num_pages: 384
description: For anyone interested even faintly in good horror writing what we have here is pure gold: Lovecraft's own selection of the best the genre has to offer along with his comments on the individual stories. Talk about the horse's mouth! This book is long overdue.- Peter Straub Lovecraft opened the way for me as he had done for others before me -- Robert Bloch Fritz Leiber and Ray Bradbury among them. The reader would do well to remember that it is his shadow so long and gaunt and his eyes so dark and puritanical which overlie almost all of the important horror fiction that has come since.- Stephen King The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.- H.P. Lovecraft In 1927 Howard Philips Lovecraft published a 30000-word essay titled Supernatural Horror in Literature. In it the father of American horror writing whose tales presented one of the earliest scholarly studies of the supernatural in fiction defined the horror story as one in which a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present. Those authors discussed in Lovecraft's seminal essay were used as the basis for the 1993 anthology H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror edited by Dave Carson and Stephen Jones. With H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural Jones uses that same essay as inspiration for a new anthology of nineteen new selections each preceded by an excerpt from Lovecraft. Included here are works from authors as varied as Edgar Allen Poe Arthur Conan Doyle Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. While these stories maycarry a classical pedigree their contents remain just as chilling and disturbing as anything cooked up by modern-day horror writers. The book also includes a short essay from Lovecraft himself Notes on Writing Weird Fiction in which he lays out tips and rules for mastering the form.
language: English
title: H.P. Lovecraft's Book of the Supernatural: Classic Tales of the Macabre
publisher: Fall River Press for Barnes & Noble