Books published by Hippocampus Press

In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, Donald Sidney-Fryer has distinguished himself by being the biographer, critic, and bibliographer of Clark Ashton Smith; the chronicler of the "California Romantics," a school of 20th-century poets including Smith, George Sterling, and himself; and an unfailingly acute analyst of poetry and prose fiction in several languages. In this scintillating volume of his more recent writings, Sidney-Fryer dwells at length on his visits to Thailand, Cambodia, Egypt, Central America, Hawaii, and Micronesia, revealing his sensitivity to exotic landscapes and the weight of history and culture in these ancient lands. We also find essays and reviews on surrealism, the poetry of George Sterling, Wade German, Henry J. Vester III, and Alan Gullette, and two vivid accounts of Lovecraft conventions in Providence, R.I. The latter sections of the volume contain Sidney-Fryer's ongoing experiments in poetry and prose poetry, exhibiting his mastery of a multiplicity of verse forms and also taking note of his momentous transition from California to Massachusetts.

The tenth issue of Spectral Realms demonstrates that this journal of weird poetry is going strong as it completes its fifth year of publication. Once again, this issue features the work of many of the leading voices in contemporary weird verse: Wade German, Adam Bolivar, Christina Sng, Frank Coffman, Ann K. Schwader, Chad Hensley, Thomas Tyrrell, and Ian Futter. Manuel Arenas, Liam Garriock, David Barker, and others provide vivid prose-poems. Jeff Hall's "In the Garden of Thasaidon" is a tribute to Clark Ashton Smith, while Manuel Pérez-Campos's "The Mirror of Arkham Woe" draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft's "The Colour out of Space." The classic reprints feature a pair of scintillating haunted-house poems by the acclaimed American poets Lizette Woodworth Reese and Edwin Arlington Robinson. Marcos Legaria supplies the second part of his study of Clark Ashton Smith's influence on Robert Nelson, quoting the entirety of Nelson's vivid poem "Dream-Stair" (Weird Tales, April 1935). Among the reviews, Leigh Blackmore studies the October 2018 issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and Donald Sidney-Fryer contributes a review-article on the brilliant work of G. Sutton Breiding. As a special bonus, a complete index of authors and titles to all ten issues of Spectral Realms is provided.

Wilfred B. Talman was a late member of the Kalem Club, the group of literati who gathered around H. P. Lovecraft during his years in New York (1924-26). In the 1920s Talman attempted to write weird fiction, and Lovecraft's letters to him feature extensive advice on the story he revised for Talman, "Two Black Bottles"; Lovecraft also wrote a 6000-word synopsis for a story, "The Pool," that Talman never wrote; the synopsis is here presented in an appendix. But Talman soon moved to other interests, and in his correspondence Lovecraft discusses such diverse subjects as Dutch settlement of the American colonies, the Greek calendar, and his wide-ranging travels. Helen V. Sully is one of Lovecraft's few women correspondents. A friend of Clark Ashton Smith, she made the long trip from California to Rhode Island to see Lovecraft, and he treated her with his customary old-world courtesy. In their subsequent correspondence, Lovecraft attempted to act as consoler to Sully (who had apparently lapsed into depression), and his sage words on ethics, values, and contemporary civilization are still of value. Lovecraft also exchanged a few letters with Helen's mother, Genevieve Sully. As with other volumes in the Letters of H. P. Lovecraft series, this volume prints all surviving letters unabridged and with extensive annotations by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi, along with numerous writings-prose, essays, and poetry-by Lovecraft's correspondents.

The passing of Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire in the spring of 2019 was a grievous blow to his many friends, colleagues, and devotees, but his literary legacy is likely to endure for decades to come. In this volume, which spans the spectrum of his work from the 1980s to the present day, Pugmire demonstrates why he became perhaps the leading proponent of Lovecraftian short fiction in his time. Several tales are set in Pugmire's Sesqua Valley-a parallel to Lovecraft's Arkham Country, and based on the Pacific Northwest topography he knew from a lifetime's residence. But beyond the mere evocation of landscape, Pugmire's tales are enlivened by the presence of vivid, piquant characters-male and female, gay and straight, sinister and naïve, all of whom contribute to the atmosphere of refined strangeness that was Pugmire's signature achievement. But Pugmire's work extended well beyond mere Lovecraftian pastiche, and in such tales as "The Barrier Between" and "The Boy with the Bloodstained Mouth" he demonstrates both originality and skill in weird creation. In sum, this volume is a testament to the pioneering imagination of one of the most distinctive writers of his generation. W. H. Pugmire (1951-2019) was the author of Weird Inhabitants of Sesqua Valley (2009), The Tangled Muse (2011), An Ecstasy of Fear (2019), and many other volumes. He lived for most of his life in Seattle, Washington.

