I want to be like John Langan when I grow up, okay? He blends meticulously crafted traditional narratives with joyous genre-bending and narrative rule-breaking. His stories are fiercely smart, timely, timeless, heartbreaking, and of course, flat-out scary. Langan fearlessly commits to his monsters, his characters, his readers, to his vision of the horror story and the messed-up, broken, frightening world we inhabit. Wide, Carnivorous Sky, indeed.-Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep and Swallowing a Donkey's Eye.

John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as Technicolor, an ingenious riff on Poe's Masque of the Red Death; How the Day Runs Down, a gripping tale of the undead; and The Shallows, a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, Mother of Stone. With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.

The California poet and fantaisiste Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) created many imaginary worlds, but none so imbued with terror and strangeness as the realm of Averoigne, set in medieval France. In the dozen tales of this cycle, Smith found a convenient means to indulge his taste for some of the venerable motifs of supernatural fiction-the witch, the sorcerer, the lamia, the quest for eternal life-while also incorporating elements of anti-religious satire and eroticism.

A Night in Maln ant introduces the cycle, where a traveler to Averoigne finds himself falling under the sway of the dead Lady Mariel. The Holiness of Azedarac features the Bishop of Nimes, who in spite of his impiety becomes a saint. The Maker of Gargoyles tells of gargoyles that may come to life and wreak havoc on the populace.

The Disinterment of Venus is a pungent satire on the sexually inexperienced monks of P rigon. Mother of Toads exhibits the loathsome M re Antoinette, a witch who commands legions of toads. The Beast of Averoigne and other tales incorporate elements of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in ingenious and innovative ways.

This volume also includes Smith's poems and prose poems relating to Averoigne. All the texts have been corrected from previous editions, and the striking artwork of David Ho is also included. Introduced by Gahan Wilson, and with an afterword by Donald Sidney-Fryer, The Averoigne Chronicles is a rich feast of terror and seduction for all devotees of weird fantasy.

2019 THIS IS HORROR AWARDS WINNER: Short Story Collection of the Year

2019 BRAM STOKER AWARD(R) NOMINEE: Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection

This book is a treasure trove for lovers of literary horror fiction.--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

From the award-winning writer of The Fisherman comes a new collection of stories. A pair of disgraced soldiers seek revenge on the man who taught them how to torture. A young lawyer learns the history of the secret that warped her parents' marriage. A writer arrives at a mansion overlooking the Hudson River to write about the strange paper balloons floating through its grounds. A couple walks a path that shows them their past, present, and terrible future. A woman and her husband discover a cooler on the side of the road whose contents are decidedly unearthly. A man driving cross country has a late-night encounter with a figure claiming to be the Devil. And in the short novel that gives the collection its title, a woman chases a monster in a race against time.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born to a well-to-do family in Providence, Rhode Island. As a child, he revealed remarkable precocity in his early interests in literature and science. Ill-health dogged him in youth, rendering his school attendance sporadic; and in 1908 he experienced a nervous breakdown that rendered him a virtual recluse for several years. In 1914 he discovered the world of amateur journalism and began slowly emerging from his hermitry. He wrote tremendous amounts of essays, poetry, and other work; in 1917, under the encouragement from W. Paul Cook and others, he resumed the writing of horror fiction, and his career as a dream-weaver began anew. In 1921 Lovecraft met his future wife, Sonia H. Greene, at an amateur journalism convention. It was at this time that he began expanding his horizons, both geographical and intellectual: he traveled widely, from New England to New York to Cleveland; and he absorbed such literary and intellectual influences as Lord Dunsany, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Machen. In 1924 he and Sonia decided to marry, and Lovecraft moved to New York to pursue his literary fortune. But, as the first volume of this biography concludes, his metropolitan adventure would be bittersweet at best. S. T. Joshi's award-winning biography H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) provided the most detailed portrait of the life, work, and thought of the dreamer from Providence ever published. But that edition was in fact abridged from Joshi's original manuscript, and this expanded and updated two-volume edition restores the 150,000 words that Joshi omitted and, in addition, updates the texts with new findings.

William Hope Hodgson's writing life spanned fourteen years, during which he published novels and stories of the adventurous, the fantastic, and the horrific. Best known, perhaps, for his novel The House on the Borderland, Hodgson wrote several other landmark weird works, including The Boats of the Glen Carrig, The Ghost Pirates, and The Night Land, as well as dozens of short stories. He explored places in the ocean where realities overlapped, described the horrors of a house built beside a gap between dimensions, and transported readers to a desolate future, where abhuman monstrosities prowl. He displayed imaginative visions of staggering scope unlike any others in literature.

In this anthology, twenty-seven authors and poets visit Hodgson's worlds and concepts to dig deep into his mythologies and delve into fresh mysteries in unexpected times, locations, and interpretations. Whether or not you've read Hodgson's works, these visions of Hodgsonian horror will lead you into strange, liminal, and frightening new landscapes of the weird and fantastic.

Authors include: Linda D. Addison - David Agranoff - Meghan Arcuri - Sal Ciano - Michael Cisco - L. E. Daniels - Andy Davidson - Aaron Dries - Patrick Freivald - Teel James Glenn - Maxwell Ian Gold - Nancy Holder - Todd Keisling - John Langan - Adrian Ludens - Lee Murray - Lisa Morton - Peter Rawlik - Sam Rebelein - Ann K. Schwader - Steve Rasnic Tem - Tim Waggoner - Wendy N. Wagner - Kyla Lee Ward - Robert E. Waters - L. Marie Wood - Stephanie Wytovich

Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of the towering figures in the Golden Age of weird fiction, and his novels and tales have influenced generations of weird writers and remain immensely popular among readers. But much of his work has been difficult to obtain, remaining buried in obscure magazines and newspapers of a century ago or published in expensive limited editions.

This is the first edition of Machen's fiction to be based on a thorough examination of his manuscripts and early publications. It is also the first edition to arrange Machen's fiction chronologically by date of writing.

This first volume contains his charming picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), an exquisite imitation of the medieval narratives of Chaucer and Boccaccio. At this time Machen was a young journalist who had moved from his native Wales to London, and he wrote a number of humorous and slightly risqu sketches for fashionable London magazines.

But then he published The Great God Pan (1894), one of the pioneering works in the entire range of weird fiction. It was condemned by contemporary reviewers as the work of a diseased mind. Machen followed it up with the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895), containing the brilliant segments The Novel of the Black Seal (which features the Little People, a sub-human race lurking on the edges of civilization), The Novel of the White Powder, and other vivid narratives.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

This third volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with a tale, The Thousand and One Nights, that has never before been reprinted. It continues with a succession of tales that Machen wrote during and just after World War I, a cataclysm that shook Europe to its foundations. The most famous of these is The Bowmen (1914), a narrative of medieval soldiers coming to the rescue of besieged British infantrymen in France was widely believed to be a true account, in spite of Machen's repeated protestations to the contrary. Machen's final war tale, the short novel The Terror (1916), is an imperishable depiction of the revolt of animals against humanity's rulership of the earth.

In the 1920s Machen resorted to humor and satire to convey his dissatisfaction with the increasing secularization of his era, which he felt was robbing the imagination of wonder and mystery. He also began contributing to anthologies of original weird fiction edited by Cynthia Asquith and others, producing several memorable tales as a result, including The Happy Children and The Islington Mystery.

Machen's final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a subtle tale of supernatural menace, narrated in the blandly repertorial prose that Machen had developed in his later work. He then published two final volumes of weird tales, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool (both 1936), which contain many memorable tales, including The Bright Boy and N.

Machen's collected fiction is a monument to the author's fifty years of rumination about human life and the obscure mysteries that may lurk hidden in far-away corners of the earth--and in our imaginations. They are filled with an intensity and sincerity of expression testifying to their author's earnest philosophical and religious beliefs, and they are written in some of the most mellifluous prose of their time.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) is best known for creating exotic worlds of fantasy, such as the lost continent Zothique, set in the far future, the arctic realm of Hyperborea, and the medieval domain of Averoigne. It is less widely known that Smith was a pioneer in science fiction, as his tales appeared extensively in such pulp magazines as Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories and had a marked influence on the science fiction of his day.

Mars was a favored locale for several significant tales, including the cosmic horror masterpiece The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis. Seedling of Mars is one of several tales in this volume that broaches the distinctive subgenre of green horror that results from deadly animated plants. This motif first found expression in Smith's early prose poem The Flower-Devil, and he utilized it in such tales as Vulthoom, The Demon of the Flower, and others.

The remote planet Xiccarph is the setting for two tales, The Maze of the Enchanter and The Flower-Women. One of Smith's most expansive tales, The Monster of the Prophecy, is set on Antares, while the late story Phoenix is grimly apocalyptic in its setting in the far future, with most of the Earth's inhabitants killed off.

Clark Ashton Smith's mastery of a prose-poetic idiom lends a distinctive flavor to his interplanetary tales. Far from being naively optimistic adventures into the depths of space, they exhibit a rueful doubt as to the place of human beings in an immense and hostile universe.

This volume, edited by leading Clark Ashton Smith scholar Ronald S. Hilger, contains an illuminating preface by Nathan Ballingrud.

This second volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with Machen's most accomplished novel, The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895-97 and published in 1907), which H. P. Lovecraft called a memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind. It features Lucian Taylor, a young man from the country who struggles to become a writer in London. His ruminations on life, love, and authorship are extraordinarily poignant, and at one point he engages in a lengthy dream of being back in ancient Rome, in the town of Isca Silurum, near his birthplace in Wales.

Later in 1897 Machen wrote a series of exquisite prose poems that were later published as Ornaments in Jade (1924). These ten vignettes display Machen's luminous prose at its most evocative, and they touch upon the possibility of strange and wondrous phenomena concealed behind the outward fa ade of the mundane world.

Machen's most accomplished weird tale, The White People, is also found here. Its account of a young girl insidiously inculcated in the witch-cult, told entirely from her own perspective as she jots down her thoughts and impressions in a diary, achieves the pinnacle of clutching fear. A very different work is the short novel A Fragment of Life, telling of how a seemingly ordinary couple rediscover their sense of wonder in the world around them.

The novel The Secret Glory (written around 1907) is a discursive novel that searingly condemns the British school system for destroying the imaginations of its pupils. The entire work--including the final two chapters, first published only in a limited edition in 1992--is included here.

The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

Something strange is going on at the Quicksilver Mine in central California. Dead bodies are being dumped there; strange sounds and smells are emanating from its black depths. As increasingly bizarre phenomena occur in the area around the mine, people begin to wonder if Nature itself has turned against humanity and is rebelling at the violation of its pristine beauty. And are some of those who work in the mine actively conspiring to bring about a cataclysm that will overwhelm the region and the Earth?

Michael Shea began writing Momma Durtt in 1986. A few years later, he entered the University of San Francisco, to secure a master's degree in its writing program, and he completed this novel as his thesis. But Momma Durtt has lain unpublished ever since. Hippocampus Press is proud to present this novel of cosmic eco-horror from the pen of one of the masters of contemporary weird fiction. With vibrant characters, racy language, and a spectacular denouement, Momma Durtt is uniquely suited to our own times, when climate change is alerting us to the dangers of tampering with Nature.

The publication in 2001 of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft was a landmark. For the first time, all of Lovecraft's 500 or more poems-including hundreds of Christmas greetings, untitled poems, fragments, and poems embedded in his published and unpublished letters-were gathered in accurate texts, with critical commentary and full bibliography. Since that time, a dozen or more poems or poetic fragments have been discovered by scholars and researchers, and this new edition prints these items along with several other works of interest. Poems that Lovecraft revised for various authors are included, along with (where extant) the original poems that served as the basis for the revisions. The original versions of poems by Ovid, Horace, and other classical poets that Lovecraft translated are provided. And the commentary and bibliography have been thoroughly revised and updated. It can well be said that this second edition of The Ancient Track is the definitive collection of Lovecraft's entire poetic output. It has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft and the editor of Lovecraft's collected fiction, revisions, essays, and letters.

As the second volume of S. T. Joshi's comprehensive biography of H. P. Lovecraft begins, we find Lovecraft dwelling in misery in a one-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights: his wife, Sonia, has had to move to the Midwest for work, and he must rely on the companionship of the Kalem Club, the informal band of friends in the New York area. In 1926, in part through the intervention of his close friend Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft finally decided to return to his native Providence, Rhode Island, effectively ending his marriage. That return spurred the greatest spurt of literary creativity he would ever experience: in less than a year, such works as The Call of Cthulhu, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and The Colour out of Space would emerge from his pen, establishing Lovecraft as the leading weird fictionist of his generation. In spite of his increasing poverty, antiquarian travel occupied much of Lovecraft's time, and he gained an impressive knowledge of such oases of antiquity as Charleston, Quebec, St. Augustine, and Richmond. These voyages both renewed his connection with the past and infused his literary work, as such later tales as The Whisperer in Darkness and The Shadow over Innsmouth drew ever more profoundly upon his far-flung travels. Intellectually, Lovecraft evolved as well. Recent developments in science confirmed his materialism and his atheism, and the onset of the Great Depression gradually caused him to reassess his political and economic theory; he emerged as a moderate socialist and advocate of the New Deal. Late in life he became a giant in the world of fantasy fandom--a development that foreshadowed his worldwide fame in the decades following his early death.

Fans of literate, subtle horror will clamor for more.-Publishers Weekly Starred Review

The quality of the stories selected is so uniformly high it's difficult to single out the best...-Rue Morgue

For the past two decades, British author Mark Samuels has written some of the most vibrant and challenging weird fiction of any contemporary writer. But his work-collected in such volumes as The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003), The Man Who Collected Machen (2010), and Written in Darkness (2014)-has by and large appeared in limited editions not widely distributed in the United States.

This volume features seventeen of Samuels's best weird stories. Several display his fascination with technology, advertising, and urban horror, as in Apartment 205 and the title story. Other tales speak of the writing of weird fiction itself as a potentially hazardous and supernatural enterprise, as in The White Hands and Vrolyck.

In several of his lengthier narratives-notably The Gentleman from Mexico and The Crimson Fog-Samuels draws upon H. P. Lovecraft's pseudomythology to venture into realms of cosmic horror. The Black Mould and My World Has No Memories are distinctively existential tales of undeniable potency.

Mark Samuels is one of the pioneering weird writers of today, and this selection makes plain why he has few rivals in the portrayal of the horrors that are unique to our troubled age.

From as early as the 1970s, Michael Shea (1946-2014) distinguished himself as one of the most compelling writers of weird fiction of his generation. Now that his classic story The Autopsy has been adapted for television for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, the time is right for a full-scale assessment of Shea's work as a writer of tales of terror and the supernatural.

The Autopsy is one of several tales that mingles gruesomeness and science fiction. Others include Polyphemus, where the members of a spaceship encounter the titanic eye of some unthinkably vast and hostile entity. The Angel of Death exhibits the battle of two alien entities as they successively inhabit hapless human beings in their quest for supremacy.

Shea's sensitivity to the downtrodden is exhibited in such tales as The Horror on the #33, Water of Life, and Tollbooth, populated by homeless people, prostitutes, drug dealers, and other disdained members of society. Shea's affinity for California is shown in Fill it with Regular, Upscale, and other tales that bring his native state to life. As a bonus, two unpublished stories are included: Feeding Spiders, evoking the work of a writer who adopted California as his home-Ray Bradbury; and Ghost, where a vengeful ghost stalks the tough streets of South Boston.

Michael Shea was the author of dozens of novels and tales of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. This volume shows why his vibrant work deserves to live in the hearts and minds of weird fiction devotees.

In the second volume of the letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the two authors continue their wide-ranging discussion of such central issues as the relative value of barbarism and civilization, the virtues of the frontier and of settled city life, and other related issues. Lovecraft regales Howard with his extensive travels up and down the eastern seaboard, including trips to Quebec, Florida, and obscure corners of New England, while Howard writes engagingly of his own travels through the lonely stretches of Texas. Each has great praise for the other's writings in Weird Tales and elsewhere, and each conducts searching discussions of literature, philosophy, politics, and economics in the wake of the depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt's election. World affairs, including the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, also engage their attention.

All letters are exhaustively annotated by the editors, and the volume concludes with an extensive bibliography of both writers as well as the publication of a few letters to Lovecraft from Robert E. Howard's father, Dr. I. M. Howard, in the wake of his son's tragic and unexpected suicide.

In this anthology of weird fiction, twenty-two authors share their harrowing visions of worlds shaped by the Yellow Sign, in stories and poems inspired by Robert W. Chambers's foundational works of weird horror. From the personal to the historic, from the macabre to the fantastic, the stories and poems gathered here illuminate new, unexpected realities shaped by the King in Yellow, under the sway of the Yellow Sign, or in the grip of madnesses inspired by their power.

Authors included: Marc Abbott - Linda D. Addison - Meghan Arcuri - Greg Chapman - JG Faherty - Trevor Firetog - Patrick Freivald - Carol Gyzander - Todd Keisling - John Langan - Curtis Lawson - Adrian Ludens - Lisa Morton - Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - Sarah Read - Kathleen Scheiner - Ann K. Schwader - Darrell Schweitzer - J. Daniel Stone - Steven Van Patten - Tim Waggoner - Kaaron Warren

Robert W. Chambers's classic work of weird fiction, The King in Yellow (1895), contained two stories that have exercised wide influence in the genre. The Repairer of Reputations introduced the world to The King in Yellow, a play in two acts, banned for its reputed power to drive mad anyone who reads its complete text. Another story, The Yellow Sign, used the experiences of an artist and his model to elaborate on the mythos of the Yellow King, the Yellow Sign, and their danger to all who encounter them. In those tales Chambers crafted fascinating glimpses of a cosmos populated by conspiracies, government-sanctioned suicide chambers, haunted artists, premonitions of death, unreliable narrators-and dark, enigmatic occurrences tainted by the alien world of Carcosa, where the King rules in his tattered yellow mantle. In Carcosa, black stars rise and Cassilda and Camilla speak and sing. In Carcosa, eyes peer from within pallid masks to gaze across Lake Hali at the setting of twin suns.

