Great Book
I'm not an avid reader of Lovecraft, but I'm familiar with his reputation. I had read some of his work years ago when I was younger, but the details are long-forgotten. This book is phenomenal, but I don't recommend it for first-time Lovecraft readers. I bought this book with another from this series, entitled "The Best of HP Lovecraft, Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror & The Macabre". I suggest, if you're new to Lovecraft, that you start with that one.
One thing I didn't realize about his work is that so much of it ties together. As you read through this book (and the other one as well), you'll notice a lot of the same characters popping up and many of the same locations, even some monsters make multiple appearances or are at least mentioned. My point is that if you start reading this Dream Cycle book, you're going to feel like you walked into a movie half-way through. There's a lot going on right away and it's a bit difficult to get your bearings. Try the "Best of" book first, it's a better introduction and contains more stories that stand alone.
That being said, this book is awesome. If you're a Lovecraft fan or at least somewhat familiar with his work, definitely check it out. If you're new and looking to try out Lovecraft for the first time, try the other book and come back to this one later.
Superb Introduction to H. P. Lovecraft's Weird Fiction
The book begins with a section entitled "Three Fragments," in which is printed "Azathoth," "The Descendant," and "The Thing in the Moonlight." A note following ye latter fragment notes: "As discovered editor/historian S. T. Joshi, the central portion of this fragment was taken from a letter Lovecraft wrote to Donald Wandrei. Opening and closing paragraphs were added by J. Chapman Miske." It was actually Schultz who made this discovery, I believe. As S. T. describes the situation in H. P. LOVECRAFT: A LIFE (pgs. 435/436):
"Later in the month of November Lovecraft had another peculiar dream, involving a street-car conductor whose head suddenly turns into 'a mere white cone tapering to one blood-red tentacle.' The account of this dream appears in a letter to Wandrei of November 25, 1927. This letter is of interest because it has proved the source of a hoax whereby a work entitled 'The Thing in the Moonlight' was spuriously attributed to Lovecraft. After Lovecraft's death, Wandrei had passed along the texts of both the Roman dream and this shorter dream to J. Chapman Miske, editor of SCIENTI-SNAPS. The Roman dream appeared in SCIENTI-SNAPS (under the title 'The Very Old Folk') in the Summer 1940 issue. When Miske renamed SCIENTI-SNAPS as BIZARRE, he printed the other dream-account, adding opening and closing paragraphs of his own and calling the whole farrago 'The Thing in the Moonlight by H. P. Lovecraft'. August Derleth, not aware that this item was not entirely Lovecraft's, reprinted it in MARGINALIA (1944). When Miske saw the volume, he wrote to Derleth informing him of the true nature of the text; but Derleth must have forgotten the matter, for he reprinted the piece again as a 'fragment' in DAGON AND OTHER MACABRE TALES (1965). Only recently has the matter been clarified by David E. Schultz."
It is wrong to call this a "hoax," and in point of fact this very queer dream-image of Lovecraft's has inspir'd many other writers of Lovecraftian horror. Edward Lee has based an entire novel, the nasty and authentically Lovecraftian TROLLEY NO. 1852, on the dream. S. T. now excludes "The Thing in the Moonlight" from all modern editions of Lovecraft's tales, so this trade pb is one of the last few places where you'll be able to find it.
This book is, for me, the perfect introduction to Lovecraft for one who is reading his weird fiction for the first time. Here we have a rich mixture of HPL's various styles and approaches to the weird tale. It contains the magnificent prose poem, "Nyarlathotep," and also "The Nameless City," a tale that Lovecraft was fond of but that never saw professional publication in his lifetime. This book also includes a wonderful group of Lovecraft's earthy Gothic horrors, tales that have profoundly influenced by own horror fiction: "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Hound," "Pickman's Model," and what is my favorite of all of Lovecraft's fictions, the short novel THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD. Lovecraft was indeed a master of the atmospheric weird tale, and some of his finest conjurations of misty terror and squalid horror are contained within this excellent collection. Highly recommended!
An excellent Lovecraft primer
I have been a Lovecraft fan for 25 years, and while my literary tastes have widened considerably since my first readings of his work, I come back time and again for a thrill at his tales of horror and insanity from beyond the stars! While a relative unknown in his time, history has shown that Lovecraft's work has had a resounding impact on the horror genre, and many modern horror writers express their debt to Lovecraft's memes. And this collection, Dreams of Terror and Death, is an excellent compendium of his dream cycle work.
Highlights of this book include The Dreams in the Witch House, The Strange High House in the Mist, From Beyond, and The Hound. These four stories alone make this book worth buying, and would be a great introduction for a reader who is new to Lovecraft's work. Other excellent stories include The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and of course The Doom that Came to Sarnath.
I own 10 Lovecraft volumes, all of which are well-loved and well-read, but this tome rates among the finest and has found pride of place in my collection.
