Ranking Lovecraft

Okay, I’m really tired and still have too much to do tonight, so I offer a quick blog post about the Lovecraft stories I’ve been reading. I’m about 80 percent done with the anthology – have six more “short” stories to go to finish it – and I really enjoyed most of them save for one. Another gave me young-Stephen-King-type chills, one was unexpectedly and beautifully poetic, and most of the others were not-quite-riveting-yet-nonetheless-entertaining mixtures of adventure, science fiction, and horror to varying degrees.

If I were to put the stories I’ve read so far into some sort of subjective ranking (with their dates of initial publication, for literary trivia aficionados like me), here’s what the list might look like:

Azathoth (1938)

Nyarlathotep (1920)

The History of the Necronomicon (1938)

The Nameless City (1921)

The Whisperer in the Darkness (1931)

The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)

The Curse of Yig (1929)

At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

The Mound (1940)

The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

Dagon (1919)

The Dreams in the Witch House (1933)

The Color Out of Space (1927)

The Dunwich Horror (1929)

The Hound (1924)

The Festival (1925)


As far as which was spine-tingling, which was poetic, etc., I’m saving all that for a huge monster post I will do on the anthology once I’ve completed it, probably around the end of this month or so.