To commemorate the centennial of the birth of H. P. Lovecraft, the editors have assembled essays by leading Lovecraft scholars that embody a wide variety of critical approaches. Biographical essays treat Lovecraft's relation to his parents and his heritage; thematic essays discuss issues such as the function of the narrator in his fiction; and the comparative and genre studies examine Lovecraft's relation to modernism.

This volume of stories and poems illustrates the ubiquitous presence of Nyarlathotep, the mighty messenger of the Outer Gods, and shows him in several different guises. The 13 stories include a Lin Carter novella.

He was the premier writer of horror fiction in the first half of the 20th Century, perhaps the major American practitioner of the art between the time of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King. Born into an upper middle class family in Providence, Rhode Island, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) had a lonely childhood, but read voraciously from his earliest years. He soon became interested in science and astronomy and began penning stories, poetry, and essays in great profusion, publishing them himself when no other market was available. The advent of Weird Tales in 1923 gave him a small outlet for his work, and he attracted a large number of followers, with whom he exchanged literally tens of thousands of letters, many of them quite lengthy. A number of these young correspondents eventually became professional writers and editors themselves. Lovecraft's fame began spreading beyond fandom with the publication of his first significant collection, The Outsider and Others, in 1939, two years after his untimely death. Book jacket.

A connoisseur of death believes consuming human flesh will renew his soul--and he's after a young girl who dreams of his depravities night after night in this new work of terror by the author of Ashes. Original.

Explore the marvelous complexity of Lovecraft's writing—including his use of literary allusions, biographical details, and obscure references in this rich, in-depth exploration of great horror fiction from the acknowledged master of the weird, including the stories "Herbert West—Reanimator", "Pickman's Model", "The Call of Cthulhu", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Horror at Red Hook" and more. Did Lovecraft believe in ghosts or paranormal phenomena? In what story does the narrator fear riding the Boston T? A pathfinder in the literary territory of the macabre, H.P. Lovecraft is one of America's giants of the horror genre. Now, in this second volume of annotated tales, Lovecraft scholars S. T. Joshi and Peter Cannon provide another rare opportunity to look into the mind of a genius. Their extensive notes lift the veil between real events in the writer's life—such as the death of his father—and the words that spill out onto the page in magnificent grotesquerie. Mansions, universities, laboratories, and dank New England boneyards appear also as the haunts where Lovecraft's characters confront the fabulous and fantastic, or—like the narrator in "Herbert West—Reanimator"—dig up fresh corpses. Richly illustrated and scrupulously researched, this extraordinary work adds exciting levels of meaning to Lovecraft's chilling tales . . . and increases our wonder at the magic that transforms life into a great writer's art.

Ashley Reeves is a young journalist at freak-of-nature magazine Missing Link. His future's bright, even if he does spend most of his time investigating hoaxes. When he receives a letter promising him a once-in-a-lifetime story, he jumps at the opportunity. The only thing is, his life is exactly what it might cost him. The letter is from Reginald Mather, a man who at first seems no more than an eccentric collector of insects, happy to live in isolation on a remote island. But when Ashley finds himself stranded with Mather and unearths the horrific truth behind the collector's past, he is thrown headlong into a macabre nightmare that quickly spirals out of control. Ashley's life is in danger. . . . And Mather is not the only enemy. . . . Gruesome, compelling, and terrifying, The Hand of the Devil will make you never want to leave the house without bug spray again.

It is well known that H. P. Lovecraft was virtually ignored by the mainstream literary community in his time, being known only in the tiny worlds of amateur journalism and fantasy fandom. And yet, it is surprising how much comment on Lovecraft appeared in various venues, both obscure and prominent, in his own time and just shortly after his early death in 1937. This volume gathers, for the first time, a wide array of early criticism of Lovecraft, including poignant obituaries by such friends as Walter J. Coates and Hyman Bradofsky; early attempts to analyze Lovecraft's work by such writers as Rheinhart Kleiner and Frank Belknap Long; voluminous discussions of Lovecraft's tales in the letter columns of Weird Tales and Astounding Stories; an abundant selection of criticism from the fan world of the 1930s and 1940s, including articles by August Derleth, P. Schuyler Miller, and Francis T. Laney; and reviews of the first Arkham House books of Lovecraft's work by Will Cuppy, T. O. Mabbott, Vincent Starrett, William Rose Benet, and many others. Compiled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft's life and work, this volume sheds unique light on the faint wisps of recognition that Lovecraft received during and just after his lifetime-recognition that would become universal and worldwide with the passing of decades.

Finalist for the HWA’s Bram Stoker Award for Best Anthology Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle From across strange aeons comes the long-awaited annotated edition of “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale” (Stephen King). "With an increasing distance from the twentieth century…the New England poet, author, essayist, and stunningly profuse epistolary Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge as one of that tumultuous period’s most critically fascinating and yet enigmatic figures," writes Alan Moore in his introduction to The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. Despite this nearly unprecedented posthumous trajectory, at the time of his death at the age of forty-six, Lovecraft's work had appeared only in dime-store magazines, ignored by the public and maligned by critics. Now well over a century after his birth, Lovecraft is increasingly being recognized as the foundation for American horror and science fiction, the source of "incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates). In this volume, Leslie S. Klinger reanimates Lovecraft with clarity and historical insight, charting the rise of the erstwhile pulp writer, whose rediscovery and reclamation into the literary canon can be compared only to that of Poe or Melville. Weaving together a broad base of existing scholarship with his own original insights, Klinger appends Lovecraft's uncanny oeuvre and Kafkaesque life story in a way that provides context and unlocks many of the secrets of his often cryptic body of work. Over the course of his career, Lovecraft—"the Copernicus of the horror story" (Fritz Leiber)—made a marked departure from the gothic style of his predecessors that focused mostly on ghosts, ghouls, and witches, instead crafting a vast mythos in which humanity is but a blissfully unaware speck in a cosmos shared by vast and ancient alien beings. One of the progenitors of "weird fiction," Lovecraft wrote stories suggesting that we share not just our reality but our planet, and even a common ancestry, with unspeakable, godlike creatures just one accidental revelation away from emerging from their epoch of hibernation and extinguishing both our individual sanity and entire civilization. Following his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger collects here twenty-two of Lovecraft's best, most chilling "Arkham" tales, including "The Call of Cthulhu," At the Mountains of Madness, "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The Colour Out of Space," and others. With nearly 300 illustrations, including full-color reproductions of the original artwork and covers from Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, and more than 1,000 annotations, this volume illuminates every dimension of H. P. Lovecraft and stirs the Great Old Ones in their millennia of sleep.

"Analyzes paratextual board games--particularly games based on film, television, and books--as unique media texts"--