Note: this has been extended indefinitely after a much worse injury left me temporarily barely able to use my hands. I’m still recovering as of October 2011.

Earlier in June, I suffered a painful injury to both hands from an extended and ill-advised bout of crocheting. After treating it and taking breaks as I finished my queue of orders, it’s gotten a good deal better and I’m not currently worried about having to give up crocheting altogether. However, I’ve decided that my hands need a proper break so that they can continue to recover.

So through July and into early August, I won’t be doing any crocheting. This means that I won’t be able to take orders until mid-August. I plan to photograph some of the Cthulhus I have around the place and put them up for sale in my Etsy store, so there will still be some Cthulhus available. I will be taking custom orders again in mid-August, unless I announce otherwise in the meantime. If you’d like to be on a list of people to be notified when I’m taking orders again, email me.

This is just the announcement post so people know what’s up. For how I feel & what I’m planning to do in the meantime, check out my other blog.

Even before I released the Lovecraft eBook, people have asked me where they should start with Lovecraft or what his best stories were. As with any fiction, this is my entirely subjective take. I added my thoughts but tried not to give things away.

As always, I recommend reading these along with the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast if you want company (and for the ones not on this list, the podcast really helps get through them and even see fun things in them). There are a number of good recordings available at the Lovecraft eZine and some on Librivox. I’ve also linked to three below which I especially recommend.

Best of Shorter Fiction

These are, perhaps, the best to start with. They’re not too long (some more than others), if you don’t like one you can drop it and move on to another. They’re in a variety of styles and have varying tones. Together, they encapsulate everything about Lovecraft’s universe except his dream stories. I don’t especially like the dream stories, but you can find a list on Wikipedia and attempt them.

Pickman’s Model

A great introduction to the world of Lovecraft. Short but manages to encapsulate cosmic horror in an ordinary city.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

One of the best.

The Rats in the Walls

Fantastic imagery and a classic Lovecraftian protagonist. Definitely Poe-inspired. Racist cringe factor with the cat’s name.

The Colour Out of Space

An excellent instance of cosmic horror. A meteor arrives and what it contains wreaks havoc on a small area.

The Call of Cthulhu

Great story. Not as readable as some because it’s a tale within a tale within a tale. There are newspaper clippings and journal entries and interviews. Nonetheless, this is one of the classics. And, of course, it’s where one meets Cthulhu and the only story in which Cthulhu is really a character—though he’s mentioned elsewhere.

The Whisperer in Darkness

I find this one of the eeriest of Lovecraft’s stories.

The Haunter of the Dark

More amazing imagery. I recommend the H.P. Podcraft audio version.

The Dunwich Horror

Best instance of heroic librarian.

The Thing on the Doorstep

Must be read after “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” or it loses background material.

Herbert West — Reanimator

This story was commissioned for a magazine and has a slightly different feel from his others. But I really enjoyed reading it.

Best of Long Stories

Lovecraft didn’t write much that was novel or novella length, these are the best of those stories.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

Fairly classic Lovecraftian story but with much more material. Proves he actually could write a novel. I enjoyed the Cthulhu podcast reading which can be bought here or downloaded episode-by-episode from the same site.

The Shadow out of Time

Somewhere between a short story and novella. I don’t recommend reading this one until you’ve read quite a few of his others, but I really enjoyed it.

At the Mountains of Madness

Actually, I didn’t especially enjoy this one and I’ve read it several times trying to like it more. But so many other people seem to love it that I’ll recommend it as something you might like as well. I recommend reading after you’ve read most of the shorter ones, not up front.

Vignettes

Lovecraft was good at writing short works which are as much about capturing the feel of a place or idea as telling a proper story. None of these really have plot or conclusions, but they’re all excellent.

The Picture in the House

One of Lovecraft’s most human-centric stories. No cosmic horror, this has the plain down-home variety and very creepy. I recommend the H.P. Podcraft’s recording of it.

The Music of Erich Zann

Trivia, the “viol” Zann plays is actually a cello, both are short for violoncello. Lovecraft made this clear in correspondence.

The Outsider

This vignette has a distinct Poe feel to it but is beautifully executed for what it is. I think it’s possible that I may have read it in high school without knowing it was Lovecraft, but can’t be sure. I read a lot of Poe & some other horror short stories.

Also Worth Reading

While not two of his best, these two are definitely worth reading if you enjoy many of the others.

The Nameless City

Beautiful desert imagery. Indiana Jones meets Lovecraft.

