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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

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The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

By: H. P. Lovecraft
Narrated by: Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot
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About this listen

FNH Audio presents a complete and unabridged audio book of H.P. Lovecraft’s novel "The case of Charles Dexter Ward". Charles is a young man, a young man with a passion, a driving passion, a love of the past. What starts as the curious interest of a young boy, growths up with the youth to become the obsession of the man.

His friends turn their back on him, he becomes reclusive. His few new friends are dark and mysterious, ominous even. And then... Charles starts to change. Follow the exploits of Charles' family as they try to discover the truth about what is happening to their beloved son. Feel their dread and despair as they aided by the family doctor, discover the horrifying truth.

©2011 FNH (P)2011 FNH Horror Scary
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I generally like Herriot's performances (I have listened to other tales read by him before), but in this recording many words are mispronounced. Still enjoyable, but it could definitely have been prepared with more care.

Medium quality

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A wonderful masterpiece. I loved it and will listen to it many more times. Give it a try !

Amazing.

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Reading this felt like rummaging through a huge waste pile to find the odd valuable here and there - that is, it wasn't very enjoyable. The writing style is repelling with extremely long and over descriptive sentences which in most cases don't advance the story. As an example, there's a scene in which a character glances upon some of the cosmic entities which we come to associate with Lovecraft. Little word count is dedicated to these horrors or the character's reaction to them. Almost immediately after this scene, there's an excruciatingly long description of a series of vials/jars in a laboratory. Aside from numerous readings of texts (e.g. letters), there's an almost complete lack of dialogue. It feels less of a novel and more of a long newspaper article that the reader might want to skim read to get that bit of information before moving on to something else. Reading a summary of the plot would likely be much more enjoyable than reading the actual novel. I see H.P. Lovecraft as a visionary; a man with great ideas that just wasn't a great writer. The same flaws are present in At the Mountains of Madness or The Shadow over Innsmouth but are not as apparent perhaps owing to them being novellas, not novels.

Like rummaging through a huge waste pile

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