HP Lovecraft essentials

[pondspider]

Before I became a regular listener to the Drabblecast my knowledge of the work of HP Lovecraft was pretty non-existent. I'd heard of Lovecraft and the name was often mentioned in other podcasts, e.g. Geeks' Guide to the Galaxy, but it had always been a genre I steered clear of in my reading habits which are more in the "hard SF" area.

Listening to recent and past DC episodes, I soon saw the need to know more about HPL and his work, particularly the significance of the fictional town of Innsmouth. Norm's excellent "Heartache Over Innsmouth" was the final trigger for this. I discovered "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and, being a lazy reader, sought an audio reading of it...

Found an excellent reading (it has a few very short re-takes that slipped through the editing) by Sean Puckett on the Voices In The Dark website. Sadly, VitD seem to have ceased production of new audio readings, but there is a good range of stuff there. The HPL section is well worth a look.

Although much (most?) of DC's output is unrelated to HPL, it would be handy to have something like a "H.P.Lovecraft Crash-Course" for newbs to his work, or a few links to such material.

[SpareInch]

I decided to look up Innsmouth too. I went to the Mike Bennett reading on Podiobooks.

A great reading, and despite, or perhaps because of, Mikes self confessed habit of reading every sentence several times before attempting the next one, I didn't notice any retakes slipped into the final production. It really is beautifully done.

As one would expect from Mr Bennett.

He also has readings of a couple of other HPL stories in his Collection of 11 Classic Short Stories.