Some hallmarks of the horror genre.

There are some clear signals in Lovecraft of stylistic elements that would later become commonplace in the horror genre. It's a pity, to some extent, that we got so used to these that by now they've become cliches. Even kids would use them when telling horror stories at night. Both the beginning and the end of Dagon, the first story in this book, are clear examples of this:

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes my life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

(Lovecraft: p. 1)

Here is the end:

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

(Lovecraft: p. 6)

They may sound tired to our ears, but one should remember that Lovecraft pretty much invented these and many other stylistic tricks.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft almost single-handedly remade the genre in the early twentieth century. More than horror, his literature can be defined as weird, creating what came to be known as cosmic horror: the idea that life is incomprehensible and that the universe we live in is alien to us, in spite of all our efforts to understand it and control it. Lovecraft did away with a tradition of ghosts and witches, replacing them with fragile human characters at the mercy of chaotic and violent universal forces.

The stories included in this volume are extracted from several of Lovecraft's books: The Dunwich Horror and Others, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, and Miscellaneous Writings.

Technical description:
Title: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.
Author: H.P. Lovecraft.
Publisher: Penguin Books.
Edition: London (UK), 1999.
Pages: 420, including introduction and explanatory notes.
ISBN: 0-14-118706-9