The Lurking Fear

Some don’t like this because they see it (rightly) as a reflection of his general xenophobia (Lovecraft seems to have feared people of all other races and a fair percentage of white people, too), but it’s also a good, scary story.

What I left out

What I left out, I left out based on my own tastes. “The Temple,” “Cool Air,” “The Dreams in the Witch House,” and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” are all short stories that you might enjoy if you discover you like Lovecraft. I enjoy them reasonably well, but I don’t think they’re good enough to put in the list above.

“The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” is one which I wouldn’t recommend to someone starting Lovecraft. If you try the rest & like them, then consider reading it or listening to it on the Cthulhu Podcast (which is the only way I made it through, though I enjoyed listening).

I really really don’t recommend “The Street,” which is so racist that it makes me yell at Lovecraft. And “Old Bugs” is about the evils of alcohol, not about giant old bugs (I was disappointed). “The Horror at Red Hook” has a lot of racist elements to it, but is a fairly successful horror story.

Of course, your take on this may be entirely different. If you have any other recommendations for people just starting Lovecraft, please leave them in the comments!

Update: It seems to be down. I don’t quite trust this, since the person took it down before. But the additional exposure today, more reviews & votes (an especial thank you to Wil Wheaton for bringing attention to this), may have convinced him/her that it’s a lost cause. I’ll be keeping a close eye out & still pursuing refunds for the buyers.

Also, I have added the real version to the Kindle store, but Amazon would not let me set it as a free book so I had to put it at the minimum price of $0.99 (of which I’d see $0.35). I included a note in the description that it’s still available for free here, but now one can get it with the convenience of Whispernet. (Based on the process, I don’t believe Amazon accepts free books from individuals, only from publishing companies/their own team.)

For the TL;DR crowd, a summary, because this is going to get long:

On March 1, 2011, I released a free eBook of the complete works of Lovecraft in EPUB and MOBI formats. On March 21, 2011, someone uploaded a copy of the MOBI file (with a different cover and missing the intro) started selling it on Amazon. I didn’t discover this until June 18th, 2011, by which time it had achieved a 5-star rating and a good sales rank. I am very disappointed and wish to a) outline proofs to back up my assertion that this is the eBook I created and b) clarify a few points regarding the eBook’s distribution (and c) talk about my feelings on the subject).

That’s the setup. After you’ve read this and seen my supporting evidence, I hope you’ll go over to Amazon and up-vote the negative reviews which people have already left for the book. There are plenty, so we probably don’t need more. I’m taking formal steps to have it taken down, but in the meantime those reviews may help others find the original eBook and keep them from being defrauded. The more up-votes, the better.

My goal in all of this is not to make money off of the eBook and despite my disappointment I will not be taking it down as a free download on my site (because it turns out we can have nice things). My only goal is to stop someone else from making money off of the countless hours I put into creating it. It’s an odd kind of reverse-piracy, like taking a free MP3 album an artist has uploaded to their website and selling it as one’s own.

Supporting Evidence

I wouldn’t make these accusations like this without supporting evidence. I spent an hour before going to Twitter doing some careful research. At first, I was incredulous. I didn’t want to believe that someone could have so little conscience, but I suppose there are already many far worse examples of the conscienceless.

Before the proofs, here’s a screen-grab I took of the listing as it appeared on June 18th, 2011 at 11:32pm EDT. Be warned, it’s an 88MB image file. Various images linked or included below are taken from this screen-grab. A fuller image of the GoodReads entry I reference can be seen here.

Proof 1) The Table of Contents

This is what clued me in. The table of contents looked exactly like mine. I compared the two side-by-side (as illustrated in this PDF, done by direct copy-paste of both sets, which you can double-check using this image of the Amazon listing TOC and my table of contents if you like). They are exactly the same stories in exactly the same order, even within the years. Even the layout is exactly the same, with the year in parentheses after the story’s name. The styling looks slightly different on my site because I use CSS that makes a circle appear next to each entry and Amazon doesn’t. The Amazon TOC actually uses the ‹br› tag which I used in the code of the eBook itself.

Might someone else have come up with that ordering? It’s chronological, after all. And it might even make sense to put in the year in parentheses.

Perhaps, but unlikely. I have a little confession. I left out two stories from this otherwise-complete works. They’re called “Sweet Ermengarde” and “The Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson.” Neither is “weird fiction,” both are spoofs of other genres/styles. I decided that they really didn’t fit and weren’t what people were looking for in a complete works, so I left them out.

Might not the other person have left them out too?