Cats and Night-Gaunts and Decadent Lost Cities
I have written elsewhere that I find H.P. Lovecraft to be a writer best taken in small doses. Short, judicious samplings of his stories are more appealing to me. But there are those readers who can't get enough stories by the Old Master. _The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death_ (1995) is a jumbo collection that should appeal to readers of this sort. Early in his career, Lovecraft wrote a number of dream fantasies in the style of Lord Dunsany. While they often had elements of horror, they tended to aim more towards the surreal and exotic than toward realistic terror. You will find more of the whimsical in this collection than in many other Lovecraft collections-- and that is something of a virtue.
_The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft_ contains two novels by Lovecraft, _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath_ (1943) and _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ (1941), along with twenty-three short pieces. Three of the pieces-- "Azathoth," "The Descendant," and "The Thing in the Moonlight"-- are fragments, all pretty minor. One story, "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," is a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price, though Price insisted that the authorship was mostly Lovecraft's. It is a fairly imaginative piece of entertainment.
Four of the stories are Randolph Carter tales: "The Dream-Quest," "The Statement of Randolph Carter," "The Silver Key," and "Through the Gates of the Silver Key". I confess that I find Randolph Carter to be a rather weak-tea hero. His main talent seems to be an ability to retreat into dream worlds. Carter (and several other Lovecraftian dream heroes) are modeled heavily on Lovecraft himself. L. Sprague de Camp shrewly noted that there is a self-pitying element that creeps into some of the dream stories. The hero is portrayed as too high-toned and sensitive for a crass, uncaring world. "The Silver Key" and "Celephais" are two stories marred by this self-indulgence.
Four of the stories-- "Nyarlathotep," "Ex Oblivione," "Polaris," and "What the Moon Brings"-- are prose poems or mood pieces that Lovecraft wrote for several amateur journals in the early twenties. I have a certain fondness for them, especially "Ex Oblivione," but I cannot seriously consider them major pieces of writing.
More substantial short works are "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," a straight Dunsanian fantasy with a strong sense of the Old Testament about it; "The Cats of Ulthor," a fable about why killing cats became a capitol offense in one town; and "The Strange High House in the Mist," about a local philosopher who went on a journey into exotic lands and who returned-- but not unchanged. "Pickman's Model" and "The Dreams in the Witch House" are solid supernatural horror stories.
The two most interesting stories in the collection are the novels. _The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadith_ was written in 1926. _The Case of Charles Dexter Ward_ was written in 1927. Lovecraft expressed dissatisfaction with both of the stories and never submitted either of them for publication. They languished in his files until after his death in 1937. They were published posthumously in the early 1940s.
"The Dream-Quest" is a surrealistic series of adventures in which Randolph Carter wanders from one fantasy setting to the next, encountering sinister merchants, Moon-jumping cats, ghouls, night-gaunts, zebras, and more. There are allusions in this novel to "The Cats of Ulthar," "Celephais," "Pickman's Model," and other dream stories. Its strength is a strong imaginative charm that carries the reader along. Its weakness is a lack of plot-- a lack of unifying dream-logic, if you will-- and an unevenness of style.
"The Case..." is a supernatural horror tale involving Dark Doings in Lovecraft's native Providence, Rhode Island. It relies on a strong sense of setting and an almost tedious accumulation of documents for its effects. It moves slowly, but it is ultimately convincing when Lovecraft pulls out all the stops at the end. It is clearly the best story in the collection.
But there remains a question. Why include this novel in a dream cyle anthology? It is not particularly dreamlike or surrealistic, nor does it seem to be very Dunsanian in style. Rather, it tends to have a historically realistic flavor. A justification of sorts comes near the close of the novel. The good Dr. Willett is prowling through some mighty grisly catacombs, and he sees a symbol chiselled above a door: "It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black Tower standing alone in the twilight-- and Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers" (305). Ah, yes. In "The Dream-Quest," we are told that Randolph Carter is aided by a band of ghouls in slipping through the cemetary kingdom of the Gugs, where the Tower of Koth dominates the landscape (134-135). So there is a dream connection of sorts.
I am sure that Lovecraft affictionadoes will love this collection. But the truth is that it consists of a lot of early pieces, when Lovecraft was doing a lot of imitation and before he had really found his voice. The overall quality is markedly uneven. There is a passable introduction by Neil Gaiman, but I somehow ended up with the feeling that he could have been telling me a lot more than he did. A better large collection is _The Best of H.P. Lovecraft_ (1965).
spellbinding in more ways than one
This might be a little different than most H.P. Lovecraft collections out there, especially since it is a collection of stories mostly dream-oriented or dream-inspired; also, don't be put off by the title. This book isn't as dark as most of the stuff Howard puts out. This book does have some fearful and horrific moments, but compared to Lovecraft's more well-known work these stories have a more colorful and (relatively) light-hearted aura about them... However, don't let this deter you, even if you are a diehard horror fan! Lovecraft's dream stories, in my opinion, are some of his best writings. Especially notable is the fragment "Azathoth" which serves as a sort of brief introduction to the rest of the book. This is some of Lovecraft's least cliched work, and includes some of his deepest and most unpredictable apparitions. If you like densely layered prose, unusual adjectives and detailed descriptions of fantasy worlds (both good and evil), then this book is for you.
