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
- 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.).