Customer Reviews
Down in Dunwich where the old gods lie! - By: D. R. Silvester, 13 Jun 2007 
The Dark Worlds Of H P Lovecraft Volume 1 features The Dunwich Horror & The Call Of Cthulhu being read by American Wayne june.
Running Time is approximately 3.5 hours.
The Dunwich Horror is the longest story at 2:02:39 with The Call Of Cthulhu running at 1:27:41
June's voice is very deep & at it's best captures the imagination. Although at times he seems to over-emphasise certain intonations.
Both stories have decent pacing & pauses but the Dunwich Horror stands out as the better read story for me. Despite being one of my favourites, The Call of Cthulhu seems a bit flat & monotonein places hence 4 stars instead of five overall.
A major plus is that the stories are completely unabridged & retain their atmosphere of suspense because of beingin full.
A slight niggle, if you purchase the 3CD set as I did, there maybe say 18 tracks on disc 1 all separate. So after converting from WAV (CD format) to MP3 format, I then had to obtain software to join all the parts together. Otherwise I would have had breaks where tracks begin & end. In addition to this, the stories are split across CDs. Rather than having one story per CD, The Call Of Cthulhu begins at tracks 12-16 on CD2 onwards. So listening on CD is going to be slightly fiddly having to change CDs. I would recommend joining the files together for a better listening experience.
I would have liked a few sound effects and/or music thrownin to add to the atmosphere but there are none presentin this volume. Mr June does have a very expressive voice & does a very good job bringing these classics to life.
To fans of Lovecraft who do not already possess this I would say give it a shot for sure. Especially as the stories are read well & unabridged. Plus how often does one encounter Lovecraft's workin audiobook format?
To anyone who has not encountered Lovecraft's work before be mindful of these points:
The subject matter is classified as strange fiction & is about ancient 'evil gods' & races of 'elder beings', so the stories are not straight forward mainstream type horror.
The stories are not 'blood & guts' affairs, the horror is very subtle creating an instinctive sense of dis-ease & rely upon having a strong imagination.
Instead most of Lovecraft's work focuses upon a 'cosmic sense of horror'in depicting a universe that is fundamentally uncaring at best, & at worst hostile to humankind.
Most frequently there are no happy endings to Lovecraft stories, madness & death are the usual botton lines. Stories usually endly badly!
H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) possessed an awe inspiring command of the English language, some of his sentences are long & quite complex....
These stories are now classified as modern literature, so they are now & again densein language & utilise grammatical structures that are somewhat antiquated. (Though for me this adds to the suspense & general atmosphere)
The bottom line: Lovecraft fans will most likely go for these stories big time. Those with an active imagination looking for something subtle, suspensful & unconventionalin the horror genre may well be taken with these stories.
To anyone who likes this volume, I cannot recommend highly enough obtaining Dark Adventure Radio Theatre's At The Mountains Of Madness. If not available via Amazon can be purchaed from City In The Sea or The H P Lovecraft Historical Society.
Update: I would strongly recommend obtaining the Audiorealms releases (The Dark Worlds Of H.P Lovecraft Series) from Amazon only. In my experience Amazon has a strong commitment to customer service, whereas I have ordered Volume 5 of this collection direct from the Audiorealms website, have not received it after 3 months of waiting, & they will not answer any number of emails.
