H.P. Lovecraft: Short Story Review.

My group and I have chosen to read The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Blood Curdling Tales Of Horror And The Macabre. We decided to read this book because we were told that H.P. Lovcraft is an essential author to study in order to fully understand the horror genre. Howard Phillips Lovecraft writes short horror stories, so our entire book is a collection of his best tales. To start off, my group members and I decided on three short stories to read and discuss. These stories are "The Rats in the Walls", "The Outsider" and "The Music Of Erich Zann". When I began the first story, I thought his language was difficult to grasp. He uses vocabulary in which I do not understand and I found myself reading and rereading paragraphs, looking up the definitions of words and going back to the beginning of the story in order to understand what was going on. Despite all of my confusion though, the dark, eery feeling I got from each story was unmistakeable and evident. Every image in my mind was frightening and similar to what I would see in a horror film. As I continued with the other two stories, his language became easier to understand and his stories were more intriguing to me. I am still not fully comfortable or at ease with his style of writing but I hope it continues to get better. The only other book I have read similar to this is And Then There Were None By Agatha Christie. That novel was frightening, but the imagery was nothing compared to Lovecrafts tales.