Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales

I can kind of see why elements capture the imagination, and how elements of the mysticism have evolved lives of their own. I don't generally have an issue separating the art from the artist, and also allowing for era. Stuff like Django Unchained, that goes heavy on slurs, but for a clear reason also doesn't bother me.

But this was just hard to get past. Between a cat named "n***** man" that is referenced by name what feels like every sentence in one story, calling people mongrels and a variety of similar terms, how other races are portrayed, and some of the ideas and tone, it just permeates the work in a way that makes it impossible for me to separate the horror from the horrifying.

Individual stories are good. The atmospheric horror that the author builds and the final pay off is wonderful. But it is a task to read the whole book at a go. These stories were written in several magazines over the course of decades and these are meant to be read like that. Maybe one story every month or so. I tried to read the whole book at a go and it severely hampered the experience. But there is no denying that Lovecraft crafts great stories...

This is one of the books I'd rather not rate. Definitely a defining piece in its genre and an origin (together with other books by H.P. Lovecraft) of a new mythos. Most of the stories are written as a memoir or letters rarely including dialogues and such. Even though I understand the usage of such technique in this context it sometimes left me slightly unsatisfied. IMHO the best part of the stories is how the author creates the atmosphere of unknown, lurking evil and a ‘conspiracy theory', etc. My biggest issue lies also within the same spectrum. It just seems like almost all of these stories are a sort of result of social or mental issues of the depicted characters. Glowing lights are some misinterpreted reflections, so-called demons are deformed people suffering from diseases, seeing or hearing weird noises are a result of sleep deprivation and a constant believe in being followed by ‘the others'. How to interpret these things always lies on the side of the reader, so what we take from it and how interpret is our own thing, so that is not really a flaw. I did enjoy reading it a lot and would recommend to anyone who either enjoys the cthulhu mythos or just likes horror stories, especially those placed in the beginning of XX century.

H.P Lovecraft is a horror/sci-fi writer from the 1920's.
He is among one of the greatest writers in the 20th century, some of my other favourites are Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley.

I have read all the stories in the book, but i'm still reading the information about the Author, because it's really long..

So my favourite stories were:
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Cats of Ulthar
Herbert West-Reanimator
The Music of Erich Zann
The Hound
The Rats in the wall
The Unnamable
Pickman's Model
Call of Cthulhu
The Shunned House
The Dunwich Horror
The Dreams in the Witch-House
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The thing on the doorstep
The case of Charles Dexter Ward
To a Dreamer (Poem)

My Least favourite stories:
Dagon
The Lurking Fear
The Doom that came to Sarnath
The Nameless City
Under the Pyramids
In the Vault
The Outsider
The horror at Red Hook
The Colour out of space
Cool Air
The Silver Key
The Whisperer in the darkness
The Strange High House in the Mist
From Beyond
Through the gates of the Silver Key (With E.Hoffmann Price)
At the mountains of madness
The Shadow out of time
The Haunter of the dark
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath

I really liked all of these stories in particular, because they were entertaining, and creepy.
Most of the time, I read these stories really late at night, when it was quiet.
I couldn't sleep after reading some of these stories. Since H.P. Lovecraft had strange and vivid dreams, that's where he got the inspiration for his stories, but he was possibly mentally ill. He was an intelligent, quiet, shy introvert, some people may of thought of him as a father figure or teacher.
To be honest I much preferred the horror stories more than the sci-fi stories because they were to the point, and creepy.
The sci-fi stories were incredibly detailed, but to the point that it distracted you with laborious details, that I was confused by. If the stories were more about horrible things happening to the protagonist, than going into great detail about an ancient civilization that I've never heard or don't understand how to even pronoun their name, then I would have been happy to read them. However, because there was so much attention to every single detail, or what an ancient long since dead creature would look like, it took me a lot longer to read some of these stories. In the mountains of madness, would be a good example. Due to the attention to detail in the sci-fi stories, I found it incredibly boring to read some of these stories, and was glad once I reached the end of the story.
If you are like me and would like to read the horror stories first, then I recommend that you read the stories that I listed above. You will not be disappointed.
However if you are more of a sci-fi fan, then by all means, read the rest of the stories that I have mentioned as my least favourite above. I would recommend this to horror and sci-fi fans, although I personally didn't like all the stories, due to the attention to detail, it made reading some of the stories to read, very tiring. Some of the stories in my opinion, once I read them were not very memorable, I preferred reading some of the more obvious, creepy and disturbing stories.
This book, might not be for everyone however, since the author wrote these stories in the 19th century, so the language and vocabulary are unlike anything that I am used to, so I had to look up what certain words mean, because I didn't always understand what they meant, or how to pronounce them.
This book is perfect, if you have a lot of spare time, since it will take you months to read it all, this book is not for the faint of heart, some people might be disturbed by the subject matter of the stories.
The Cats of Ulthar is violent, the animals are harmed, so some people might be offended by this for example.
H.P. Lovecraft is considered a controversial person due to the name he gave his black cat, something he will forever be judged for, even though he lived in the 1920's a notoriously racist Era.