H. P. Lovecraft's letters are among the most remarkable literary documents of their time, and they are a major reason why he has become such an icon in contemporary culture. He wrote tens of thousands of letters, some of them of great length; but more than that, these letters are incredibly revelatory in the depth of detail they provide for all aspects of his life, work, and thought. This volume, first published in 2000, assembles generous extracts of Lovecraft's letters covering the entirety of his life, from childhood until his death. He tells of his youthful interests (poetry, Greco-Roman mythology, science), his childhood friends, and the "blank" period of 1908-13, after he dropped out of high school. He emerged from his hermitry in 1914 by joining the amateur journalism movement, where he became a leading figure and was involved in numerous literary and personal controversies. In 1921 Lovecraft became acquainted with Sonia Greene, whom he would marry in 1924. By that time, he had begun publishing in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. But his marriage was a failure: living in New York, he was unable find a job and found the teeming city so different from the tranquility of his native Providence, R.I. Returning home in 1926, he embarked on a tremendous literary outburst, and over the next ten years wrote many of the stories that have ensured his literary immortality. Lord of a Visible World is a riveting compilation that not only paints a full portrait of Lovecraft's life, writings, and philosophical beliefs, but features the piquant and engaging prose characteristic of his letters. In this new edition, the editors have updated all references to current editions of his work and also exhaustively revised their notes and commentary. TABLE OF CONTENTSIntroduction[Biographical Notice]I. Childhood and Adolescence (1890-1914)II. Amateur Journalism (1914-1921)III. Expanding Horizons (1921-1924)IV. Marriage and Exile (1924-1926)V. Homecoming (1926-1930)VI. The Old Gentleman (1931-1937)Appendix: Some Notes on a NonentityGlossary of NamesFurther ReadingIndex

This third volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with a tale, "The Thousand and One Nights," that has never before been reprinted. It continues with a succession of tales that Machen wrote during and just after World War I, a cataclysm that shook Europe to its foundations. The most famous of these is "The Bowmen" (1914), a narrative of medieval soldiers coming to the rescue of besieged British infantrymen in France was widely believed to be a true account, in spite of Machen's repeated protestations to the contrary. Machen's final war tale, the short novel The Terror (1916), is an imperishable depiction of the revolt of animals against humanity's rulership of the earth. In the 1920s Machen resorted to humor and satire to convey his dissatisfaction with the increasing secularization of his era, which he felt was robbing the imagination of wonder and mystery. He also began contributing to anthologies of original weird fiction edited by Cynthia Asquith and others, producing several memorable tales as a result, including "The Happy Children" and "The Islington Mystery." Machen's final novel, The Green Round (1933), is a subtle tale of supernatural menace, narrated in the blandly repertorial prose that Machen had developed in his later work. He then published two final volumes of weird tales, The Cosy Room and The Children of the Pool (both 1936), which contain many memorable tales, including "The Bright Boy" and "N." Machen's collected fiction is a monument to the author's fifty years of rumination about human life and the obscure mysteries that may lurk hidden in far-away corners of the earth-and in our imaginations. They are filled with an intensity and sincerity of expression testifying to their author's earnest philosophical and religious beliefs, and they are written in some of the most mellifluous prose of their time. The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

This second volume of Machen's collected fiction begins with Machen's most accomplished novel, The Hill of Dreams (written in 1895-97 and published in 1907), which H. P. Lovecraft called a "memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind." It features Lucian Taylor, a young man from the country who struggles to become a writer in London. His ruminations on life, love, and authorship are extraordinarily poignant, and at one point he engages in a lengthy dream of being back in ancient Rome, in the town of Isca Silurum, near his birthplace in Wales. Later in 1897 Machen wrote a series of exquisite prose poems that were later published as Ornaments in Jade (1924). These ten vignettes display Machen's luminous prose at its most evocative, and they touch upon the possibility of strange and wondrous phenomena concealed behind the outward façade of the mundane world. Machen's most accomplished weird tale, "The White People," is also found here. Its account of a young girl insidiously inculcated in the witch-cult, told entirely from her own perspective as she jots down her thoughts and impressions in a diary, achieves the pinnacle of clutching fear. A very different work is the short novel A Fragment of Life, telling of how a seemingly ordinary couple rediscover their sense of wonder in the world around them. The novel The Secret Glory (written around 1907) is a discursive novel that searingly condemns the British school system for destroying the imaginations of its pupils. The entire work-including the final two chapters, first published only in a limited edition in 1992-is included here. The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

