The White People

This was OK, not great. For all that I'm a Lovecraft fan, some of his favorite stories fall a bit flat for me. This, “The Willows,” “Count Magnus” - they all strike me as inferior to other works by their authors.I'd say the biggest chill here comes from the “found footage” feel - the bulk of the story is a diary clearly never meant to be read by anyone but its author. The fact that the author was a young girl, and she recounts increasingly disturbing** details of her nanny's tutelage, give this a feeling of building dread.But it failed to make a full emotional impact on me, and the framing tale is off-putting in its droning pace and pedantic tone. So this is a “glad I read it, but it didn't really work for me” story.For those interested, I found Blackwood's “The Wendigo” to be a better iteration on “The Willows”;M.R. James's “Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book,” “Lost Hearts,” and “The Mezzotint” are all better than Magnus, and that's just picking the first three that appear in his catalog;As for Machen, “The Great God Pan” is the classic, in my opinion.But don't get me wrong, HPL also introduced me to some amazing stories like [b:The Were-Wolf 6519002 The Were-Wolf Clemence Housman https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328319128s/6519002.jpg 6710866], [b:The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories 129798 The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories Robert W. Chambers https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1416873291s/129798.jpg 954927], Crawford's “The Upper Berth” and “The Dead Smile,” and many others.**Knowing that Machen was a Christian who basically believed in withcraft/pixies/The Good Folk lends understanding here. For him, reading a little girl's secret diary about her initiation into pagan magic would probably be as horrifying as a diary recounting pedophilia would be to us.