The Lurking Fear and Other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft (collection pub. 1971)
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Caution: spoilers.

I've wanted to read Lovecraft's works for quite a long time, particularly stories that are part of the Cthulhu mythos (which not many of these stories seem to be). I finally got this collection of twelve of his stories in a secondhand shop in 2018, and began reading it in October of that year, a week before Halloween. Upon reading the first story in the book, I thought that... the words he chose and the way he put them together was superior to anything I could ever do; if I were writing the story, I'm sure it would be much blander. I started thinking... I know his stories were all originally published in pulp magazines, and I definitely feel like there's a pulp sensibility to his style, even if I'm not particularly familiar with pulp fiction in any genre. His writing style just feels like my idea of what pulp is probably like. I'd call it "hardboiled horror." (Note: I wrote this intro probably after only reading the first story, and I don't know how many other stories I'd apply that description to, if any.) I also started thinking it seems to me like a transitional style between the way people wrote in the nineteenth century and the way they wrote... somewhat later than Lovecraft, say the mid-20th century. But of course, again, my knowledge of such things is sadly limited. And considering both Lovecraft and some of the 19th century writers with whom I'm at all familiar were considered, in their time, different in style than their contemporaries, my own concepts of the writing styles of any given era are probably off base.

The Lurking Fear (pub. 1923)
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The unnamed narrator apparently has some experience hunting for various types of terrifying creatures, or whatever. This story is about one such search, on and around Tempest Mountain, where the "lurking fear" is said to reside. There are many local stories about the mansion on the mountaintop, built centuries earlier by the Martense family, and eventually abandoned. Some creature apparently comes down from the mountain during thunderstorms, and kills people. The narrator wants to find the creature and discover its true nature. In his own search, a few people who assist him either disappear or are killed, before he ever finds the creature (or creatures). I won't spoil what he finally discovers their nature to be, but it is certainly disturbing. And I guess it must be more so than any of his previous experiences with such things, because it seems after this, he gives up on this occupation (or hobby, whatever it was), out of terror that haunts him for the rest of his life. Anyway, I thought it was a fairly good story.

Dagon (pub. 1919)
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An unnamed narrator begins by telling the reader that he is addicted to morphine, but has run out of it, and that it is necessary for him to bear living. So, he plans to jump out a window to kill himself. Then he tells the story of why this is necessary. It's about having been a sailor, whose ship was captured during a war. He then escaped on a small boat, but was stranded in the middle of the ocean. Then after sleeping, he awoke to find himself on a horrible landscape, apparently risen from the bottom of the ocean. He began exploring, and eventually saw a creature that terrified him. So... he went mad, and returned to his lifeboat, and was eventually rescued, after the landscape had sunk away again, apparently. So no one believes his story. But he can't escape the fear without morphine. Anyway... I guess my feeling about the story is indifferent.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep (pub. 1919)
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Well, this one's more a science fiction story, rather than horror. It's told by an intern at a psychiatric hospital. He begins by thinking about the nature of dreams, and how some of them, at least, might allow us to experience another reality, just as real as the physical reality of waking life, possibly even more real. It's something I've wondered about before, and I expect plenty of other people have, too. But anyway, the main part of the story is about a patient named Joe Slater, who is admitted to the hospital, after having killed someone. Now, I must mention that the narrator's way of describing not only Joe, but in general the mountain- or hill-dwelling people he comes from, sounds awfully prejudiced. (In fact, Lovecraft's narrators can have any number of prejudices, in different stories, and I'm sure I haven't seen the worst of it yet, just three stories into the book.) Well, Joe often wakes up ranting about some strange experiences, which he later doesn't remember. This leads the narrator to hook up a device of his own invention that's meant to transfer brain waves between two people. Which leads to his sharing in one of Joe's dreams. Beyond that, I don't want to reveal anything. But it's certainly an interesting concept.

The White Ship (pub. 1919)
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A lighthouse keeper named Basil Elton takes a journey on a white ship, which sails by various fantastical places without stopping at most of them. There's a bearded man on the ship who always warns against it. But eventually they stop and go ashore at a land called Sona-Nyl, and stay there for a long time. It's a really great place, but eventually Basil decides he wants to sail on to some other place called Cathuria, which no one has ever been to. And that's a bad idea. I don't want to say how it all ends, but... I guess I'm fairly indifferent to the story.

Arthur Jermyn (pub. 1921)
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This is the story of a long line of a family called Jermyn. It's mainly about Sir Arthur Jermyn, who we learn at the beginning of the story committed suicide. But the story then explains what led up to that event, going back several generations. His great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was an explorer of the Congo, who brought back stories of a discovery, which no one believed, and he eventually went mad. I don't want to go into the whole family history, but... Arthur eventually does his own investigation into his ancestor Wade's stories. And he finally makes a disturbing discovery that leads to his suicide. I won't say what that discovery was, but I guess it's kind of an interesting story. (Although Wikipedia informs me that it's likely a metaphor for something... well, something that shouldn't be disturbing at all, and really only is so to bigots. Which makes it difficult to enjoy the story at all. But I still think it can be enjoyed to some degree, if you take it at face value.)