Zothique, a mythical land of the far future, is Clark Ashton Smith's most carefully worked out fantasy realm, and many of his most celebrated stories are set in this evocative world of languid decadence, strangeness, and sexuality. Beginning with The Empire of the Necromancers (1932) and extending all the way to the short play The Dead Will Cuckold You (1956), Smith fashioned Zothique in tale after tale, each adding new elements to the locale.

As we read the Zothique tales, we see how the imminent extinguishing of the sun has caused civilization to collapse. Paradoxically, society has reverted to a kind of primitivism with the return of royalty, superstition, and sorcery. This scenario allowed Smith to engage in tongue-in-cheek archaism of both langauge and setting. Some of the most poignant stories he ever wrote-stories that fused fantasy and the supernatural with a sense of aching loss and tragedy-are set in Zothique, including The Dark Eidolon and Xeethra.

Other tales, such as The Weaver of the Vault and Necromancy in Naat, focus morbidly on death. Eroticism is the focus of The Witchcraft of Ulua and Morthylla, while The Voyage of King Euvoran is grimly humorous. And The Last Hieroglyph is a fitting capstone to the series in its depiction of the ultimate destruction of the realm.

Of all his story cycles, Zothique allowed Clark Ashton Smith the widest scope for his imagination. This volume presents his expression of that imagination in prose fiction, drama, and poetry. All the texts have been scrupulously edited by leading Smith scholar Ron Hilger, and features a new introduction by Donald Sidney-Fryer.

H. P. Lovecraft's Fungi from Yuggoth is a remarkable achievement. Written in little more than a week (December 27, 1929-January 4, 1930), the cycle of 36 sonnets is a compact encapsulation of the essence of Lovecraft's imaginative vision. Its central motifs-the lure of hidden worlds, cosmic alienation, the terrors lurking behind the placid surface of life-are those that structured Lovecraft's greatest weird tales.

David E. Schultz has spent decades preparing this annotated edition of the Fungi. He discusses the origin of the poem (including the influence of Donald Wandrei's similar cycle, Sonnets of the Midnight Hours), its connections with Lovecraft's fiction, Lovecraft's changing thoughts on natural expression in poetry, and the complex history of the poem's publication-both as individual sonnets and as a unity. Schultz also provides penetrating annotations on every poem.

This volume features the superlative artwork of longtime Lovecraftian artist Jason C. Eckhardt, who has produced a poignant cover perhaps more Lovecraftian than most seen of late, and illustrated each poem in a separate full-page edition. Readers are also treated to a reproduction of Lovecraft's handwritten manuscript of the Fungi, which shows how carefully he revised each sonnet in the course of composition, and Harold S. Farnese's sheet music for two of the sonnets, most of it never published previously.

This edition takes its place as a landmark contribution to Lovecraft studies-one that allows readers to appreciate Lovecraft's most famous poem as never before.

David E. Schultz is the editor of an annotated edition of Lovecraft's Commonplace Book (1987) and coeditor, with S. T. Joshi, of numerous editions of Lovecraft's letters, including A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (2009) and Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (2017). Schultz's revised and annotated edition of H. P. Lovecraft: Commonplace Book is forthcoming from Hippocampus Press.

In the thirty years since S. T. Joshi prepared revised editions of H. P. Lovecraft's stories for Arkham House, Joshi has continued to do research on the textual accuracy of Lovecraft's stories, and this comprehensive new edition is the result.

For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story-manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, along with how Lovecraft significantly revised his stories after initial publication.

The result is the definitive text of Lovecraft's fiction-an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it and should endure as the standard text of Lovecraft's stories for many years.

In this first volume, Lovecraft's earliest stories are printed in chronological order by date of writing. Included are such early triumphs as Dagon and The Outsider, along with the many tales Lovecraft wrote under the inspiration of Lord Dunsany. The celebrated Herbert West-Reanimator and The Rats in the Walls show Lovecraft experimenting with longer narratives-a tendency that will culminate in the novelettes and novellas of his final decade of writing.

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Biographical Notice]

I. Childhood and Adolescence (1890-1914)

II. Amateur Journalism (1914-1921)

III. Expanding Horizons (1921-1924)

IV. Marriage and Exile (1924-1926)

V. Homecoming (1926-1930)

VI. The Old Gentleman (1931-1937)

Appendix: Some Notes on a Nonentity

Glossary of Names

Further Reading

Index