I'm giving this five stars because I think Leslie S. Klinger did an amazing job with the annotations. It's full of history, and pictures. Both photographs of places mentioned in the stories and art from Weird Tales where the short stories was first published and it has been an fun experience.

As for H.P. Lovecrafts work itself, it doesn't seem like I'm a big fan personally. I felt that he had maybe 4 original ideas, or how to tell a story, and kept shuffling them around trying to make the idea into perfection. Which meant a lot of the time it felt like I had already read the story he was telling me. But maybe that's me being uneducated, or maybe that's simply being a modern reader. I've grown up on cthulhu everywhere. From movie posters, to video games, to just casual mention everywhere. It's part of why I wanted to finally sit down and get invested in these stories and it has been a goal of mine for the last two years.

Maybe back when these were first introduced to the public, they were such an original idea that they were actually impactful and scary. While today the fact that so little of the horror is actually described makes a lot of these kind of dull to me. The narrator often simply states that they do not dare describe what they saw, or that what they saw isn't something that CAN be described. And often, the narrator wasn't the.. protagonist? Of the event but rather someone reporting about it after the fact and then often all they saw, or heard, was the other person disappearing and other clues. Chilling, surely, but also kind of boring after having read that a few times.