H.P. Lovecraft was the inventor of cosmic horror, of weird fiction and the Cthulhu mythology. His stories found purchase in the fertile earth of pulp fiction where he inspired many other writers from Robert E. Howard to Clark Ashton Smith. This is a companion volume to our hugely successful Gothic Fantasy series of classic and modern writers.
S.T. Joshi (foreword) is a leading authority on H.P. Lovecraft, as well as other writers mostly in the realms of supernatural and fantasy fiction. He is the author of
The Weird Tale (1990),
The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). His award-winning biography
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was later expanded as
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (2010).
H.P. Lovecraft is a modern master of horror and gothic fiction, influencing a generation of writers and creating dark worlds that still haunt the speculative fiction of today. Lovecraft's father died in a mental institution when Lovecraft was only two years of age and he spent very little time at school, due to illnesses. In his early years though he corresponded with amateur writers and editors, wrote essays, poetry and reviews for amateur magazines. In the 1920s he began to sell to the popular pulp magazines of the day, particularly Weird Tales and Astonishing Tales.