By Gavin Callaghan

Back Cover Text

This volume attempts an objective reassessment of the controversial works and life of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Ignoring secondary accounts and various received truths, Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft’s parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sympathy for the Shoggoths
• One • Dark Arcadia: Arcadia, Arkham and H. P. Lovecraft’s Process of Classical Inversion
• Two • The Birds and the Bees (According to H. P. Lovecraft)
• Three • Secrets Behind the Locked Door: Lovecraft and the Theseus Myth
• Four • From the Moon to the Pit: Lovecraft’s Moon-Ladder
• Five • Lovecraft’s In Memoriam: Phillips Gamwell and the Innsmouth Coda
• Six • H. P. Lovecraft and the Magna Mater
• Appendix
• Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Bibliographic Information

H.P. Lovecraft’s Dark Arcadia: The Satire, Symbology and Contradiction. By Gavin Callaghan. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co.; 2013; ISBN 978-0-7864-7079-2; softcover; 288 pages.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in softcover from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, McFarland & Co..