Over on the DMR blog Deuce Richardson just popped up a review of John D. Haefele’s most recent book (and presumed magnum opus) Lovecraft: The Great Tales.
He wrestles with the complexities, and I suppose my fave pull quote would be “Haefele wasn’t looking to get to first base with this Cyclopean tome. He swung for the Lovecraftian fences.”
One of the Amazon reviews for the book by Tom Krabacher also grapples with the scope and scale of the study, but my personal favorite lines come from another Amazon bit from Jeffrey Scott Sims, where he notes: “A pleasure to read, its great length just flies by. I didn’t want it to end.”
And as a footnote to the Deuce review — keeping in mind that any single review couldn’t possibly cover every nuance of the text — the noted book and pulp collector Kevin Cook just mentioned to me that “Deuce missed what I consider the seismic revolution in Lovecraft studies, with HPL changing his whole style of writing after reading The King in Yellow — after Joshi has proclaimed for years that Chambers had ‘little’ effect on HPL.”
Yeah, one angle and another and another in those 700-plus pages. Who knows what specific insight will most resonate with any given reader?
