Any HP Lovecraft fans out there?

Question

I really like reading HP Lovecraft - he could weave a story so beautifully. His fiction is some of the scariest I have ever read. I have just skipped around reading his stories & books, but I am under the impression that his books have some type of chronological order (that some of his stories build off of other stories). I was wondering if anyone could suggest a reading order of his books and stories.

Answer 1

Here's a list of his writings in the order he wrote them:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/

That's probably as a good a way as any to start :-)

Answer 2

I love Lovecraft (haha!). To me, what's scariest about his stories is what they imply for the concepts of meaning and existance we must all share in order to function in our civilization. He undermines thought itself, and that's scary to me.

Anyway, I read Lovecraft more based on themes than chronological order. For example, I read his stories on dreaming and nightmares as sort of a different set from stories set in the universe of the Necronomicon, and I read his stories set within the dream-world as distict from other stories about nightmares.

Of course, I realize that it's all connected in Lovecraft's mind, but it's impossible to know the mind of another, so why bother trying? It's also very true that his books draw on each other, but I'm not enough of a scholar to try to find some order between them. I simply read them haphazardly (within a theme) and let the relationships between the stories grow organically within me. Probably, my understanding of Lovecraft is different than what your's will turn out to be, but that's the nature of art. Analyitical, rational thinking is far and away the greatest barrier to the truths of instinctual experience and intuitive understanding of horror that storytelling can provide, so don't sweat it much. If you're on a budget, just go with whatever stories appeal most at the time of purchase and work from there.

Answer 3

I was going to link to a list of his works in chronological order, but Flapperchick beat me to it.

So all I can add is a suggestion to check S. T. Joshi's biography of Lovecraft, "H.P. Lovecraft: A Life." Joshi seems to be the leading Lovecraft scholar, so if anyone would know about the best order for reading Lovecraft, he would.


JMB

Answer 4

I mostly have read a collection of his short stories. I remember them being chilling, kinda like a Hitchcock movie, or the Haunting, in that everything was in suggestion, and your imagination, he never really showed you what he was talking about. I never saw an order to the stories, and I don't think the intro to the stories mentioned one.

Answer 5

I recommend "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", "Pickman's Model", "The Shunned Room", "The Shuttered House", and "The Statement of Randolph Carter". All his works are really good though.

Answer 6

never heard of him before but will give him a go.