The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Frequently imitated and widely influential, H. P. Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre for the twentieth century. Discarding witches and ghosts, he envisaged mankind as an outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi makes his selection from the early tales of nightmares and madness to the overpowering cosmic terror of 'The Call of Cthulhu'. This is the first paperback edition to include the definitive corrected texts of these classics of American fantasy fiction.

H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction-three short novels and about sixty short stories-has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.