The works of Anglo-Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947) made an indelible and ever-expanding impression in the genre of horror and the supernatural, and have always inspired both ardent advocates and determined opponents. In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde, Jerome K. Jerome, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle admired his work, but the majority of critics were hostile, and he was often seen as part of the Decadent movement of the "Yellow 'Nineties." The first section of this critical anthology provides important contextual information about Machen's life and works, and gives a clear impression of how Machen was regarded in the 1920s, when his books began to emerge from the shadows. The following section offers contributions concerned with Machen's role as a figure of the 1890s and a participant in the Decadent movement. The third section presents discussions Machen's interest in ritual magic, occultism, classical mythology, the sublime, and his own individual and particular form of Christianity. In his later work, Machen never lost his deep interest in folklore and popular customs, eccentric characters and curious historical episodes, and the present volume's final section shows how these continued to inform Machen's work right up until his last writing. In sum total, this volume presents an extended critical assessment of Machen's work, early and late. The volume has been edited by Mark Valentine, a leading authority on Machen, author of Arthur Machen (1995), and editor of Aklo, All Hallows, and Wormwood; and Timothy J. Jarvis, instructor in creative writing and author of the novel The Wanderer (2014) and numerous works of short fiction.

Welsh writer Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of the towering figures in the Golden Age of weird fiction, and his novels and tales have influenced generations of weird writers and remain immensely popular among readers. But much of his work has been difficult to obtain, remaining buried in obscure magazines and newspapers of a century ago or published in expensive limited editions. This is the first edition of Machen's fiction to be based on a thorough examination of his manuscripts and early publications. It is also the first edition to arrange Machen's fiction chronologically by date of writing. This first volume contains his charming picaresque novel The Chronicle of Clemendy (1888), an exquisite imitation of the medieval narratives of Chaucer and Boccaccio. At this time Machen was a young journalist who had moved from his native Wales to London, and he wrote a number of humorous and slightly risqué sketches for fashionable London magazines. But then he published "The Great God Pan" (1894), one of the pioneering works in the entire range of weird fiction. It was condemned by contemporary reviewers as the work of a diseased mind. Machen followed it up with the episodic novel The Three Impostors (1895), containing the brilliant segments "The Novel of the Black Seal" (which features the Little People, a sub-human race lurking on the edges of civilization), "The Novel of the White Powder," and other vivid narratives. The edition has been prepared by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction and the author of The Weird Tale (1990) and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012). Joshi has prepared textually corrected editions of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, and many other weird writers.

TABLE OF CONTENTSThe Lovecraftian Solar System ....... Fred S. Lubnow"Hungry fer Victuals I Couldn't Raise nor Buy": Anthropophagy in Lovecraft ....... Duncan NorrisThe Rings of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, Dürer, Saturn, and Melancholy ....... Andrew Paul Wood"The Cats": An Environmental Ditty ....... Cecelia Hopkins-DrewerLovecraft's Consolation ....... Matthew Beach"The Inability of the Human Mind": Lovecraft, Zunshine, and Theory of Mind ....... Dylan HendersonH. P. Lovecraft's "Sunset" ....... H. P. Lovecraft and S. T. JoshiThe Pathos in the Mythos ....... Ann McCarthy"Now Will You Be Good?": Lovecrat, Teetotalism, and Philosophy ....... Jan B. W. PedersenLovecraft's Open Boat ....... Michael D. MillerLovecraft Seeks the Garden of Eratosthenes ....... Horace A. SmithDiabolists and Decadents: H. P. Lovecraft as Purveyor, Indulger, and Appraiser of Puritan Horror Fiction Psychohistory ....... Scott MeyerAquaman and Lovecraft: An Unlikely Mating ....... Duncan NorrisHow to Read Lovecraft ....... A Column by Steven J. MaricondaReviewsBriefly Noted

For more than a decade, Bobby Derie has written insightful and penetrating essays on some of the leading authors of pulp fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, especially Robert E. Howard and his friends, colleagues, and fellow-writers. In this collection of twenty-six essays, Derie covers an extraordinarily wide range of subjects; but in every instance he draws upon primary documents to illuminate some of the obscurer corners in the realm of the pulp magazines, especially the legendary Weird Tales. Here we find studies of the expansive and at times contentious correspondence of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard; Howard's association with such colleagues in the pulp world as Clark Ashton Smith, Henry S. Whitehead, and Frank Belknap Long; Howard's sporadic involvement with such fans as R. H. Barlow, Stuart M. Boland, and Francis T. Laney; a discussion of Howard's writing for amateur papers; and numerous other topics. Derie's perspicacity and keenness of analysis are apparent on every page of his work. His thorough familiarity, not only with Robert E. Howard's fiction but also with his bountiful letters, serves as the foundation of his critical work, and he exhibits a wide knowledge of the work of Lovecraft, Smith, and others who form the inexhaustibly fascinating cadre of writers associated with Weird Tales. Bobby Derie is the author of Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014) and the compiler of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard: Index and Addenda (2015). He has written numerous articles on pulp fiction that have appeared in print and in online venues.

