Lovecraft is an interesting beast. Due to adaptations and the complicated relationship Lovecraft's works have to the public domain, many of his more popular creations have existence independent of their original context. They are something of a cultural meme. The terms Lovecraftian, Cthulhu, and Shoggoth often have meaning even to those who have never read a word of Lovecraft's prose

Unfortunately, while Lovecraft deserves some credit for the genesis of these tropes, much of his actual work is just not very good. This collection makes that obvious by leading off with "The Horror at Red Hook," a story where Lovecraft's much-noted racism is not just prominent but overwhelming. From there, the quality varies, but the premise is usually the same. A white man discovers some evidence that non-Abrahamic extremely powerful supernatural beings (Cthulhu, Shoggoth, Dagon etc) may exist. He then fails to cope.

The difficulty I have with Lovecraft is that his two main methods to convince me that I ought to be horrified do not succeed. His protagonists panic when faced with something different than and also more important than western civilization. The existential crisis of realizing they do not matter in the scheme of things combined with a deep seated dread from looking at mythos things too strange to understand produces their breakdowns. The first one, the dread of unimportance, holds some merit with me, and Lovecraft should be commended for introducing it. However, at this point, the myriad adaptations and reinterpretations of Lovecraft's ideas do a better job than the original of handling it, with less belabored prose.

However, it is the second, the panic of beholding something alien and different, that I find truly exasperating. Here, conceptually, I see a lot of Lovecraft's xenophobia. His narrators often panic and declare a thing to be horrifying and wrong, when information they are able to provide places it merely as foreign or difficult to explain. In fact, its often just as I become interested in the mythos that the protagonists become completely insane. I, like many of those engaged with the modern Lovecraft meme, feel the urge to study the mythos, to understand the lore or merely enjoy its strangeness. However Lovecraft's own protagonists, some of whom are anthropologists or scientists, do not.

In conclusion, looking back on Lovecraft's stories from the perspective of the Lovecraft meme, I find them unengaging. Lovecraft's best creations were his myths, and culture has loved them better than he did.