August 20 (today as I write this) is the birthday of H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). I’ve not had a chance to read anything by him, so I’m going to do something different. There have been two different collections claiming to representative of his best fiction. I’ll survey them here, discussing what stories each contain, where they overlap, and where they differ.

The first volume is The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. It was published by Del Rey in 1982 and has reprinted several times. Here’s a list of the contents:

“The Rats in the Walls”
“The Picture in the House”
“The Outsider”
“Pickman’s Model”
“In the Vault”
“The Silver Key”
“The Music of Erich Zann”
“The Call of Cthulhu”
“The Dunwich Horror”
“The Whisperer in Darkness”
“The Color Out of Space”
“The Haunter of the Dark”
“The Thing on the Doorstep”
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
“The Dreams in the Witch-House”
“The Shadow Out of Time”

Robert Bloch did the introduction. The copyright page says 1963 copyright by Arkham House, but I can find no book by t his title or with the same contents under a different title. The introduction by Bloch is copyright 1982.

This volume is probably the one most people reading this post would be familiar with.

The other volume, published in 2001 by the Science Fiction Book  and edited by SFBC editor Andrew Wheeler is Black Seas of Infinity. The subtitle, as you can see from the image, is The Best of H. P. Lovecraft. This collection has only had one printing.

In his introduction, Wheeler claims this is the largest single collection of Lovecraft’s work. I’m not sure that was true at the time. I have my doubts, but I’m too lazy to dig through the ISFDB to verify it one way or the other. I know it isn’t true now.

Wheeler talks about not including much from early in Lovecraft’s career. Instead he focused on what he calls “the major phase of Lovecraft’s career”. He intentionally didn’t include any of the stories written in Dunsany’s style.

Here are the contents:

“The Call of Cthulhu”
“Dagon”
“Winged Death”
“The Rats in the Walls”
“The Color Out of Space”
“The Outsider”
“The Shadow Out of Time”
“The Lurking Fear”
“Pickman’s Model”
“The Thing on the Doorstep”
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”
“The Festival”
“The Dreams in the Witch House”
“The Nameless City”
“The Mound”
“What the Moon Brings”
“In the Walls of Eryx”
“The Unnameable”
“At the Mountains of Madness”
“Appendix I: History of the Necronomicon”
“Appendix II: Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”
“Appendix III: Some Notes on a Nonentity”
Appendix IV: Chronology of the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft”

I’m not going to consider the appendices, just the fiction here. So how do these volumes compare?

Well, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap. If I’ve counted accurately, there are nine stories common to both volumes: “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Color Out of Space”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (one without the hyphen), “The Shadow Out of Time”, and “The Outsider”. It would be hard to argue that any of these stories doesn’t belong in a Lovecraft collection.

So in determining which is really the “best”, assuming such a thing is even possible considering best is a subjective thing, we have to look at the stories that appear in one collection but not the other. I’m not going to attempt that here. I’ve not read all of the stories that appear only once, although I’m partial to the Del Rey volume simply because it contains “The Whisperer in Darkness”, which is probably my favorite Lovecraft story. Throw in “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Music of Eric Zann”, and I think t he Del Rey volume is probably a bit stronger.

But that’s just me. Like I said, I’ve not read all the stories in either volume. The SFBC has more in it that I’ve not read than the Del Rey.

So I’ll throw the question out to the Lovecraft experts in the crowd. Which book do you think is most representative of the best of Lovecraft? And why? Please explain your reasoning.