Horror fiction - Week 4(ish)

Slightly late.  Decided to sneak a full novel in with the short stuff:

52. Thumbprint - Joe Hill
53. Fear - Achmed Abdullah
54. The Lost Door - Dorothy Quick
55. The Death of Ilalotha - Clark Ashton Smith
56. The Yellow Sign - Robert W. Chambers 
57. The Repairer of Reputations - Robert W. Chambers
58. The Mask - Robert W. Chambers
59. Dagon - H. P. Lovecraft
60. Cold Air - H. P. Lovecraft 
61. The Call of Cthulhu - H. P. Lovecraft
62. The Girl from Samarcand - E. Hoffman Price
63. The Middle Toe of the Right Foot - Ambrose Bierce
64. The Dreams in the Witch-House - H. P. Lovecraft
65. The Haunter in the Dark - H. P. Lovecraft
66. The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

Finally got around to Lovecraft.  It was really interesting reading him again now that I am at least a little familiar with some of the earlier weird fiction authors.  The influence of Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, and others is really clear, and he even name drops those first two in one of the stories I read.  Lovecraft takes what they started and absolutely masters it.  He is also the first author I've read this month to genuinely scare me - "The Dreams in the Witch-House" in particular had me up late with the lights all on.

The three stories by Robert W. Chambers are all from his collection The King in Yellow, and they were all fantastic.  The title refers to a fictional book that appears in all of the stories, which drives anyone who reads it completely insane.  Lovecraft mentions the "Yellow Sign" in at least one of his stories, and later writers have fully adopted the book into the Cthulhu mythos.

Finally, I mixed things up a bit and read a full-length novel, Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.  The 1963 film version directed by Robert Wise (the title of which was shortened to just The Haunting) is my all-time favorite haunted house film, and likewise this novel is one of the best takes on the genre in all of literature.  It is beautifully written, sometimes quite unsettling, and the somewhat ambiguous nature of the haunting opens up the novel to lots of interesting analysis and varying interpretations.