The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham

lovecraft-binding

Excellent volume. Massively annotated, 1/3 sidebar is almost always full of red text. Mentioned people, places, and artworks are shown inline.

First volume covered mostly more popular stories (arbitrarily chosen as ones mentioning Arkham), but this has most of his Dream Quest, and “The Outsider”, one of my favorite of his stories.

It’s a big improvement over S.T. Joshi’s fandom-oriented books, which had some blurry photos half-assed shoved in the text, no index, in one volume no table of contents!

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them”
—H.P. Lovecraft, “The Tomb” (1917)

The man himself was troubling, but he’s long dead and the shadow of his writing has happily darkened the entire 20th & 21st Centuries.

I don’t know why, but I’m really getting in the mood of endless Halloween this year, and a steady diet of horror helps.