I kind of both love and hate this book.

It is very beautiful written, it is extremely poetic. It is so beautiful that I had to slowly consume this book over the span of two weeks because it filled me with such indescribable emotions that I simply needed time to consume. I'd sit here, rereading a phrase over and over.

It was beautiful. The first part of it. Then.. then it goes downhill. This felt like two stories meshed together, and the contrast between the two was so shocking it felt unreal. And here is the thing, if we ignore how beautiful this was written. Plotwise, it kind of sucks.

While I'm sure we've all had plenty of experience with self destructive behavior in our younger years. There are usually signs, a slow decline, odd behavior popping up. What the protagonist in this story does here however, is going from 0 to 100 in a flat second. And the way he shuts down is unforgivable to me. It makes the entire novel seem hollow and unrealistic: How can you love someone so fiercely, and still throw it away when nothing bad has happened between the two of you?

But then, maybe that's the point, the story is also written in a way where you could believe it is a real story from the authors younger years. And we all know, life doesn't make sense. We all know, logic doesn't always follow our choices and decisions. Not like how a storyteller tells and plans a story. The open ending also kind of helps support this, where the narrative changes to making it sound like a letter he's writing to her.

I still love this book.
I will still probably think about it for a long time.
But I still want to smack the choices in it.

This book almost made me cry multiple times.

I don't need all my stories to have a happy ending. But All The Lovers In The Night is an extremely depressive read. From beginning to end. Fuyuko Irie isn't happy, and from the sounds of it, she might never have felt the emotion happiness in her life.

And, even then, had this story taken place in her young 20s, I might even have been okay with it. She'd have time to.. heal? Maybe see a professional and try some antidepressants. But no, the book ends with her being 37. And I haven't pitied anyone more in my life, real or fictional.

I didn't even know I had it in me to feel this level of pity. I don't generally have any ideals I believe people need to conform to. Kids? Marriage? Good Job? none of that matters aslong as you can feel some joy in your life.

Fuyuko Irie doesn't feel joy, and from the sounds of it, she never will. And I don't get what the point of the story was, or even what the title is about considering the total lack of actual lovers in the story.

Generally my standards of quality is fairly low, I'm a big consumer of trashy flicks after all. Which has me rather conflicted about this one because I kind of love the scenario but the writing is.. bad. It felt very flat, and was rather stilted. Like it felt like a teenagers first foray into writing.

But I adored the scenario/world building enough that I kind of wish the author would rewrite it once they grow as a writer.

Having played the games, I obviously had to give this a spin. I found the art to be very cute but it felt a little.. cluttered. I wish it have been cleaner and given us more time to appreciate the charm of the individual characters instead of seeming to want to rush through something that is supposed to be very relaxing and slice of lifey.

That being said, the enjoyment I got out of this was because I was already familiar with the characters. I doubt someone new to the franchise would get as much out of it

Thanks Netgalley for this arc read!

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.