SOURCE: “Sabbat-Night Reading.” Punch 220, no. 5755 (28 February 1951): 285.

In the following review of The Haunter of the Dark, the critic praises Lovecraft for his likeliness to Edgar Allan Poe, but derides him for a lack of prudence and an overuse of lurid adjectives.

The Haunter of the Dark is not a book to explore alone in a benighted cottage; at high noon on top of a bus in Oxford Street it would be sufficiently disturbing. H. P. Lovecraft was an American who died before the war, when his remarkable gift for the eerie was not yet widely known; this collection of his uncomfortable ghoulish short stories is the first to be published here. At his best, as in “The Outsider” and “The Thing on the Doorstep,” his power to give overwhelming conviction to the wildly abnormal brings him close to Poe. His lesser pieces lack economy and suffer from an...