Genre : Horror
Authors : HP Lovecraft, ST Joshi
The annotation was done by S.T. Josh and has several useful functions. First, it explains what the hell Lovecraft is talking about. His stories are peppered with words like "cyclopean" and "pithecanthropoid" which the everyday person doesn’t use in conversation. This helped me understand his stories better "pithecanthropoid" means the missing link between men and apes.
The second function of the footnotes is cross referencing his books. This means that S.T. Josh gives us information like "the town of Arkham moved around a lot" all the way from Massachusetts, to Connecticut, wow. Useful for a Lovecraft junkie, but not an ordinary person.
The third way the footnotes are used is referencing Lovecrafts characters with other authors. This gives us quotes like "The demon god Hathor was actually a creation by Arthur Machen." Once again an ordinary person doesn’t need to know these things.
About the stories themselves. Lovecraft wrote weird gothic fiction. Nobody in their right mind believes this stuff. But you don’t read these stories to believe them, its some sort of escapist fantasy that Lovecraft has created for people who want to read about insanity and mass death. (did I mention this isn’t for normal people?). The really strange thing (besides tentacled gods hiding from purple gas in the far reaches of the universe) is that for all their talk of mass killings and world domination...NONE OF IT EVER HAPPENS! So we wait the whole story for some star spawn to destroy everything and in the end someone runs it over with a boat and it dies. Yeah, okay. So the message we get is "huge beings from beyond the stars that are of immense power and can be killed easily will take over the world unless we blow on them first."