HP Lovecraft.

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Lovecraft is great. Don't care very much for Derleth though...I don't think he really understand what Lovecraft was getting at.

H.P Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors. (Him along with Stephen King and some others that I can't remember at the moment.)

Perhaps the favorite story of his that he wrote was The Shadow Over Innsmouth. I've also read The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and the Dream quest for Unknown Kadath.

I don't think I dislike any of his stories. They are all good. Though some are better than others.

I am a hardcore fan of him too I like him practically as much as Stephen King, only in a different way and for different things As much as I like King, he is too normal and ordinary - nothing like HPL. Here I'm thinking about his personality, personal life and not about what King writes, let me precize. I recently am reading his stories. I found some Derleth's stories and read them all but later I read that Derleth wrote his stories practically all himself, on his own and lied he wrote them with HPL. I read almost everything by HPL but for some things that weren't translated and published in my country (though I did read some of those in their original version, like Celephais, Cats of Ulthar etc.). I have the collection of HPL's stories, "Road to Madness" which include some pieces which previously weren't released in Poland, like The White Ship or The Tree - I bought myself the collection 4 years ago, for my name day. I am recently reading HPL all the time I'd love to visit Innsmouth or, especially, Dunwich and see its degenerated inhabitants Maybe but for Lavinia Whateley's son - the one who was more than Wilbur similar to their dad I'd love so much to see the Dunwich region. I haven't read the Dreamland stories for they weren't published in here.

I HEARD HE WAS A MASSIVE RACIST.

His racism seems to be the "normal" racist believes of the beginning of the XXth century (judging the past through the morality of another time is stupid) mixed with aspi-ish obsessions.

I'm a fan, too.
My favorite are The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness.

True, but finding out things about people that you don't like can really put you off them.

For example; H. G. Wells was a Eugenicist but not a racist... which is worse I wonder?

Funnily enough, he was "anti-racist"



while at the same time, he encouraged the sterilization of the "weak".



I don't know if Lovecraft was like that but HG was one of my favorite authors and this side of him somehow spoiled it all for me.

Of course, when one day, we finally discover that plants communicate with us all the time (and we just couldn't understand the signals), we'll probably look upon vegetarians with disgust... who knows?

Almost all intellectuals and political men were eugenicists before this ideology became discredited because of WW2 and Holocaust.

Some of Lovecraft's stories are blatantly racist and he was prone to almost psychotic rants about blacks and Jews, but he was also married to a Jew who claimed that she had to calm his rants by pointing this out to him. The more I read about his life, the more convinced I am that he was the kind of person who spouts racism out of fear and ignorance rather than genuine hatred.

As for his writing, some of it's amazing but some of it's pretty bad, which he himself admitted to. And even the amazing stories are often a challenge to read, due to his fondness for deliberately archaic and overly verbose language. I usually recommend that newcomers read "The Call of Cthulhu," because if they don't like that one, they certainly won't like the others.

My late father had been a Lovecraft fan, and so I grew up with my Dad retelling me the stories written by Lovecraft and his imitators. I became a Lovecraft reader in high school, and have eaten up his fiction ever since. I'm currently getting my daughter to warm up to HPL - I even let her have my Cthulhu plushy.
Without a doubt, Lovecraft was the most important practitioner of horror fiction in recent history, as he has had an calculable influence on modern horror fiction.
As to name my favorite Lovecraft story - I'd have to say, it has to be Nyarlathotep, with it's dreamlike quality, as told by a narrator who has witnessed the end of the world by the Old One, Nyarlathotep.

Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer