Letters to Lovecraft: Eighteen Whispers to the Darkness

Letters To Lovecraft is a collection of short stories created in the style of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic tales of eldritch horror. Each story is a response to, or reflection on, a passage each author selected from Lovecraft’s essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” Jesse Bullington provides a lengthy introduction to explain the premise and each work, and then the authors’ stories are presented. While Letters to Lovecraft may be interesting to academic readers and writers, it misses several essential emotional characteristics that made Lovecraft’s original works so original and enduring. The unknown, as several of the passages selected from Lovecraft’s essay indicate, is part of what makes a horror story horrifying; unfortunately, the introduction to this collection provides so much detail and analysis on each short story as to render them quite known. Worse still, the introduction, which provides a very necessary explanation of the format of the book altogether, is, therefore, not easily skipped; readers will likely spoil the stories as they prepare to read them. The writing of the short stories themselves ranges from poor to better-than-average, but the writing is, unfortunately, also often pedantic; both features, again, mar the collection both in comparison to Lovecraft’s originals and in comparison with the quotes selected as introductions to each story.

Letters To Lovecraft is more suited to those who prefer to study Lovecraft than for those who prefer to read his work and work like it. Most readers will be better off staying away.