Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

This is a completely worthy companion to "Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos." Really, you'll want both. Everything in this book is worthwhile for those interested in the mythos, early horror, and the roots of weirder science fiction. This is a top-tier collections due to its inclusion of rarely-reprinted, pulp-era material. Lovecraft had a fertile imagination, but he also connected literary dots to cement into place a genre or style perhaps long in coming. The gap between awe and fear that he is the pinnacle of exploring represents elements of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. And he wrote even before those genres were explicitly named! His "cosmic horror" was a dark, protoplasmic forbear to the diverging fields of modern fantastic writing. Once his discovery was recognized for what it was - a cultural and intellectual idiom as well as a stylistic approach - other weird, imaginative outsiders began developing it. And with any genre, the subtleties reward you richly when you dig into the early material (as opposed to just hacking through terms on wikipedia, or the even more distilled, dumbed-down trope dictionaries on the internet). This collection contains more outre nuggets for the scifi horror pulp addict - concepts so weird and timeless that they seem anachronistic for when they were published. When translucent tentacles appear, or a psychic transcends hyperspace, you'll feel like you're seeing high-definition polygons rendered on an 1980s Tandy computer. Unless you are interested in tracking down individual books of the collected works of the included authors, this excellently edited anthology is essential.

There were only a handful of outright pastiche, though even some of the other stories started strong but ended fairly weak..(a quivering big toe should never be crescendo of a story)