I've read Lovecraft's ten short stories. Let's discuss them.

Long story short: I was disappointed. But there's an asterisk at the end of that sentence.

The thing is, my expectations were very high for this one. My introduction to Lovecraft was promising. I had so many moments when I discovered something I loved was inspired by Lovecraft. I saw essays about his writing style and thought it deeply resonated with me. I tried to skim over some of his prose, but I clearly lacked fluency at that time. I didn't understand much, and what I thought I understood didn't quite click. Cautiously, I put it off for later times in order not to spoil my impression. Later, I read some of his poetry, and it was breathtaking. "Nemesis" was so sublime I learned it by heart. I could recite it in bed to amuse and mesmerize myself in times of insomnia. Then I memorized "Astrophobos," too.

A few years ago, I started to trudge slowly through English fiction. It was inevitable that I would study Lovecraft more closely and carefully at some point. And so recently I bought a book. And then I read a story, and it went like this:

Tom and Jerry uncovered an ancient crypt. Tom went down to explore. Jerry felt a foul stench emanating from the crypt. "Seal the crypt and run!" said Tom over the wired telephone. "What's there?" asked Jerry. "I can't explain! It's too horrible! Just run!" answered Tom. "What on earth is there, Tom?" demanded Jerry. Then, silence. Then, an inhuman voice: "Fool. Tom is DEAD!" Jerry went mad.

Yep, that was the story. It was so bad. Who but a ten-year-old kid experimenting with horror would write anything like it?

Alright, I cherry-picked the worst story among the ten from the book (The Statement of Randolph Carter). Still, most other stories followed its formula: people encountered something inexplicable, destructive, horrible, and *stinky* and then ran, fainted, and lost their sanity. I couldn't take anything from those stories. I didn't believe them. I didn't feel the fear or the awe of the characters acting so frantically; I just suspected they were feeble-minded. My least unfavorite story was The Dunwich Horror. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it was the longest one. You just can't stretch the same primitive formula along the fifty-some pages. And so the characters there were forced to experience, study, and face the horrors.

After reading a few of the stories, I was a complete doubter. However, this slowly and unexpectedly changed by the time I finished the last one. I transitioned from being a 100% doubter to becoming about a 25% believer. I was starting to have this wholesome feeling that the ancient horrors occupied a little corner of my heart.

So here are my closing thoughts. Lovecraft was a worldbuilder. He loved to cross-reference his works. His plots and characters may have been terrible, but he undoubtedly had a rich, imaginative, and sick, in a good sense, mind. And for such a worldbuilder, short stories are a bad medium (less so if you convince the reader to read tons of them). This is the case when quality comes from quantity. Like a child or an LLM learning the fine art of a language from the sheer copious exposure, you too may become a connoisseur of Lovecraftian dreamlands and cosmic horrors, and find joy in it. Well, that's the theory.

As for me, I won't touch another Lovecraft story for a while. Later, I may want to read some of his longest works.

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I don't plan on turning this place into a book review site quite yet, though I can imagine a future where I will run out of other things to say.