Since the early years of the twenty-first century, Matt Cardin has distinguished himself by writing weird fiction with a distinctively cosmic and spiritual focus, publishing two short story collections that have now become rare collector's items. In this substantial volume, Cardin gathers the totality of his short fiction, including the complete fiction contents of Divinations of the Deep (2002) and Dark Awakenings (2010). Several of the tales have been substantially revised from their original appearances. Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and other masters of cosmic horror, Cardin's fiction explores the convergence of religion, horror, and art in a cosmos that may be actively hostile to our species. In tales long and short (including a new novella co-written with Mark McLaughlin), Cardin rings a succession of changes on those fateful words from the Book of Job: "Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan." Aside from his short story collections, Matt Cardin is the editor of Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014) and Horror Literature through History (2017). He is also co-editor of the journal Vastarien.

This volume gathers the weird and fantastic tales of Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), a pioneering French author whose weird work includes such distinctive tales as the Egyptian fantasies "One of Cleopatra's Nights" and "The Mummy's Foot," the classic vampire story "Clarimonde," and an entrancing novella of psychic transference, "Avatar." Gautier's tales feature a haunting fusion of eroticism and weirdness, in consonance with his view that the human female constituted the most exalted form of beauty in all creation. The evocative translations of Lafcadio Hearn and Edgar Saltus have been used in this volume. The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, weird fiction has been a slender but provocative contribution to weird fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.

TABLE OF CONTENTS A Feast in Small Bites ........... Géza A. G. ReillyRobert Aickman, Compulsory Games Alive with Darkness ........... S. T. JoshiRamsey Campbell, By the Light of My Skull and The Way of the Worm God Is a Disease: The Mystic Exile of Andrzej Zulawski's Possession ........... Nathan Chazan Full House ........... Hank WagnerDarrell Schweitzer, The Dragon House Ringing in Apocalypse ........... Christopher RopesDavid Peak, Corpsepaint Reflections on ICFA ........... J. T. Glover Ramsey's Rant: A Modicum of Blood ........... Ramsey Campbell What Is Anything When Considered Twice?Existential Remembrance ........... Donald Sidney-FryerAll He Cared to Tell ........... Géza A. G. ReillyS. T. Joshi, What is Anything?: Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft The Case for Weird Tales Replicas ........... Ryne Davis Transformative Visions ........... Acep HalePriya Sharma, All the Fabulous Beasts A Visionary Work Renew'd ........... Sam Gafford and The joey ZoneWilliam Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland, illustrated by John Coulthart Adam Nevill: The Sense of Dread ........... S. T. Joshi Horrifying Abnormality of the Mundane ........... Fiona Maeve GeistTim Waggoner, Dark and Distant Voices: A Story Collection Stephen King: Fast Food or Five Star? ........... James Arthur Anderson Signs of a Young Horror Master ........... Leigh BlackmoreJosh Malerman, Goblin: A Novel in Six Novellas When Unreality Becomes Too Unreal ........... Darrell SchweitzerJosh Malerman, Unbury Carol The Beauty and Horror of Home ........... Javier MartinezAndrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day Realities Other Than the Ordinary ........... Peter Cannon Henry Wessells, A Conversation larger than the Universe:Readings in Science Fiction and the Fantastic 1762-2017 About the Contributors

The ninth issue of Hippocampus Press's acclaimed journal of weird poetry features verse by some of the leading contemporary poets of fantasy, horror, and the supernatural, including Frank Coffman, Fred Chappell, Ashley Dioses, Wade German, K. A. Opperman, Leigh Blackmore, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Ann K. Schwader, and the late Michael Fantina. Such significant fiction writers as John Shirley, Darrell Schweitzer, and David Barker also contribute striking weird verse, while Liam Garriock, David B. Harrington, Charles D. O'Connor III, and others show that the prose-poem is alive and well. Among the classic reprints are rare and unreprinted poems by Madison Cawein (a prominent poet of the turn of the 20th century, much of whose work is laced with weirdness) and Dora Sigurson Shorter. Marcos Legaria contributes the first part of a detailed examination of the influence of Clark Ashton Smith upon the poetry of Robert Nelson, who in his tragically brief life (1912-1935) produced some scintillating work that continues to attract attention. In the section of reviews, Donald Sidney-Fryer assesses Henry J. Vester III's Of Mist and Crystal; Frank Coffman supplies a sensitive reading of Ashley Dioses's Diary of a Sorceress; and Russ Parkhurst evaluates Adam Bolivar's book of ballads, The Lay of Old Hex.

