By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited with a Foreword and Notes by Leslie S. Klinger
Introduction by Alan Moore

Dust Jacket Text

“Klinger’s remarks open up a breathtaking, authoritative, affectionate vision of this cherished but often misunderstood genius of weird fiction.”
—PETER STRAUB ————— “With an increasing distance from the twentieth century . . . the New England poet, author, essayist, and stunningly profuse epistoler Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge as one of that tumultuous period’s 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, 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 (1890–1937) 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, Lovecraft—“the 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 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 extinguishing both our individual sanity and entire civilization.
Following his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger collects here Lovecraft’s complete “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 1,000 annotations, this volume illuminates every dimension of H.P. Lovecraft and stirs the Great Old Ones in their millennia of sleep.

LESLIE S. KLINGER is the editor of numerous books, including the best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The New Annotated Dracula, and The Annotated Sandman. He lives in Malibu, California.

Contents

• Introduction by Alan Moore
• Foreword
• Editor’s Note
• The Stories
• Dagon
• The Statement of Randolph Carter
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep
• Nyarlathotep
• The Picture in the House
• Herbert West: Reanimator
• The Nameless City
• The Hound
• The Festival
• The Unnamable
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Silver Key
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• The Colour Out of Space
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Whisperer in Darkness
• At the Mountains of Madness
• The Shadow over Innsmouth
• The Dreams in the Witch House
• The Thing on the Doorstep
• The Shadow Out of Time
• The Haunter of the Dark
• Additional Material
• Appendix 1: Chronological Table
• Appendix 2: Faculty of Miskatonic University
• Appendix 3: History of the Necronomicon
• Appendix 4: Genealogy of the Elder Races
• Appendix 5: The Works of H.P. Lovecraft
• Appendix 6: The “Revisions” of H.P. Lovecraft
• Appendix 7: H.P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements

Bibliographic Information

The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. By H.P. Lovecraft, Edited with a Foreword and Notes by Leslie S. Klinger, Introduction by Alan Moore. New York, NY: Liveright; 13 October 2014; ISBN 978-0-87140-453-4; 922 pages; hardcover.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in hardcover from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Liveright (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.).