Title: Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales
Author: Kenneth Hite
Pub Date: 2008
Genre: Literary criticism
Nutshell: A Lovecraft scholar takes us through the writer's collection of stories
Obviously, there's a certain barrier to entry with this book. If you haven't already read Lovecraft's works, you're probably going to want to either before or as you're reading Ken Hite's book, because otherwise there's not much purpose to the exercise. This is a companion piece and not a standalone work.
However, if you, as I, are a Lovecraft nerd, or even just a Ken Hite fan, this is worth the 8 bucks you'll pay for it on Kindle (it is totally out of print). I came to Lovecraft in my 20s, after a thorough affair with Poe, and then discovered Hite through the completely excellent and yet manifestly silly H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast (hppodcraft.com: all the Lovecraft stuff in the history is free--it is now a subscription model with one free episode a month as they're going through stories mentioned in Lovecraft's essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature"). I also heard Hite speak last year at GenCon in Indianapolis, and the man clearly knows his stuff, and a lot of it.
Hite is the rare author that still makes me consult a dictionary every few pages. The Kindle format is great for that, since you can just long press on a word and off you go. For me to have to look up a word is pretty rare, but he definitely does not hold back on the vocab. He is an unabashed fan of Lovecraft, and while he and I do not always agree on what we like, there is enough here to be interesting ephemera to the original stories. Probably only for a true fan, though. You have to have already fallen into the wormhole. If you don't like Lovecraft and don't really care, then this isn't for you. Otherwise, this is an interesting and cheap and well-written companion piece from a guy who obviously knows quite a bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment