For more than two decades, Robert H. Waugh has been one of the most penetrating scholars of the work and thought of H. P. Lovecraft. His earlier volume, The Monster in the Mirror (2006), contained a treasury of essays that displayed Waugh’s exhaustive knowledge of Lovecraft’s work and his skill in placing Lovecraft in a broader literary context.

This new collection of essays cements Waugh’s reputation as a pioneering Lovecraft scholar.

Among the contributions are studies of the influence of World War I on “The Rats in the Walls”; Lovecraft’s relationship to his two late colleagues, Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber, as well as to such other writers as D. H. Lawrence, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Eugene O’Neill; the influence of Roman literature and history on Lovecraft; and the sublimated eroticism of “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “Medusa’s Coil.” All in all, this volume, containing several previously unpublished essays, displays the inexhaustible depths of Lovecraft’s writing and Robert H. Waugh’s deftness in probing its intricacies.

386p

When An Epicure in the Terrible first appeared in 1991, commemorating the centennial of H. P. Lovecraft’s birth, it was hailed as a significant contribution to Lovecraft studies. Its thirteen original essays, along with a lengthy biocritical introduction by S. T. Joshi, contained penetrating work by leading authorities in the field. Among them were Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s pioneering study of Lovecraft’s parents; Jason C. Eckhardt’s analysis of Lovecraft’s heritage as a New England Yankee; and Donald R. Burleson’s treatment of the key theme of “touching the glass,” epitomized by “The Outsider.”

Other essays in the book deal with such topics as the theme of isolation in Lovecraft’s fiction (Stefan Dziemianowicz); Lovecraft’s cosmic imagery (Steven J. Mariconda); Lovecraft’s progression from a macabre writer to a cosmic writer (David E. Schultz); and Lovecraft’s “artificial mythology” and its development (Robert M. Price). Essays by Peter Cannon, Robert H. Waugh, R. Boerem, Norman R. Gayford, and Barton L. St. Armand round out the volume.

This paperback edition presents these perspicacious essays to a new readership, and shows the richness and complexity of H. P. Lovecraft's writing-writing that is destined to endure for centuries. Citations to Lovecraft's work have been updated to reflect newer and more accurate editions that have appeared since 1991, and some of the essays have been revised in other particulars.

380p

For decades, David Goudsward has been a leading authority on the obscurer historical and topographical corners of his native New England. In this lavish and detailed treatise, he has written the definitive treatment of Lovecraft’s connections with the Merrimack Valley of coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Goudsward traces Lovecraft’s initial visits in the 1920s to such towns as Newburyport, Haverhill, and Hampstead, where he met such colleagues as Charles W. “Tryout” Smith, Myrta Alice Little, and Edgar J. Davis. Later visits clearly inspired many of the topographical features in such tales as “The Shadow over Innsmouth” and “The Shadow out of Time.”

Goudsward has made a profound study of Lovecraft’s letters and other documents in tracing the Providence writer’s movements in the area and the impressions he drew from it. This book is lavishly illustrated with dozens of photographs of the locale, including many vivid period snapshots that show the towns and other landmarks as they would have been seen by Lovecraft himself. Goudsward also treats the possibility that Lovecraft visited Mystery Hill, a megalithic site that some scholars believe inspired “The Dunwich Horror.”

H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley is an exhaustive treatment of a subject that has rarely been discussed before, but that is of crucial importance to H. P. Lovecraft’s life and imagination.

192p

For nearly three decades, Steven J. Mariconda has been one of the keenest analysts of H. P. Lovecraft’s variegated literary work. In the 1980s, he wrote landmark articles on Lovecraft’s prose style, demonstrating how the dreamer from Providence utilized an array of rhetorical techniques to generate maximum power and effectiveness in the writing of weird fiction. Mariconda also focused on Lovecraft’s relations to Modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane, proving that Lovecraft was a small but significant voice in the general literary tendencies of his time.

Mariconda has also written penetrating articles on specific stories, including significant essays on the literary sources of “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” And in the pioneering article “Toward a Reader-Response Approach to the Lovecraft Mythos,” Mariconda showed how Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos grew out of responses by readers and fellow writers of Weird Tales as each story successively engendered a sense of the reality of this invented cosmogony.

As a reviewer, Mariconda has been acute in evaluating the leading Lovecraft scholarship of the past thirty years. But his work is far from solemn or pedantic; in an appendix to this book we find delightful strokes of humor, such as “A Real Hard Lovecraft Quiz.”

This volume of Steven J. Mariconda’s collected essays establishes him as a leading voice in the dynamic Lovecraft scholarship of our time.

308p

H. P. Lovecraft’s letters are among the most remarkable literary documents of their time, and they are a major reason why he has become such an icon in contemporary culture.

In this new edition, the editors have updated all references to current editions of his work and also exhaustively revised their notes and commentary.

Lovecraft wrote tens of thousands of letters, some of them of great length; but more than that, these letters are incredibly revelatory in the depth of detail they provide for all aspects of his life, work, and thought.

This volume, first published in 2000, assembles generous extracts of Lovecraft’s letters covering the entirety of his life, from childhood until his death. He tells of his youthful interests (poetry, Greco-Roman mythology, science), his childhood friends, and the “blank” period of 1908–13, after he dropped out of high school. He emerged from his hermitry in 1914 by joining the amateur journalism movement, where he became a leading figure and was involved in numerous literary and personal controversies.

In 1921 Lovecraft became acquainted with Sonia Greene, whom he would marry in 1924. By that time, he had begun publishing in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. But his marriage was a failure: living in New York, he was unable find a job and found the teeming city so different from the tranquility of his native Providence, R.I. Returning home in 1926, he embarked on a tremendous literary outburst, and over the next ten years wrote many of the stories that have ensured his literary immortality.

Lord of a Visible World is a riveting compilation that not only paints a full portrait of Lovecraft’s life, writings, and philosophical beliefs, but features the piquant and engaging prose characteristic of his letters.

378p

For nearly forty years, Donald R. Burleson has been a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft. Beginning in the late 1970s, he has written article after article that have cumulatively reshaped our understanding of the dreamer from Providence. Among his earlier papers can be found searching analyses of the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, and others on Lovecraft; studies of the topographical sources for such major stories as “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Whisperer in Darkness”; and pioneering studies of mythic elements in “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Colour out of Space.”

Later essays by Burleson venture into more challenging territory, as his bold adoption of poststructuralist literary methodologies have led to new ways of looking at Lovecraft’s work. Examing the Providence writer through the lens of deconstruction, Burleson provides innovative interpretations of Lovecraft’s prose style, his use of gender, and his relations to such writers as Herman Melville and Friedrich Nietzsche. As a practicing mathematician, Burleson has also studied Lovecraft’s use of cryptography and higher mathematics.

Burleson is one of the most sensitive students of Lovecraft’s oft-neglected poetry, writing penetrating analyses of such poems as “Nemesis,” “The Ancient Track,” and his touching poem on the death of a cat, “Little Sam Perkins.” In all, this collection is a concentrated distillation of the decades of work by a pioneering scholar.

Donald R. Burleson is the author of H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (1983), Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (1990), and other works. He has also written novels and story collections, and is the publisher of Black Mesa Press. With his wife, the writer Mollie L. Burleson, he lives in Roswell, New Mexico.

260p

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most well-read authors of his time, and his personal library constitutes an intimate glimpse into his mind and imagination. This fourth revised edition provides comprehensive information on 1085 books owned by Lovecraft.

These books focus chiefly on four key areas that Lovecraft found particularly fascinating: ancient literature and history; the history and antiquities of New England; astronomy, chemistry, and other sciences; and, of course, the literature of weird fiction. S. T. Joshi has supplied full publication information, tables of contents for many titles, data on Lovecraft’s discussions of the volumes in his stories, essays, poems, and letters, and a wealth of other information. To know Lovecraft’s mind, one must first know his books.

In this new 2017 edition, eighty new titles have been added to the list of books owned by Lovecraft, and additional information has been supplied on all titles listed.

203p

During H. P. Lovecraft's residence in New York City, his social and literary life centered upon a group of friends collectively known as the Kalem Club, so named for the initials of the surnames of original members--K, L, or M. Gatherings or “meetings” were frequently held in members’ homes, and particularly in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, for it was there that Lovecraft’s friend George Kirk lived, and where, in the building HPL utilized as the setting of “Cool Air,” Kirk operated his Chelsea Book Shop.

From August 1924 until March 1927, George Kirk wrote almost daily to his fiancee in Cleveland, revealing many details of his interactions with the other Kalems. After nearly seventy years, the letters were discovered by Kirk’s daughter Mara Kirk Hart, who used portions of them as the basis for her fascinating chronicle of the Kalem Club, “Walkers in the City.”

Now expanding greatly upon that earlier work, she and S. T. Joshi have here assembled all the letters of George Kirk that relate information about the Kalem members and their activities during this time, together with representative writings of all the Kalem members during their most active and fruitful period.

242p

In 1973, plans were made to publish a collection of musings by noted Lovecraft scholar Kenneth W. Faig, Jr., the man now credited with transforming research on Lovecraft and his circle from a haphazard collection of amateurs into a literary discipline unto itself. The publication never materialized, and Faig’s manuscript became the holy grail of scholarship, difficult to consult because of its very limited distribution, but well worth the quest. Early scholarship relied on Faig’s holistic approach to treating bibliographic, genealogical, biographic, and epistolary material to understand the full picture of Lovecraft as a man and as a writer. Faig’s fabled manuscript was the foundation on which future research was built. One need go no further than de Camp’s 1975 biography of Lovecraft to see Faig’s presence already influencing future research.

Lovecraftian Voyages is the eclectic amalgam expected of a man who is equally at home discussing Lovecraft’s annual income as he is pondering proper pronunciation of Cthulhu. This is a book for everyone interested in the external influences of Lovecraft’s life and how they shaped his career. Faig’s research remains the gold standard; as fascinating, relevant, and valuable as when it was pulled from a typewriter in the early 1970s.

This updated 2017 edition has been prepared for Hippocampus Press by editors Christopher M. O’Brien and J.-M. Rajala, who have augmented the text with chapter divisions to assist readers in locating particular topics. Additional annotations are provided, distinguished from Faig's notes. Finally, a thorough listing of works to date by and about Faig has been assembled, celebrating his unstinting and continuing devotion to the study of the Providence writer. S. T. Joshi has provided a new foreword.

352p

During the past two decades, Robert H. Waugh has established himself as a leading scholar on H. P. Lovecraft. Bringing to the study of Lovecraft a remarkable breadth of knowledge in literature, aesthetics, history, and philosophy, Waugh has approached his subject with sensitivity and nuance.

In this volume of his collected essays on Lovecraft, the reader will learn of the importance of documents in Lovecraft’s work; his provocative similarities to the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi; and his fascination with underground horror, as exemplified in At the Mountains of Madness and other tales. In a trilogy of substantial essays, Waugh looks at Lovecraft’s seminal story “The Outsider” from a variety of critical perspectives.

A concluding article probes the controverted issue of religion in Lovecraft’s life, thought, and writings. In all, the essays demonstrate that Lovecraft’s multifaceted work is a virtually inexhaustible treasure-trove for the scholar and analyst.

Dr. Robert H. Waugh is professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In addition to his articles on Lovecraft, he has written on David Lindsay, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, and other science fiction writers. He is also a widely published poet.

304p

Acclaimed Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi's best pieces on H. P. Lovecraft are collected for the first time in one volume, resulting in an exciting tour-de-force for fans and scholars alike.

S. T. Joshi, the world's leading authority on Lovecraft, has written a substantial number of articles on Lovecraft-biographical, critical, philosophical, and bibliographical-over the 25 years in which he has been studying the Providence master of horror. In this collection, the most extensive of Joshi's critical essays ever published, many aspects of Lovecraft's works are studied. Essays on Lovecraft's relations with the Munsey magazines, with Weird Tales, and with the films of his day add sidelights to Joshi's landmark biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life.

