num_pages: 852
description: With an increasing distance from the twentieth centurythe New England poet author essayist and stunningly profuse epistolary Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge as one of that tumultuous periods 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 Lovecraftthe 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 1000 annotations this volume illuminates every dimension of H. P. Lovecraft and stirs the Great Old Ones in their millennia of sleep.
language: English
title: The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft
publisher: Liveright Publishing Corp./W.W. Norton