Description: The horror, science fiction, and fantasy writing of American author H. P. Lovecraft attracted little attention during his lifetime. Indeed, outside of a small circle of admirers and readers of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s, few had ever heard of him. And yet today he is recognized as one of the most important horror authors of the twentieth century, with authors from Stephen King to Clive Barker to Neil Gaiman acknowledging his influence on them. Much of Lovecraft''s appeal to contemporary readers arguably derives from his pioneering of "cosmic horror," a peculiarly modern philosophical belief system in which there is no controlling God or deity in charge of the universe, and human beings, regarded as especially insignificant in light of the vastness of time and space, are always just a hairbreadth away from being wiped out. The especially Lovecraftian twist on this apocalyptic premise is that it is not human arrogance or carelessness that is at fault; it is not atomic weapons or global warming that threatens human beings--we just aren''t that important. It is rather alien forces and powers at work in the universe, including Lovecraft''s "Elder Gods" and "Great Old Ones" (not actually gods but extraterrestrial monsters with powers far outstripping those of humanity), that possess the potential for the ultimate destruction of mankind. This volume collects together a sampling of Lovecraft''s earlier work, along with many selections from his "Cthulhu Mythos," his stories that introduce his pantheon of alien "gods," including his famous "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, a city that becomes the setting for several of this tales. He was the only child of Winfield Scott Lovecraft, a traveling salesman for a silversmith company, and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry back to colonial New England. In 1893, when Lovecraft was three, his father suffered a psychological breakdown and became delusional while on the road in Chicago and was admitted to Butler Hospital (an insane asylum) in Providence where he died five years later of what was most likely tertiary syphilis--it''s unclear if Lovecraft ever became aware of the actual nature of his father''s illness. Lovecraft, a precocious but sickly child coddled by his overprotective mother, began composing poetry at age six and short horror tales and musings on science at age seven. Under the auspices of his maternal grandfather, the delightfully named Whipple Van Buren Phillips, Lovecraft was introduced to the classics (among them, children''s versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey ), as well as to Gothic tales of his grandfather''s own invention. However, it was Lovecraft''s discovery at age eight of the work of Edgar Allan Poe that arguably marks his true entrance into the realm of tales of the uncanny. Later in his life, the works of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany and Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen would also exercise considerable influence on his artistic development. Lovecraft''s formal schooling was limited by ill health--to a large extent psychosomatic as he suffered his first "near-breakdown" in 1898 at age eight--but Lovecraft, who never finished high school, compensated for his lack of formal education by his voracious reading and, in the assessment of preeminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi, became "one of the most prodigious autodidacts in modern history."[i] Lovecraft''s entrance into the world of publishing was facilitated by his association with the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA)--a relatively small group of amateur journalists who published journals and circulated them among themselves in the 1910s and 1920s. Lovecraft contributed poetry and essays to UAPA journals and published thirteen issues of his own journal, the Conservative-- a periodical that reflected his own conservative cultural views. His first published story, "The Alchemist," appeared in the United Amateur in 1916, but his transition into professional fiction did not occur until 1922 (when he was thirty-one years old) with the publication of "Herbert West--Reanimator" in a crude professional publication called Home Brew . Then, at the urging of colleagues, Lovecraft began to submit his tales to the celebrated pulp magazine Weird Tales , which was founded in 1923 and which included the early work of notable authors such as Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Theodore Sturgeon. Weird Tales became the principle publication venue for Lovecraft. In the early 1920s, Lovecraft also began to build up an ever-expanding network of correspondents that led to his becoming one of the most prolific letter writers of the twentieth century--letters which Joshi speculates may one day be recognized as in fact his greatest achievement.[ii] After a curious failed marriage to a Russian Jewish immigrant named Sonia H. Greene (given Lovecraft''s anti-Semitism, his marriage to a Jewish woman is surprising) and several years of attempting to subsist in New York through a combination of writing, ghostwriting, and editing the work of others, and unsuccessful stints working for firms including a collection agency and a lamp-testing company, Lovecraft returned in 1926 to Providence, the place of his birth. His mother had died in 1921 as a result of complications from gallbladder surgery, so he moved in with his two maternal aunts. This transition touched off the most fertile period in Lovecraft''s creative life--in a nine-month period between 1926 and 1927, Lovecraft produced several of his best-known and most celebrated works: "The Call of Cthulhu," The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath , The Case of Charles Dexter Ward , and "The Color Out of Space." Despite his best efforts, however, Lovecraft found it difficult to sell his increasingly lengthy and complicated later work and his revision efforts for others brought in diminishing returns. His last years were lamentably plagued by poverty and hardship. In 1936, he was saddened by the suicide of his correspondent Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan the Barbarian stories, and Lovecraft himself succumbed to cancer of the intestine on March 10, 1937, at the age of forty-seven, having never seen a true book publication of his work. Lovecraft''s body of fiction is often divided up into three roughly chronological categories: his early Poe-inspired horror stories (roughly 1905-1920), his Lord Dunsany-inspired "Dream Cycle" stories (1920-1927), and then his Cthulhu Mythos (1925-1935). As preeminent Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has remarked, Lovecraft initially found in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe a model for both style and plot structure, and his early work, nearly devoid of dialogue, built around narration, and overloaded with adjectives, clearly reflects this influence.[iii] An example of one of Lovecraft''s Poe-inspired short horror stories included here is "The Terrible Old Man," composed in 1920. In this brief tale, three thieves who intend to loot the home of a strange Old Man get their comeuppance through apparently supernatural means. In 1919, Lovecraft discovered the work of Lord Dunsany, an Irish fantasy writer and dramatist, and for two years after, he did little but write Dunsany imitations. What Lovecraft found so captivating in Dansany''s fiction was the "remoteness" of his fantasylands--realms of pure fantasy without connection to the human world.[iv] The stories in Dunsany''s first two books, The Gods of Pegana (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906), and in part of his third book, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), are set in his invented world of Pegana , complete with its own gods, geography, and history. Dunsany''s influence is clearly evident in Lovecraft''s stories, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926) and "The Silver Key" (1929), set in the Dreamlands, an alternate dimension that can be entered through dreams, as well as in stories set in other worlds such as "The Cats of Ulthar" (1920), "Celephas" (1920), and "The Other Gods" (1921). Although Lovecraft''s Dream Cycle stories include some of his best writing, what he is most well known for are his Cthulhu Mythos, stories set in the contemporary world of twentieth-century America (often in New England), into which Lovecraft introduces monstrous extraterrestrial forces. Most familiar here is this collection''s title story, "The Call of Cthulhu." Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales in 1928 and is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself appears. The story actually consists of three separate stories linked together by the narrator who discovers the notes of his deceased relative, and it culminates with the characteristically Lovecraftian realization that human beings are not the center of the universe and it is only our ignorance of our true insignificance that keeps us from going mad. Collected in this volume are stories that tend to fall into the first and third categories of Lovecraft''s oeuvre. Observant readers will notice, however, that even in tales written as early as "Dagon" (1919) and "Nyarlathotep" (1920), Lovecraft is already beginning to introduce ideas and entities that will inform and populate his later Cthulhu Mythos tales, so these categories should not be considered as discrete or non-overlapping. Reprinted here are many of Lovecraft''s most famous works,

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