![]() This is one of the unreadable Lovecraft stories, in my opinion. ![]() I got about a third of the way through the walls of text Lovecraft threw up at me, and I simply didn't have the heart to go on. Instead you see a writer working and reworking ideas and themes (including characters and character names) until the truly classic stories evolve. ![]() Also, seeing the Cthulhu Mythos as an intentionally consistent and coherent whole was probably not foremost in Lovecraft's mind either. A lot of this has been tacked on by later reviewers and analyzers, August Derleth being probably the worst offender. At the same time I think way too much is made of Lovecraft's conception of his dream-cycle works as a connected whole at all. One thing you can see in this collection is a working out of themes and ideas that he used again and again in his dream-cycle stories. Writers like Dunsany and Eddison and Machen did this sort of thing much better than Lovecraft. ![]() I admittedly am not a big fan of Lovecraft's "prose poem" dream-cycle stuff, preferring his horror and scifi stuff (yes, The Whisperer in Darkness is a scifi story, not a horror story). Even so, Kadath itself meanders all over the place and parts of it vary greatly in quality. Of the "stories" in this book I would only call The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath a classic. ![]()
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