Joshi also treats such provocative issues as the interrelation of the dream world and the real world in Lovecraft's Dunsanian fantasies, his use of autobiography in his tales, and the many extraterrestrial civilizations he introduces in his longer narratives. Several studies of individual stories highlight little-known facts about Lovecraft's stories, including their literary and philosophical sources and the details of their plots and themes. This volume is a rich treasure-trove of information on Lovecraft by his leading interpreter.

208p

H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most asexual beings in history—at least by his own admission. Whether we accept this view of his own sexual instincts or not, there is no denying that sexuality—normal and aberrant—underlies a number of significant tales in the Lovecraft oeuvre. The impregnation of a human woman by Yog-Sothoth in “The Dunwich Horror” and the mating of humans with strange creatures from the sea in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” are only two such examples.

In this pioneering study, Bobby Derie has presented an objective and scholarly analysis of the significant uses of love, sex, and gender in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and some of his leading disciples. Along the way, Derie treats such matters as Lovecraft’s relations with his wife, portrayals of women in his work, and the question of homosexuality in his life and work. Many Lovecraft stories are subject to detailed examination for their sexual implications.

Derie then examines the work of such significant writers of the Lovecraft tradition as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Ramsey Campbell, W. H. Pugmire, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, whose work features far more explicit sexuality than anything Lovecraft could have imagined. Derie goes on to study sexual themes in other venues, such as Lovecraftian occultism, Japanese manga and anime, and even Lovecraftian fan fiction.

The result is a comprehensive and incisive examination of a delicate subject—but one whose significance in Lovecraftian writing can hardly be denied.

314p

In 2008, S. T. Joshi published The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos, an exhaustive study of the Cthulhu Mythos as initiated by H. P. Lovecraft and expanded upon by many subsequent writers. Joshi himself confessed to his surprise at finding a substantial amount of superlative Mythos writing in various works written over the years, ranging from Robert Barbour Johnson’s “Far Below” (1939) to William Browning Spencer’s Résumé with Monsters (1995).

In this new edition, extensively revised and expanded, Joshi continues to explore the myriad ways in which writers of all different sorts have elaborated upon the themes, conceptions, and imagery found in Lovecraft’s writings. This edition includes several new chapters on Mythos novels and tales written over the past two decades. Caitlín R. Kiernan has emerged as a leading author of Lovecraftian fiction, fusing her own distinctive idiom with Lovecraft’s central motifs to produce work of scintillating vibrancy. Jonathan Thomas, in stories like “Tempting Providence” and the novel The Color over Occam (2011), has also done outstanding work, as have such diverse writers as Donald Tyson, Ann K. Schwader, Cody Goodfellow, W. H. Pugmire, and many others. Anthologists such as Paula Guran, Stephen Jones, and Joshi himself have enticed some of the best writers of contemporary weird fiction to write original tales employing the Lovecraft idiom, with spectacular results.

So much good Lovecraftian writing is emerging today that Joshi feels justified in retitling his book The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Cthulhu Mythos.

S. T. Joshi is a leading authority on H. P. Lovecraft and weird fiction. He is the author of I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010) as well as the critical study Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). He is the editor of the Lovecraft Annual, the Weird Fiction Review, and Spectral Realms.

357p

For nearly forty years, Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. has been a leading authority on Lovecraft. He has devoted his career to probing obscure corners of Lovecraft’s life, and the life of his immediate and distant ancestors. In this hefty collection of essays written over many years, Faig presents the results of his diligent research.

We find an exhaustive account of Lovecraft’s paternal and maternal ancestry; a detailed investigation of his grandfather’s work with the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company; studies of Lovecraft’s involvement in amateur journalism; and two substantial essays on the life and work of Lovecraft’s literary executor, Robert H. Barlow.

Not content to study Lovecraft’s life, Faig has written sensitive essays on such Lovecraft stories as “The Silver Key,” “He,” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Cumulatively, The Unknown Lovecraft presents more information on Lovecraft the man and writer than any volume published in years.

Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. is a pioneering scholar on H. P. Lovecraft. Among his previous books are H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Work (1979) and The Parents of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1990). He has contributed to the Dark Brotherhood Journal, Nyctalops, Lovecraft Studies, and other journals.

