The Essential Horror of H P Lovecraft: The Short Horror Stories of HP Lovecraft

by H. P. Lovecraft

Overview

The Essential Horror of H P Lovecraft

The Short Horror Stories of HP Lovecraft

By HP Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales are "The Call of Cthulhu," canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from earnings as author and editor, Lovecraft saw commercial success increasingly elude him in this latter period, partly because he lacked the confidence and drive to promote himself. He subsisted in progressively straitened circumstances in his last years; an inheritance was completely spent by the time he died at the age of 46.

CONTENTS

The Alchemist

The Beast in the Cave

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

The Cats of Ulthar

Celephais

The Crawling Chaos

Dagon

The Doom That Came to Sarnath

Ex Oblivione

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family

Herbert West: Reanimator

Hypnos

The Lurking Fear

Memory

The Music of Eric Zann

The Nameless City

Nyarlathotep

The Picture in the House

Poetry and the Gods

Polaris

The Statement of Randolph Carter

The Street

The Terrible Old Man

The Tomb

The Tree

What the Moon Brings

The White Ship

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781523419883
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	01/15/2016
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.02(h) x 0.37(d)

About the Author

Howard Phillips "H. P." Lovecraft, August 20, 1890 - March 15, 1937, was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.

Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His father was confined to a mental institution when Lovecraft was 3 years old. His grandfather, a wealthy businessman, enjoyed storytelling and was an early influence. Intellectually precocious but sensitive, Lovecraft had begun composing rudimentary horror tales and had begun to be overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety by the age of 8.

The adult Lovecraft was gaunt with dark eyes set in a very pale face (he rarely went out before nightfall). For five years after leaving school he lived an isolated existence with his mother, without seeking employment or new social contacts, primarily writing poetry. This changed in 1913 when he wrote a letter to The Argosy, a pulp magazine, complaining about the insipidness of the love stories in the publication by writer Fred Jackson. The ensuing debate in the magazine's letters column caught the eye of Edward F. Daas, president of the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA), who invited Lovecraft to join the organization in 1914.

The UAPA reinvigorated Lovecraft and incited him to contribute many poems and essays; in 1916 his first published story, The Alchemist, appeared in the United Amateur. The earliest commercially published work came in 1922, when he was aged thirty-one. By this time he had begun to build what became a huge network of correspondents. His lengthy and frequent missives would make him one of the great letter writers of the century, Among his correspondents were Robert Bloch (Psycho), Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian series). Many former aspiring authors later paid tribute to his mentoring and encouragement through the correspondence.

His oeuvre is sometimes seen as consisting of three periods: an early Edgar Allan Poe influence; followed by a Lord Dunsany inspired Dream Cycle; and finally the Cthulhu Mythos stories. However, many distinctive ideas and entities present in the third period were introduced in the earlier works, such as the 1917 story "Dagon", and the threefold classification is partly overlapping.