Introduction

In the three-quarters of a century since his death, H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has enjoyed a shift in literary reputation akin to that of Edgar Allan Poe, the writer whose work he held in highest regard. Like Poe, Lovecraft has gone from being perceived as a writer of a peculiar type of fiction with appeal only to a limited audience, to being respected as a literary figure whose work measures up to that of other classic American writers, Poe among them. In Lovecraft’s case, this change in critical estimation is perhaps a little more surprising. Whereas Poe wrote for mainstream publications and saw several collections of his poetry and short stories published in his lifetime, Lovecraft sold his writings to disposable pulp fiction magazines that were read almost exclusively by horror enthusiasts. Only one book of his work, published in a miniscule print run, saw print before his death, and for much of the next quarter century his work was nearly the exclusive property of the specialty press Arkham House, named for the famous town that dominates Lovecraft’s weird tales and created largely for the purpose of getting Lovecraft’s work between hardcovers. Unlike Poe, until recently, Lovecraft’s legacy was as obscure after his death as in his lifetime.

It is as a horror writer that most readers know Lovecraft, and in that regard there is no question that he is one of the genre’s most important authors, the greatest American horror writer after Poe and an artist who has influenced every horror writer of consequence who came after him. Prior to Lovecraft, most writers of supernatural fiction built stories around traditional genre fixtures—the vampire, the werewolf, the demon, and especially the ghost—and framed their dramas in terms of the struggle between good and evil. Lovecraft, by contrast, gave a cosmic scope to his horrors more akin to that of science fiction (albeit a science fiction that looked apprehensively over its shoulder more than it looked forward).

In a 1927 letter to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, the magazine that published most of his stories, Lovecraft wrote: “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large … To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligent and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.” To make his point about the insignificance of human concerns outside of a human frame of reference, Lovecraft conjured a pack of monstrous entities with such provocative names as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and the like. Biologically impossible, these beings exist outside of space and time, though they occasionally emerge in our world to wreak havoc. Lacking a sensibility appropriate for appreciating these beings’ incomprehensible alienness, humans tend to refer to them in a vocabulary usually reserved for describing gods and their awesome supernatural powers.

The stories in which Lovecraft explicitly references these monsters were singled out by his publisher as his tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Over the years, many of Lovecraft’s colleagues and literary disciples contributed their own Lovecraft-inflected stories to the mythos, making it one of the biggest and most enduring shared worlds in modern fantastic fiction. Though Lovecraft’s so-called mythos tales represent some of his best writing and best-known work, it’s not really appropriate to consider them as entities apart from his other stories. The mythos is just one approach Lovecraft used to express the strangeness of horrors beyond human ken. All but a handful of the twenty stories in this volume—mythos and non-mythos—are set in Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of New England, where towns named Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth are home both to backwoods rustics and civilized sophisticates who chance upon horrors in the course of their daily lives. Invariably, the revelations they uncover are mind-shattering, driving them to despair, madness, and even death. Ultimately, this is what unites all of Lovecraft’s macabre fiction: the terror that characters (and by extension, the reader) feel when they come to realize the inconceivable horrors that lie in wait just beyond the small, well-lit circle of the familiar world they have always known—and the understanding that, for all of their education, they are little better than superstitious primitives, cowering in fear at the sounds of vast and incomprehensible things that lumber about unseen in the surrounding darkness.

Stefan Dziemianowicz
New York, 2012