sadistic libidinal thrill from violence done to them.
Thematically speaking, it shouldnt matter if the victims of Pennywise or Cthulhu are well wrought representations of the human psyche, Its not really the point, As Thomas Ligotti puts it,“the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the soundingboard of our horrorhollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.
” Jump scares have a limited shelf life amp Lovecrafts ability to shock has long expired, but there is something in his stories which still rises to Ligottis challenge.
This component piece of Lovecraft is ageing well and is more acutely pertinent today than it was when I first read him as a teenager, It has comfortably assumed a new precedence in the stories,

Call Lovecrafts characters onedimensional if you must, Ill concede at least that the rotating dramatis personae of antiquarians, scientists and academics are indistinguishable from one another.
But hes a more patient amp meticulous writer than anyone working in the immense ambit of his legacy, New England architecture, arctic geography, alien biology, family histories, fossil patterns, etc, are lovingly, sometimes appallingly, detailed, This can be a slog to read through but it creates the sense of a lived in world, This is very important for the meaning amp effect of his stories, The minutiae of the world, which Lovecraft archives very well, is exactly as meaningful as it helps people navigate their busy little lives, But implanted in an even slightly broadened perspective, it becomes the subject of cosmic horror stories with power that reaches undiminished across the long amp varied century since they were written.


As Ray Brassier said of our species, we crafty apes with opposable thumbs have catalogued and indexed an almost unbelievable scope of the cosmos, an extraordinary accomplishment which Lovecraft duly reveres.
In his stories, the sincerity amp nobility of scientific enterprise is never stymied by romantic or sentimental conceitedness, But this earnestness and courage in science is always inevitably humiliated by the literally unthinkable vastness of its address, Astronomers and geologists are doing the best and most important work humanly possible its just, in proportion to its context, human possibility is unimportant and insignificant.


I cracked open this collection because it contained several stories I hadnt read, Unfortunately they were mostly inessential juvenalia, a sequence of Lovecrafts Dunsanyinspired dreamscape stories, These stories are fine but somewhat forgettable, and indistinct upon recollection, The real draw to The Thing on the Doorstep amp other Weird Stories areof Lovecrafts best known amp longest works, all of which are fullthroated in his own voice Charles Dexter Ward, The Dunwich Horror amp At the Mountains of Madness.
Together they span more than half the collection amp especially read in succession, they seem to go on forever, Despite their seemingly interminable aggregate length amp unified representation of Lovecrafts artistic maturity, theres a sea change between each text and they have bold amp discreet identities.
That said, if I were editing these collections, I wouldnt have stacked them all atop one another,

Incidentally, I think Nick Land is the only inheritor of Lovecraft worthy of the name, And not just because theyre both deranged eugenicists with skeletal bodies made from angles amp elbows, I didnt touch on this enough in my, shall we say, expansive review of Fanged Noumena, but Lands earnest attempt to represent a cosmic materialism unvarnished by human self esteem is more Lovecraftian than the thousand year reich of bmovie tentacle monsters.
In Land, as in Lovecraft, the quest for meaning is portrayed as embarrassing amp slightly hysterical, But a splenetic angst always arises in rebellion against the cleaving toward ahuman perspectives amp if the dark Promethean act survives amidst this opprobrium, it is obviated by our biological limitations.


actually Thomas Ligotti is good for this too, but Ive written about that elsewhere

What does Science Fiction mean when the daytoday life of your average firstworld reader contains more technological marvels than the wildest speculation of books released just several decades prior What does Horror mean when the population of earth lives in a constant state of emergency What kind of realism would not deal with these vectors Does the genre just refer to a narrative emphasis on the excitations of spectacle rather than the mindful pleasures of serious literature In that case, Lovecraft is not a science fiction writer, and despite his own suspiciously overstated protestations to the contrary, he has far more in common with Eliot and Pound than comic books and alien invasion films.
Realism cant possibly keep up with reality anymore in the time that it takes to write a novel its culturaltechnological paradigm for postpostmetamodernity will be obsolete.
Whatever the fate of realism amp fantasy as storytelling devices, Lovecraft seems more true to life than ever in, .