I've been meaning to get around to reading this stuff for ages, and as I don't currently have anything I'm into right now, I figured it's the perfect opportunity.

So, seeing as how there are CoC and Lovecraft threads here every so often, I thought I'd ask some of you guys who seem familiar with it what books you recommend to start off with. I'm looking for two or three titles to get me going, and I don't really know what's out there. I have a feeling Lovecraft has a ton of books and I want to make sure I get in on the ground floor.

So, what do you recommend I pick up first?

Actually, no, Lovecraft does not have tons of books. There are a ton of books that in some remote way tie in to his stuff, or are derived from it, or were written by his friends that contain in-jokes, but the master himself didn't right a huge mass of material. Quality rather than quantity.

I suggest you wander over to a bookstore, and look for these compilations. THey don't have to be read in any particular order, but I suggest the following:

"The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurling Tales of Horror and the Macabre"

"The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness"

"The Dream-Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death"

Which covers like 99% of all Lovecraft material. If you really get into it, I then suggest "The Annotated Lovecraft" and "More Annotated Lovecraft." After which I would suggest the various Chaosium white-cover over-sized collections, weird tales, his collected letters, in that order.

[/edit] A few notes:

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft focuses mainly on the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, and contains HPL's best stories (In my opinion): The Dunwich Horror and the Shadow Out of Innsmouth.

The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft holds a slew of miscellaneous stories; some connect to the mythos and some do not. I personally love the seven-and-a-half page "The Picture in the House," and the novella "At the Mountains of Madness" for Cthulu Mythos Lore.

The Dream-Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft tends more to fantasy than Horror, and while connected to his other works lacks a certain kick to it for my tastes. These are the stories are partially derivative of other authors who influenced HPL, most notably Lord Dunsany. Still, it has a number of excellent stories in it, as well as the novella "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

Someone posted this Link over in the Shadowrun thread a few days ago, very entertaining.

Thanks for the pointers AH. I don't know why I was under the impression he had a lot of material, but it's nice to know where to start. Even if he doesn't have a ton of books.

I recomend At The Mountains of Madness and The Re-Animator.

Both of which are in the collections I mentioned, but likewise available as stand-alone novellas.

Beware the right angles!

Well, there is only one that you should read 1st and that is The Call Of Cthulhu http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/cc.htm

And beyond that, everything that MASTER has written.

Actually, I found "The Call of Cthulhu" to be one of HPL's poorer stories. I almost prefer his Re-Animator tales.

I dont suppose someone could post a phonetic spelling of the word Cthulhu. I have always pronounced it "kathulu" but most people agree that I am an idiot so any help would be appreciated.

I think it's pronounced keh-too-loo...

chool-loo,

I was always partial to "Bob"

On a related tangent...:

http://www.choppingblock.org/d/20030912.html
http://www.choppingblock.org/d/20030721.html
And my personal favorite...Booyah.

Lovecraft intentionally fucked with people's heads on the pronounciation of the name. The most consistent I've heard from the Truly Anal Types© is "Ka-t'hul-hloo", with especial emphasis on seperating the t and h at the beginning, a long u ("oo") and preounoucnign the h seperate from the l at the end.

I haven't read all of Lovecraft's stuff but I did read, among other things, call of Cthulhu (And the other Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and Macabre) and could never figure out what about him was supposed to be scary. So we've got a guy who, for apparently millions of years at a time, is totally helpless trapped in a tomb. When he's on the surface he can communicate telepathically with artists and poets and frag them up, but anybody else is safe. Furthermore this psychic power doesn't work when he's underwater.

He also has an assortment of worshippers who have no special abilities and get their asses handed to them by the police who are only sad that they had to use lethal force. How terrifying.

Furthermore Cthulhu himself finally wakes up and gets torn apart by ramming from a Steamboat that could hardly have been going much more than 25 miles an hour (And that's pretty generous given how fast Steamboats are). Though he regenerates, this apparently puts him down for another million years or so since Cthulhu's gone afterwards.

And this guy is supposed to scare me? He can't affect most of us with his mind and his body is as tough as tofu. And even if he regenerates, a steamboat tears him up so what's going to happen when he meets up with a tank, or an artillery piece, or frag, a home-made batch of high explosives?

Keep a few things in mind:

Uno) "Call of Cthulhu" is not HPL's finest work, and even he admits it.

Dos) I've never found any Horror literature particularly horrifying. Disturbing, yes; entertaining, aye. Just try to get into the proper mindset, the rhythm of HPL's text and words. Very entertaining then.

Tres) HPL was scared shitless by the idea of other dimensions, alien intelligences, and time/space doing weird freaky things. This was back in the days when Relativity was hot shit and the Atom bomb not even Oppy's wet dream. Likewise, he was a racist (not so overt or frothing-at-the mouth as people paint him to be, though. Just an hangover to when people attributed a great deal of brain-time to "proper breeding") and he hated fish.

My personal favorites are "The Picture in the House" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

At the movie theater when the trailers were on, I thought for a moment someone made a movie of At the Mountains of Madness, I was actually disappointed when it turned out to be the AVP trailer.

That makes sense AH. Thanks. Personally I've always rather found vritually all Horror stories more humorous than not. I guess it comes from living in a place where the weather tries to kill you every week, on a homestead where there are several heavily armed people (Including me) to protect the place from anything, and we believe in massive self-sufficiency. All I could think of when I read Cthulhu getting killed by the Steamboat was "Well dang, he'd better never come around here or between the Tornadoes, Shotguns, and Freeway traffic he's really gonna be in bad shape."