The Five Lovecraft Stories You Should Read

...If you're only going to read five H.P. Lovecraft stories.

Actually, a more accurate name for this article would be "Lovecraft Reading List For Busy People."

If you're only going to read one story by H.P. Lovecraft, read "The Call of Cthulhu." It's the one most people know, if only vaguely, and it's a good starting point.

If you're only going to read three stories by H.P. Lovecraft, read "Pickman's Model," "At the Mountains of Madness," and "The Dunwich Horror." Yes, I left out TCoC, I'll explain why in a moment.

If you're only going to read five stories by H.P. Lovecraft, read the four listed above and "The Colour Out of Space." I'll explain this in a second, too.

Now, as for my reasoning: H.P. Lovecraft's works usually involved a universe that was either indifferent to humanity or very actively hostile to it. To this end, his works had three major undercurrents that ran through them: Human degeneration, alien forces far superior to humanity, and supernatural horror.

"Pickman's Model" is a story about "ghouls," humans who have essentially by choice decided to spurn the modern lifestyle, living naked underground and hunting normal human beings. They are known to abduct children and replace them with their own, and to swarm over the scenes of accidents, devouring the victims. Lovecraft wrote a number of tales about human degeneracy, and this one is the best for several reasons, including a lack of racist content (actually, racism was probably why Lovecraft was so obsessed with human degeneracy) and the believability factor ("The Rats In the Walls," a much better known story with similar themes, faces extreme biological improbability at the least).

"At the Mountains of Madness" features the Elder Things, also known (like about fifteen other mysterious groups in Lovecraft's works) as the Old Ones. They are utterly alien beings, lacking even our bilateral symmetry, and were masters of Earth for some hundreds of millions of years. They created life on Earth as a food source (symbolism much?) and also created the Shoggoths, uberamoebas of mass destruction. Ultimately, even the Elder Things' civilization fell, because even they were "men." (This also shows a peculiar paradox in Lovecraft's works. He was very overtly racist at times, even describing black people as abominations created in the image of man, but at other times he had bizarrely non-racist sentiments. In a later part of "Madness's" narrative, he described the Elder Things as "still men," mostly contrasting them against the monstrous shoggoths, but still casting them in an ultimately positive light, as if they were the equal of humanity in "niceness" type terms-and this when they are nine-foot tall starfish/sea cucumber relatives.)

"The Dunwich Horror" demonstrates H.P. Lovecraft's works at their most supernatural. A lot of his weird beings could easily be explained as simply existing by strange or physics, but this story doesn't skirt around the magic. Wilbur Whateley and his twin are conceived by a spell, his twin is invisible and amorphous, and the day is saved by an occult researcher and his helpers using a magic spell to banish the evil back to the ether from whence it came. (There is a very blatant and obviously deliberate parallel between Wilbur Whateley and his twin and Jesus Christ, as well.)

The other reason I think these are the best choices for a three readings only regimen is because these stories have aged fairly well. The science that exists in the first two is not horribly dated or inaccurate, as much of Lovecraft's efforts at science are, and the problem of the third is solved by the fact that there's no science involved.

"The Colour Out of Space" is number five on this list because it was Lovecraft's personal favorite out of all his works in terms of literary accomplishment, most achieving his desire of a story about an encounter with a vague, mysterious entity. I put it later than the preceding three because its science is worse than wonky, which dates the story rather badly. (For a much better story by a different author with the same central theme, one that Lovecraft rated multiple times as the best horror story in the English language [and which also is one of my own favorite horror stories for various reasons], read "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood. "The Willows" practically could have taken place a couple of weeks ago [I may be exaggerating, but not by much] because of how well it's aged, and it was written in 1907, a decade before the main body of Lovecraft's work.)

Finally, as "honorable mentions," I recommend reading "Herbert West--Reanimator" and "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath." "Herbert West" is interesting because it has a strong relationship with one of modern horror's tired workhorses, the zombie (and many will probably find it a refreshing change from the modern zombie plague narrative), and TDQoUK is a fascinating (if ponderously long by Lovecraft's standards) exercise in worldbuilding.