Collection: The Dark Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft [Vol. 1-6]

The Dark Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft [Vol. 1-6]
Audio Realms | 2005-2007 | MP3 Audio | 24 hrs 52 mins | 1.02 Gb

The Dark Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft is a six volume set of audio books released by AudioRealms, a firstrate audiobook publishing company. Wayne June does an amazing job and is perfect for the role. His deep raspy voice helps to emerge the listener in the world of cosmic horror that Lovecraft so often focused on. For those who are unfamiliar with Lovecraft, these would be a good starting point, as well as a must-have for Lovecraftian fans.

The Call of Cthulhu
This is the big one, the story that started it all! In “The Call of Cthulhu” the narrator, executor to a rather bizarre and eclectic estate, pieces together the terrible truth contained within the information he possesses. Contains both his supernatural detective, Inspector Legrasse, and possibly his most famous first line: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

The Dunwich Horror
In Dunwich, Massachusetts, an out-of-the-way backwoods village, live Wilbur Whateley, the son of a deformed albino mother and an unknown father, and his sorcerer grandfather. The two are up to something, searching for occult books, performing dark rituals and constantly making modifications to their home to accommodate an unseen presence–one many think may have something to do to all those cattle that keep mysteriously disappearing. This is it–the father of all dimensional doorway stories, containing Lovecraft’s famous Miskatonic University, the town of Arkham and the dark magical volume, the dreaded Necronomicon.

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The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Once a normal sea town, now Innsmouth is home to a strange hybrid race–half-human, half-fish. Worshipers of Dagon, the townsfolk are preparing to welcome their god to Earth, at least that’s the conclusion of a secret government investigation. One of the finest stories by H.P. Lovecraft, recognized the world over as one of the greatest horror stories ever written, this is the tale of a lonely piece of New England real estate where things have taken a terrible turn.

Dagon
An American Naval officer adrift in a lifeboat comes upon an unnamed black, murky island, upon which he discovers a centuries old monolith. He finds much more as well, horrible things that will haunt him all of his days.

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The Horror at Red Hook
In New York City, a terrible hunger stalks the streets of Brooklyn, stealing children, and working toward a mysterious goal too horrible to contemplate. Is the once highly respected Robert Suydam the power behind the madness, or merely another one of its victims. Only Thomas Malone, Lovecraft’s poet detective can unearth the truth and possibly save the great metropolis before its doom is sealed!

The Outsider
A highly emotional piece, this H.P. Lovecraft classic concerns a mysterious individual who awakens to find himself completely alone in a vast but incredibly ancient castle, one from which he never seems to have ventured. The story tells of his determination to free himself from his prison, to scale the highest tower of the castle, and of the hideous truth he discovers when he does so.

The Statement of Randolph Carter
An effective and moody tale, “The Statement of Randolph Carter” is told in the form of testimony given to the police. It’s a tale of attempted communication with the beyond gone horribly wrong. It also marks the first appearance of Carter and is part of Lovecraft’s remarkable Dream Cycle as well.

Herbert West: Reanimator
The most popular of all Lovecraft’s creations, Herbert West is a medical man obsessed with the notion of defeating death. In six short stories, he tells the story of West discovery of a reanimation formula, and of the terrible havoc he causes with it.

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Rats in the Walls
After its complete restoration, the narrator of this tale moves into his ancestral family home. Soon afterward, however, he begins to hear noises in the walls. Suspecting rats, he sets out traps but finds these vermin are not the kind so easily dispatched. One of the all-time creepiest of Lovecraft’s tales.

The Shunned House
In the city of Providence stands an antique home of which everyone whispers. Never called “haunted” exactly, it is known as a place “unlucky,” one in which people have supposedly died in alarmingly great numbers. This is what Lovecraft’s narrator tells us, just before he and his uncle begin a series of investigations into the old place, a place with a terrible odor, one that is stronger in the basement than any place else.

The Music of Erich Zann
In the city of Lights, an impoverished student hears incredible music coming from peaked garret overhead. He knows little of the violin, but is certain from the fantastic pieces he hears night after night that he is in the presence of a highly original genius. But, it isn’t long before he finds himself wondering, why does Zann only play at night? And why every night?

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In the fifth volume of The Dark Worlds of H. P. Lovecraft, listeners are brought ever deeper into the Lovecraft universe with three more frightening tales. All three stories are excellent.

Haunter of the Dark tells the story of Robert Blake, a horror writer/artist who becomes obsessed over a far off, decrepit church spire spied from his rented studio window. Blake’s investigation reveals the place to be an abandoned, ruined church once used by a dark cult, and now inhabited by something far, far worse.

The best of the three tales is probably The Thing on the Doorstep, which features full-blown Lovecraftian goodness. The tale is set in the famous, fictional town of Arkham, and involves Arkham University, the Necronomicon and other assorted monstrous tomes, a strange intermingled race of men and fish-like deep ones, mind control, a descent into an unholy pit “where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate,” and much, much more.

The Lurking Fear is the most straightforward horror tale of the three and explores one of Lovecraft’s recurrent themes, that of cursed blood and hereditary corruption. Here an investigator of the supernatural looks into a strange massacre in the mountainous Catskills region of New York, where a deserted mansion holds the key to an unspoken horror living beneath the earth. The terrors he uncovers leave him a gibbering wreck at stories’ end, a common fate for Lovecraft’s narrators.

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This volume includes At the Mountains of Madness.

A party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Professor William Dyer, discover fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains in Antarctica.

At the Mountains of Madness was originally written in 1931 by H. P. Lovecraft who is considered by some to be the inventor of modern horror. Many believe that in this novella lay the roots of the Cthulhu Mythos.

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Bonus: Weird Tales – The Strange Life Of H P Lovecraft
BBC Documentary Broadcast | December 3rd 2006 | MP3@256 kbps | 44 mins | 82.16 Mb

Stephen King has hailed the writer HP Lovecraft as the most important exponent of weird fiction since Edgar Allan Poe. Although Lovecraft never had a book published commercially in his lifetime, his stories did feature in lurid magazines devoted to fantastic fiction that were printed in the United States in the 1020s and 30s, such as 'Weird Tales' of this biography's title. Geoff Ward, professor of literature at Dundee University and presenter of this programme, argues a strong case for Lovecraft as a writer who brought something very different to the horror genre, both in his stylised writing and his desire to leave the reader in a dark place from scary start to frightening finish. Other contemporary fantasy writers, like Neil Garmain, back Ward up, with exquisite examples of how deliberately peculiar the author's choice of adjectives was - 'gibbous' being a particular favourite for a nearly full moon. But the most fascinating insights into his work come from the realisation that it was the horrors in Lovecraft's home life and a hellish upbringing that helped shape his fiction.

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