They might’ve, but then it would be very strange for this other person to include “Old Bugs,” which I did. “Old Bugs” is a story about the evils of alcohol. It’s not “weird” by a long shot and I really have no idea why I left it in when I left out the other two. It’s an editorial decision I can’t explain.

An even better proof in the table of contents is the sentence before the table of contents. It didn’t catch my eye until later, but the table of contents on the Amazon listing is introduced by the phrase “The eBook’s table of contents is listed below. It includes the year each story was written.”

Now look at the introduction to the table of contents in my post about the eBook. You can probably use Google cache to confirm it’s always been that way. The text was lifted straight from my site. This person was too lazy to write their own two sentences.

Proof 2) The Timing

Amazon didn’t have a timestamp on when the book was put up for sale, but I got some help from @NightWhistler who recognized the book as the cover he’d gotten on GoodReads. As a book on Amazon, it’d been added to GoodReads’s entry for the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft (in which entry there are actually many different books listed, hence the entry dates the book back to 1997 when the first of these was published). And GoodReads detected when this book was added to Amazon: March 21st, 2011. That’s 3 whole weeks after my publication. Plenty of time for someone to simply rip off the cover, remove the intro, and upload it to Amazon.

Proof 3) The Sample Text

I could not bring myself to pay the thief just to see whether the copy matched mine. Fortunately, I could get a sample selection from it. The sample was rather large, perhaps a % based on the size of the book, and therefore even more conclusive. I borrowed my sister’s Kindle and viewed both the sample and the same section of my book on it. Identical.

The chapter headings were identical. The page breaks were identical. Even if two people had compiled this at exactly the same time using exactly the same source material, one could expect some minor variations in layout. Nothing.

In Sum

Identical table of contents (formatting, story choice, story order within years). Very suspicious timing. Identical text for a very large sample. This is not a coincidence, this is a theft. You can check all of these things for yourself.

What I’m Doing

I’m taking my statements from the post about the eBook and making them official by licensing the eBook under a “BY-NC” Creative Commons license. I’ve added it to the eBook files.

This Creative Commons License really doesn’t do anything different than what I’d already asked in my initial post. It tells people to give me credit (attribution) and not to sell it. Otherwise it allows for unlimited distribution. I chose this license because it’s as open as I could get while formally restricting sales without hiring a lawyer to write the licensing. I wish I didn’t have to, but I think I need something formal for my notice to Amazon.

A quick note on copyright—I don’t claim copyright of any of the text in the book. But I do hold the rights to the html and structure of the file. It’s like a copy of Pride and Prejudice. You can buy it very cheaply (or get it for free) because no one holds the copyright, but people who’ve made nice print or digital versions do own the rights to that presentation/html/etc unless they choose to give them up entirely. I say this to clarify what I mean when I talk about my rights concerning the eBook I created. Anyone else can create an eBook with the exact same materials and if they create it from scratch then they own the rights to it. It’ll probably also be slightly different.

(Updated to add) After I submitted the paperwork to Amazon, I submitted the book as a $0.99 book in the Kindle store (I would’ve done free, but they wouldn’t let me). I stated that it was available for free on my site but listed there for convenience. We’ll see if they accept it.

What This Means for You

Probably nothing. If you want to download and read the book, nothing’s changed. It’s still free, it’s still there. Nearly 38,000 people have downloaded it for free and I plan to leave it up. I hope it’s being torrented and e-mailed and shared between friends. Should you like it and decide you want to donate, there’s a link in the sidebar. But no pressure, I created the book to be shared, not bought.

Want to do more than just read and share? Here are my thoughts:

• Want to upload a copy to your site and let people download it there? Fine. You don’t even have to link to me, but please give me any credit for creation (if you give credit at all).
• Want to take the EPUB (the MOBI doesn’t edit well) and add/delete stories to make a “best of” collection based on your tastes? Go for it!
• Want to share your best-of collection with all your friends? Go ahead. I’d appreciate credit for the initial file, but you should have credit for story-selection.
• Want to add a section with his poems? Great idea! Go for it.
• Want to make your own cover? Not an issue.

In the end, while attribution is nice, the only thing I really ask of you is that you not sell the eBook. You probably weren’t going to do that, right? Because, like most people out there, you’ve got certain standards and you’re a decent individual. So the Creative Commons licensing really doesn’t mean much to you.

