H.P. Lovecraft

My group chose to read a few short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. We focused on three stories, "The Rats in the Walls", "The Outsider", and "The Music of Erich Zann". The language Lovecraft uses was difficult for me to grasp at first. His sentences are pretty wordy which forced me to re-read them over a few times in order to understand what was going on. Once I got used to his writing style, the stories became easier to read.

My favorite of the three is "The Music of Erich Zann". It is about a man who moves into a new building in an unfamiliar part of town and hears one of his neighbors playing the viol late at night. He later finds out that the man was possessed and that that was the reason for him playing music. The imagery in this one really stood out to me. For example, when the narrator first meets Erich Zann, he describes him like this: "He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head;"

None of the stories were as creepy as I thought they would be, which is disappointing. I would have liked them better had there been more suspense. H.P. Lovecraft was a good introduction into this genre, but we are moving on to The Shining, which we will hopefully find more interesting to read.