The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

What is amazing about THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD is that what we have of it is a rough draft that was never polished or readied for publication. The history of its discovery is wonderful. One half of the MS was discovered among Lovecraft's papers, and eventually the second half was discovered. It's first publication (abridged) was in WEIRD TALES. The text we have in this convenient mass market edition is corrupt due to poor editing on the part of August Derleth. (The best paperback edition of the novel may be found in the Penguin Classics edition, THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP AND OTHER WEIRD STORIES, in which the corrected text is graced with 170 [!!!] annotations in the notes at the back of the book. That edition is available here at Amazon.)Lovecraft has been criticized as unable to create character -- but that is pure nonsense. Each character in this novel is superbly portrayed, distinct and fascinating. We learn exactly what we need to know about each character for the novel to move toward its macabre climax. The character of Joseph Curwen is stunning, and the legend of his life before his neoteric resurrection is haunting and hypnotic. The tragedy of Charles Ward's fate, though subtly expressed, is deeply felt, as is the effect of his alteration on his unhappy parents.The supernatural has never been dealt with in such an interesting and unique way. The suggestions concerning Yog-Sothoth and the properties with which this daemon are composed are tantalizing indeed. Most of all, the portrait of Lovecraft's beloved city of Providence is poignant and heartfelt. This is a classic of supernatural fiction, and this small book, although not the corrected text, is a handy edition to carry around in one's pocket. Michael Whelan's cover art for this series has long been a favourite of mine. High recommended!

Poor printing quality..It is like reading a newspaper. I miss the old-days publishers.If the book doesn't appeal you, the reading experience is quite poor.

I give two stars for this overlong story and lose three for - I'm sorry to the performer - an awful reading. The narrator adopts a singsong voice that stresses the wrong words and thus totally misses what's going on in the story. This makes it a very hard disc to follow and unusually for the HPL stories I found my mind wandering rather than being drawn in. I apologise to the narrator for a bad review but it is wholly the reason this release got 2 stars. The same narrator reads the Shunned House from the same company.

I was excited to get this until I flipped through it and found not a single annotation.What passes for "annotated" here is a brief biography of H.P. Lovecraft at the very end of the story. Hardly insightful and presumably the "annotations" in the other Lovecraft stories by this publisher are similarly thin.

NOT SEALED, NOT NEW, USED WITH SCOTCH TAPE FOR SEAL BAD NEWS.