Rohan15: Fellow GOGites, I have recently came to terms my shelf of books is rather....small.
I currently on it have most of Stephen Kink's work, some of the required readings for my classes, a Qu'ran, a Kink James Bible, two copies of The Inferno, The Communist Manifesto, and a few miscellaneous graphic novels and humor books. I need to widen my collection as you can see. I am in the process of obtaining:
A copy of the Satanic Bible
A copy of the Torah
The Andromeda Strain
HP Lovecraft works (Need suggestions)
I would love some recommendations. I mostly like horror and historical works, preferably books with extreme views in both the liberal and conservative viewpoints.
Thanks in advance :D
I can help with the horror, and offer a few suggestions with the historical.
If you're willing to spend the money, Library of America has
quite a handsome Lovecraft anthology out. If you don't want to put down $23 on a single book, then
this has a lot of good stuff in it. Some distinctly mediocre stuff too, but Lovecraft really was all over the place in terms of quality.
Of course, his stuff's in public domain, so if you either have a Kindle or are willing to read stuff on your computer with an e-reader, you can get his complete stories for a few dollars (you
could get them for free online; you'd be paying for convenience).
If you're into that sort of thing, I have further recommendations. One of the writers that Lovecraft greatly admired was Algernon Blackwood; if you've heard of him, it's probably for The Willows and The Wendigo, but he wrote other stuff, and if you like horror, you should add
this book to your collection.
You also should read Lord Dunsany; with Blackwood, one of Lovecraft's inspirations. In particular, you should read
The Gods of Pegana; it does have the disadvantage of being quite short, so even if you buy it for a cheap price, you might wonder if you're getting good value; but it's a good book, and it prefigures Lovecraft's mythos (unkind souls might go so far as to say that the idea of the sleeping god Azathoth is flat-out plagiarized from Dunsany's sleeping god Mana-Yood-Sushai. Kinder people will throw about words like "inspired" and "homage.")
There's other worthwhile authors from that time period, but this post is already pretty long, so let's skip forward; one of the writers who started out writing Lovecraft fanfiction (sorry, "pastiche") is Ramsey Campbell, and he's pretty great. The book you want is the short story collection
Alone With the Horrors So you might be getting the idea that I think horror begins and ends with Lovecraft, but I don't! I've just been focusing on related authors since he's the one you specifically asked about. To prove it, I'll give as my final recommendation
White and Other Tales of Ruin; I haven't read all of the stories, so buyer beware, but I remember being very impressed with White; a story about a group of people stranded together in a snowed-in manor house after some terrible but unspecified event caused (apparently) the end of the world as we know it. And then they start dying...
Actually, I'm going to bed now, so nonfiction recommendations will have to wait.
