Some say home is where the heart is, but what if the heart in your home is the "Tell-Tale Heart"?Houses can be reservoirs of joy . . . or misery. When this affective power endures, a place is said to be "haunted." When this energy for good or evil continues-especially when it touches people who were not involved in the primary circumstance which occurred in that location-then a place is considered alive. Places, then, may serve as portals through which a person can enter into the p...

The author writes:This book began as an expansion of my essay, "H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West," in The Weird Tale, but very quickly became something quite different, to the degree that the two works have little save the title in common. I have always been interested in Lovecraft the philosopher, and in my Starmont Reader’s Guide to Lovecraft (1982) I attempted a very compressed account of his philosophical views. To treat so complex a thinker as Lovecraft in a few pages ...

Sixteen all-new stories spring from the concepts of doomed exploration, remote terror, and cosmic horror. A who's-who lineup of authors instills new energy into the sub-genre that is Lovecraft, featuring authors who rarely contribute to a Lovecraftian anthology, including Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Alan Dean Foster, Jonathan Maberry, William F. Nolan (Logan's Run), and more. New foreword by Kim Newman and edited by S. T. Joshi.

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected, stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that this volume does not contain necessarily...

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."At the time of his death in 1937, American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was virtually unknown. The power of his stories was too great to contain, however. As the decades slipped by, his dark visions laid down roots in the collective imagination of mankind, and they grew strong. Now Cthulhu is a name known to many and, deep under the seas, Lovecraft's greatest creation becomes restle...

"The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity . . . "Plagued by insane nightmare visions, Walter Gilman seeks help in Miskatonic University's infamous library of forbidden books, where, in the pages of Abdul Alhazred's dreaded Necronomicon, he finds terrible hints that seem to connect his own studies in advanced mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. The Dreams in the Witch House, gathered together here with more than ...

A definitive edition of stories by the master of supernatural fictionHoward Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. This Penguin Classics edition brings together a dozen of the master's tales-from his early short stories "Under the Pyramids" (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and "The...

A much-awaited collection of prose and poetry from one of the great cosmic masters of the supernaturalNot just any fantasy, horror, and science fiction author could impress H. P. Lovecraft into calling him “unexcelled by any other writer, dead or living” or compel Fritz Lieber to employ the worthy term sui generis. Clark Ashton Smith—autodidact, prolific poet, amateur philosopher, bizarre sculptor, and unmatched storyteller—simply wrote like no one else, b...

In every way this monograph should be regarded as merely a preliminary study of Campbell. Because much of his work is not widely known to the general public, I have felt the need to provide fairly detailed synopses of his major novels and tales, and this has reduced the space available for analysis. While I have chosen tostudy Campbell's work thematically, I am aware that many other perspectives could be employed.Although the opinions in this book are of course my own, I hav...

Weird fiction is an incredibly rich and varied genre, running the gamut from supernatural horror to imaginary-world fantasy to psychological terror. This anthology seeks to exhibit the wide range of themes, motifs, and imagery that weird fiction allows, as embodied in the work of some of the leading contemporary writers in the field.The ghost or revenant is a venerable motif, and stories by John Shirley, Lynda E. Rucker, and Reggie Oliver ring fascinating changes on it. Allied to t...

Modern Masters of Terror The works of H. P. Lovecraft have inspired brilliant writers for decades, leading Stephen King to call him the "twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." S.T. Joshi-the twenty-first century's preeminent expert on all things Lovecraftian-gathers greatest modern acolytes, including Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, Darrell Schweitzer and W.H.Pugmire, each of whom serves up a new masterpie...

H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), the pioneering writer of weird fiction, has himself become an icon in popular culture. Stories, novels, and other works featuring the gaunt, lantern-jawed gentleman from Providence, Rhode Island, have proliferated. These works have been triggered by the incredible amount of knowledge we have on the writer—his family, his friends, his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities—as found in his thousands of surviving letters.This anthology takes the figure of Lovec...