If you’ve read that and you’re still not sure about some idea, write me and ask. I’m a friendly person and if you’ve come up with this amazing “best of” using these text files and you really want to sell it, send me a copy. Odds are good I’ll be on board with your doing it. I won’t steal your remixes or ideas. I’m burning the candle at 3 ends as it is and I know how it feels to have one’s work stolen.

How All of This Has Made Me Feel

All of this happened on Father’s Day weekend, while I was back home. It’s different being back home since my Mom died last July. This week, my Dad adopted a dog who was apparently mistreated by a man and wouldn’t trust men. I was trying to help the dog relax and learn to trust my Dad and I was reminded everywhere that my Mom was gone and never coming back. I also wasn’t crocheting, because I’d hurt my hand earlier that week (all commissions are still on track for the times promised), and was feeling frustrated and in pain. It was a hard weekend.

In the midst of all this, I found out that someone has been using my work to defraud other people. It made me feel sick. At first I just stared at the screen and tried not to throw up. People had paid for this when I had made it so that they could enjoy it for free. Between this and knowing that someone had hurt the sweet dog I was cuddling, it was enough to make me lose my faith in humanity. People are cruel, people are greedy, people cannot be trusted.

A helpful friend who writes eBooks sent me an estimate of this person’s earnings based on the sales rank and commission and….well, it’s over 10x what I’ve been given in donations by appreciative readers (for which I’m quite grateful, since they were given because the reader valued my work and wanted to give, not because they had to). I’m not even going to post it, but the book was at 527th rank in the Kindle store, which is saying something.

But there was a bright spot to it too. Twitter rallied to my support when I posted about it. A few dozen people went over and left negative reviews on the book and even more up-voted those reviews. The ranking dropped from 5 stars (which had made me simultaneously proud that people thought so well of it and sad at the cause) to 1.5 stars by Saturday afternoon and the sales rank has dropped in the last 36 hours. I got sent messages of support and thanks for the eBook and people shared the link to the real, always free, eBook. The community I’ve gotten to know online is phenomenal. I’m so grateful to have all of these people in my life and I felt very loved.

On Sunday morning, things got very bright and the thief temporarily took down the eBook. I thought I was going to have to title this post “Why We Can‘t Have Nice Things.” Alas, around 5pm on Sunday I checked the link and it was back up. So I’m reverting to my original plan to file a claim with Amazon according to their procedures.

What I would like for Amazon to do would be refund everyone’s money but leave the eBook on their Kindles. It doesn’t have any credits for me, but I don’t need credit as much as I need for people not to be charged for it and I don’t want these peoples’ lives to be disrupted because someone else broke the rules. If Amazon does follow its copyright violation policy and remove the eBook from their Kindles, I hope they’ll send out a download link to my free MOBI version. Once I’m done contacting them, I’ll also look into whether it’s possible to put the book up on Amazon for free distribution, just to make it easier for people to find it.

Actually, We Can Have Nice Things

Sometimes one has to take a stand against cynicism and create something good. I will try to resolve this problem with Amazon and I hope that in the meantime the negative reviews and one-star votes will keep people from giving the thief any more money. S/he is definitely aware of this because s/he briefly took down the listing and also took the time to (hilariously) down-vote each of the negative reviews.

But this isn’t about me and this pirate. This project has always been about making a useful resource to let Lovecraft fans take the (nearly) complete works anywhere and to introduce others to Lovecraft without asking them to pay up front. This has been about building the Lovecraft-reading community and is meant to be read in tandem with other amazing free resources like the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast or the Lovecraft E-Zine. One of the fantastic things about the Weird Fiction community is that it’s had so many people create so much to keep it going. I’m proud to be a small part of it.

So download the eBook if you want it, share it with your friends, upload it to your site if you like. And fight back by making the world a better place. Numfar! Do the dance of joy!

Rufus and me hanging out on Saturday. I’m in a BSG outfit for reasons I can explain…but won’t go into here.
(Yes, I know the stand against cynicism isn’t Lovecraftian at all. I’m the cuddliest Lovecraftian you’ll ever meet. Cthulhu will judge his own…and everybody else.)

Dear internet (especially Cthulhu-lovers),

Last week over a dozen of you sent me a picture of a plush Pikathulhu doll. So I made you this:

I need to get some better pictures, though a few people seemed to like the dramatic lighting. Many thanks to ProfX who took these new pictures when the light got better. This Pikathulhu doesn’t have the electric bolt tail…in its place, he has accented wings. If you’d like a Pikathulhu, you can e-mail me about commissioning one. I’d rather do it by e-mail and PayPal, but I’ve also got it listed in my Etsy store.