256p

In the one hundred years since his birth, Robert E. Howard's reputation has expanded from a mere pulp writer to a leading figure in the horror, fantasy, and adventure fiction of the 20th century. The virtual creator of the genre of sword-and-sorcery, Howard peopled his tales with such imperishable action figures as Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, King Kull, and Bran Mak Morn.

In recent years, students and scholars have been examining Howard's work with increasing care and precision, placing it within the context of American and world literature. Two-Gun Bob commemorates Howard's centennial with an anthology of thirteen new and reprinted essays on Howard, ranging from Glenn Lord's study of Howard's early amateur press work to Fred Blosser's look at Howard's detective writing; from Charles Hoffman's analysis of Howard's portrayal of character to S. T. Joshi's placement of the Bran Mak Morn stories in the context of Roman history; from Charles Gramlich's psychological study of Howard to Michele Tetro's survey of Howard's poetry. Essays by John Goodrich, Frank Coffman, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Steve Sheaffer, Martin Andersson, Pietro Guarriello, and editor Benjamin Szumkyj discuss many other aspects of Howard's life, work, and thought, presenting a balanced and well-rounded portrayal of the man and the writer, and laying the groundwork for continuing study of this complex and enigmatic writer in the decades to come.

With a preface by Michael Moorcock.

236p

For more than a decade, Bobby Derie has written insightful and penetrating essays on some of the leading authors of pulp fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Robert E. Howard and his friends, colleagues, and fellow-writers. In this collection of twenty-six essays, Derie covers an extraordinarily wide range of subjects; but in every instance he draws upon primary documents to illuminate some of the obscurer corners in the realm of the pulp magazines, especially the legendary Weird Tales.

Here we find studies of the expansive and at times contentious correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard; Howard’s association with such colleagues in the pulp world as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, and Frank Belknap Long; Howard’s sporadic involvement with such fans as R. H. Barlow, Stuart M. Boland, and Francis T. Laney; a discussion of Howard’s writing for amateur papers; and numerous other topics.

Derie’s perspicacity and keenness of analysis are apparent on every page of his work. His thorough familiarity, not only with Robert E. Howard’s fiction but also with his bountiful letters, serves as the foundation of his critical work, and he exhibits a wide knowledge of the work of Lovecraft, Smith, and others who form the inexhaustibly fascinating cadre of writers associated with Weird Tales.

Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) and the compiler of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Index and Addenda (2015). He has written numerous articles on pulp fiction that have appeared in print and in online venues.

354p

Eldritch... cacodaemoniacal... lucubration... Have you ever wondered about the meaning of these and other esoteric words used by Lovecraft and his colleagues? In this Cyclopean dictionary, the product of æons of erudition and research into the most recondite recesses of literature, Dan Clore not only defines thousands of words found in the work of A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, and many others in the weird fantasy tradition, but supplies their etymologies and, most impressively, provides parallel usages of the words from centuries of English usage, citing authors ranging from Cotton Mather to Henry Kuttner, from Edmund Spenser to Samuel R. Delany. This is a volume that scholars of English usage, enthusiasts of fantasy and horror literature, and readers who love the beauty of the English language will find richly rewarding... either to read from beginning to end or to dip into as the mood strikes them.

Dan Clore is a free-lance writer and scholar. He has had articles published in Lovecraft Studies, Studies in Weird Fiction, Necrofile: The Review of Horror Fiction, Weird Times, and the anthologies A Century Less a Dream: Selected Criticism on H.P. Lovecraft, The Freedom of Fantastic Things: Selected Criticism on Clark Ashton Smith, and Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. His fiction has appeared in The Urbanite, Deathrealm, Terminal Fright, Lore, Epitaph, Black October Magazine, Cosmic Visions, Cthulhu Sex, Creatio ex Nihilo, The NetherReal, and the anthologies The Last Continent: New Tales of Zothique and Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales. It was collected inThe Unspeakable and Others, first published in the fall of 2001, undoubtedly the most terrifying incident to occur in the period. A revised and expanded edition of The Unspeakable and Others will appear in 2009.

572p