From Beyond (pub. 1934)
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An unnamed narrator tells the story of his friend Crawford Tillinghast. The latter had exiled the narrator from his home ten weeks before the story begins, when he had discouraged Tillinghast from pursuing his intended research. Now, the narrator has been invited back, to witness the results of that research. Tillinghast has obviously gone mad, because of the success of the horrible machine he has created. (It kind of put me in mind of how success affected Victor Frankenstein.) Tillinghast explains to the narrator how there is much more to the world than we can perceive with our five senses, and his machine emits waves that activate dormant, vestigial senses. This allows people affected by those waves to perceive things normally beyond human perception. It also allows unseen living things to perceive us. I won't reveal how it ends, but so far this is my favorite story in the collection. I think it's a very interesting concept, albeit one with which I'm rather familiar. I think a lot of horror stories (especially short films, and maybe a few feature films) use a similar concept. Not necessarily with some special scientific device, sometimes very simple things, like turning a light on and off, or using a camera, or whatever, can let us see monsters or demons that are all around us. Or stories about parallel realities coexisting with our own. (Stranger Things, for example.) But really, any sort of question about the limitations of our senses or the possibility of other senses we can't even imagine, is something I find interesting.

The Temple (pub. 1925)
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In 1917, a German naval officer named Karl Heinrich writes a log, which he says he's depositing in a bottle to explain... things. First of all, I have my doubts that the whole story would even fit in a bottle, and also I'm not sure whether it would reach the surface of the ocean, since at the time his U-boat was stuck at the bottom. Anyway, after sinking a British ship, one of the survivors clings to the outside of the submarine, even after it submerges. He's only discovered by the German crew later on, obviously dead, but... some of the crew don't feel so sure about that. An officer named Lt. Klense takes a carved ivory object from the dead man's pocket, and over the next couple of months, more and more members of the crew becoming increasingly agitated, eventually deemed mad, and end up being killed by other officers, to keep them from sabotaging the sub. Eventually it's just Heinrich and Klense left, after some of the crew had succeeded in sabotage. And in the end, it's down to just Heinrich. He discovers a submerged temple, which he believes to be Atlantis. He feels supernaturally compelled to explore it, but knows he won't return, which is why he's leaving this log behind. So... we don't get any idea of what he might find inside the temple, or how he might die. Which makes the story seem to me a good deal less scary than I think it's meant to be. And also frustrating, since it arouses our curiosity without any hope of payoff. Also, Heinrich is a really annoying character, because of how deeply nationalistic he is. He has contempt for anyone who's not German, but even derides people from parts of Germany that he considers inferior to his own home of Prussia. Although I suppose I found it a bit interesting how meticulous he was in his disbelief in the supernatural, assuming himself to be going mad (of course, long after the rest of his inferior shipmates) rather than allow the possibility that his senses were correct in telling him anything supernatural was happening. So, whatever... I didn't really like the story, but I didn't hate it.

The Moon-Bog (pub. 1926)
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The unnamed narrator tells us of his visit to his friend Denys Barry, an Irish-American who made his fortune in America, then moved to Ireland to buy his family's ancestral castle in Kilderry. Barry had invited the narrator to visit him because he'd become lonely after all the local servants and laborers he had hired quit working for him, when he decided to drain the nearby bog. It turns out there are local legends about the bog that terrified them of what would happen if it were drained. So, Barry hired new servants and laborers from elsewhere. Both Barry and the narrator found the locals' superstitions ridiculous. However, the narrator soon learns that they were true. And that's all I want to reveal of the plot, but it's a fairly decent story. More of a straightforward ghost story (with an Irish flavor) than Lovecraft's usual style (as far as I can tell from what I've read so far in this collection). So far it's probably my second favorite story in the collection.

The Hound (pub. 1924)
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This story starts out reminding me of "The Lurking Fear." Once again, there's an unnamed narrator who seeks out unnatural thrills. However, he and his partner in these endeavors, someone named St. John, aren't really looking for anything supernatural. Rather, they go around the world robbing graves. And they create a secret museum in their basement, filled with strange and often grotesque things they've stolen. We know from the start of the story that the narrator is planning on killing himself, to avoid the fate of St. John, who had been mauled to death in a most horrific fashion. What led up to that was their stealing an amulet from the grave of someone buried five centuries ago, in Holland. They recognize the amulet as having been mentioned in a book called the Necronomicon. (That's a name I've known for a very long time. This story is the first time it's mentioned, but it will play a significant role in stories Lovecraft wrote later, as part of the whole Cthulhu Mythos. It's also been referenced in various movies and things unrelated to Lovecraft's writing.) Anyway, after stealing the amulet, the narrator and St. John return to England, but a hound's baying that they first heard in the cemetery in Holland follows them home. And as I said, eventually St. John is killed, presumably by the hound. The narrator later returns to the cemetery to rid himself of the amulet, but... that doesn't work out for him, which leaves suicide as his only option. I don't want to say what exactly he found when he returned to the grave he had robbed, partly because I'm not sure I even understood it. But in any event, I thought the story was okay, mainly because I liked the baroque writing style.

