Agreed. There are some brilliant things in there ("The Mound", "The Night Ocean"), some quite good pieces ("Out of the Aeons", "The Curse of Yig", "Deaf, Dumb, and Blind"), and some truly awful things ("The Horror at Martin's Beach", "The Disinterment", and, most especially, "Ashes"). As these are revisions, it isn't always easy to tell where the fault was Lovecraft's, and where it was his collaborators (though with some it is very easy, such as "The Mound", which was based on a two-line idea by his client); but just about all of them have some points of interest (again, with the exception of "Ashes", which is a simply gawdawful farrago of nonsense and cliches).
At any rate, glad it is this edition, as it contains the properly restored texts, rather than relying on the older, often very faulty texts of earlier editions. (I made the effort of comparing some of these at one time -- the number of mistakes, elisions, excisions, and simple rewriting, for purposes of being "politically correct" or otherwise -- was simply astounding).
And as for myself... along with the continuing reading of Poe, I am also dipping into W. H. Pugmire's Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (which is, so far, a wonderfully eerie volume) and doing a reread (for the first time in over twenty years) of Ramsey Campbell's Demons by Daylight....
"The Electric Executioner", at least, has the advantage of being a self-parody (much like the title story of that collection), which makes it a little easier for me, at any rate....