The Unnamable (pub. 1925)
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The narrator is named Carter (though we don't learn that til the end of the story). He's a writer, and he's sitting in a burying ground with a friend named Joel Manton, a high school principal. The two of them have rather different beliefs about certain things, so I guess they tend to argue, but in a friendly way. Anyway, Carter tells Manton about a local legend, or whatever... some unnamable thing, though Manton doesn't believe anything is truly unnamable, or indescribable. And... I guess the creature Carter talks about shows up at the end and hurts them both (but doesn't kill them). That's really all I can say about the plot. I thought the story was okay, mainly because I liked the setting. That was creepy enough, in a relatively ordinary sort of way, even if it was hard for me to care about the thing itself, or find it all that scary. I dunno, the whole point of the story seems to be a justification for writers (like Carter or Lovecraft himself) not describing the things that readers are supposed to find scary. (This is kind of why I tend to think the horror genre works better in movies than in literature. And I'm not generally a huge fan of the genre even in movies.)

The Outsider (pub. 1926)
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The narrator has apparently lived his whole life within a castle, with no light, no memory of his origins or of other people (though he has read books about the outside world). Eventually he decides to find a way out, but when he does, he makes a shocking discovery. I don't want to spoil it, even though I did find it rather predictable. But it's definitely a good story, and I do like the twist ending, despite having seen it coming. It's a kind of horror that... well, there are several other things I could compare it to, but of course that would spoil the twist. But it's a kind of psychological horror that I think is particularly disturbing, in a way that's rather the opposite of most horror stories.

The Shadow over Innsmouth (pub. 1936)
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Well, the final story in the collection is also the longest; in fact, it's a novella. It's the one that's sort of the most clearly a part of the Cthulhu mythos; though Cthulhu himself doesn't appear in it, he is at least mentioned. And there is some language used in a few spots that I recognized as being part of the mythos. Anyway, as usual, the narrator of the story isn't named in the story itself, though Wikipedia informs me that his name is Robert Olmstead. He tells the story of a sightseeing trip he made throughout New England in the summer of 1927 (before his final year of college). In particular, he wanted to visit the town of Arkham, which is where his mother's family had come from, a couple of generations back (before they moved to Ohio). When he stops in Newburyport, Massachusetts, he learns of the existence of a run-down town called Innsmouth, and he decides to spend a day there before continuing on to Arkham, despite the fact that locals from Newburyport warn him against it. While in Innsmouth, he meets an old man named Zadok Allen, who tells him stories about the history of the town, which involve a cult called the Esoteric Order of Dagon. (So there's obviously a connection to the earlier story "Dagon.") People in the town made human sacrifices to, I guess some sort of fishlike or froglike humanoids called the Deep Ones, in exchange for gold and for driving fish toward the town, so fishermen would have lots of success. Also, people were eventually required to marry Deep Ones, so their descendants would be half-breeds. Some of them might look fairly human until later in life, when they start to become more like the Deep Ones, and eventually go to live in the ocean or whatever, and live forever. Of course, Olmstead doesn't really believe any of this, but he is nevertheless anxious to leave the town before nightfall. Unfortunately, when the bus shows up, it ostensibly has a mechanical problem, so Olmstead will have to spend the night in Innsmouth. He can't sleep, and eventually realizes people are trying to break into his room, so he manages to escape from the hotel where he was staying. He goes on the run through town, while a mob of locals search for him. In the end he escapes and returns home, but that's not the end of the horror. I don't want to give away any more, though I will say it reminded me of the end of "Arthur Jermyn." Anyway, as horror stories go, I guess it's not bad. Certainly it's a decent introduction to Lovecraft's fictional universe, and reinforces my prior desire to read more stories in that universe. Though I do hope such stories reveal a lot more than this one did.

So, now I'm done with the book, and I'm glad to have read it. In general, I have to say I didn't really enjoy any of the stories quite as much as I'd hoped I would, but I also can't say I was disappointed by the collection. The stories are weird and dark enough, it's just... I've always associated the word "eldritch" with my vague idea of Lovecraft, and somehow the stories in this collection just weren't quite abnormal enough for me to feel that I can use that word to describe them. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping other stories in the mythos will turn out to be: more eldritch.