Enter the shadows of New York's dark secrets and haunted past!From a city and state that have witnessed all manner of menace-from serial killers and corrupt political machines to natural disasters and terrorist attacks-come twenty-four visions of dread from New York horror authors-all to benefit the next generation of New York writers. Presenting stories set in New York locations, A NEW YORK STATE OF FRIGHT gathers tales by new and established writers who give voice to New York's everyday fears, macabre mysteries, and worst nightmares.To help New York's rich literary tradition endure into the future, the authors, editors, and publisher of A NEW YORK STATE OF FRIGHT pledge to contribute all proceeds to New York City's Girls Write Now non-profit organization, which pairs at-risk teen women interested in writing with professional writing and career mentors. Find out more at www.girlswritenow.org.

This volume contains the ghostly tales of the British writer W. W. Jacobs (1863-1943), best known for the immortal classic "The Monkey's Paw." But Jacobs wrote many other weird tales throughout the course of his life, many of them set on the high seas. Jacobs was best known in his time as a comic writer, and he fuses humor and weirdness with a deft touch. This volume is the first to include Jacobs's complete weird writing-and also includes two dramatic adaptations of his stories as well as Louis N. Parker's celebrated dramatization of "The Monkey's Paw." The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.

This volume presents the weird fiction of the British writer Thomas Burke (1886-1945), author of the scintillating horror collection Night-Pieces (1935). But Burke-celebrated for his evocative tales of London's Chinatown, gathered in Limehouse Nights and other volumes-wrote other weird tales, scattered through his many other collections. One of the most distinctive is "Johnson Looked Back," a tour de force of second-person narration. This volume constitutes the first occasion when Burke's complete supernatural writing has been gathered in a single volume. The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.

Simon Gregory Williams, known as "the beast" in Sesqua Valley, has been so corrupted by his reading and memorizing every existing edition of the Necronomicon that his tainted psyche cannot enter into Randolph Carter's Dreamland. However, there is another dreamland, "the dreamland of witches," into which Simon can slink because of his brilliance as an alchemist; and it is into that dreamland that Simon accompanies an innocent young woman in her quest for rare magick. Yet even Simon, who is so experienced in eldritch lore, has never been so confronted by such outlandish Lovecraftian lunacy as he finds in this dreamland of witchery. In this fascinating excursion into the Lovecraftian fantasy/horror realm of Dreamland, two veteran authors of weird fiction have written a novel that is by turns horrific and poignant, with vibrant characters and a compelling narrative that carries the reader on from scene to scene to the novel's cataclysmic conclusion. David Barker is a widely published author and poet whose work has appeared in Fungi, Cyäegha, and Shoggoth.net. W. H. Pugmire is a longtime Lovecraftian author whose work has been gathered in many volumes, notably The Tangled Muse and An Ecstasy of Fear. The two authors have collaborated on The Revenant of Rebecca Pascal and In the Gulfs of Dream and Other Lovecraftian Tales.

Table of ContentsThe Melancholia of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann"James GohoFeminine Powerlessness and Deference in The Case of Charles Dexter WardCecelia Hopkins-DrewerRavening for Delight: Unusual Descriptions in LovecraftDuncan NorrisWhere Lovecraft Lost His Telescope: His Kingston and the Towns around ItRobert H. WaughWhy Michel Houellebecq Is Wrong about Lovecraft's RacismS. T. Joshi"Whaddya Make Them Eyes at Me For?": Lovecraft and Book PublishersDavid E. SchultzTwo Centenaries: H. P. Lovecraft and Elsa GidlowKenneth W. Faig, Jr.2001: A Lovecraftian OdysseyMichael D. MillerThat Fool OlsonBobby DerieA Placid Island: H. P. Lovecraft's "Ibid"Francesco BorriLovecraft, Aristeas, Dunsany, and the Dream JourneyDarrell SchweitzerH. P. Lovecraft-Beacon and GatewayDonald Sidney-FryerThe Void: A Lovecraftian AnalysisDuncan NorrisHoward Phillips Lovecraft: Romantic on the NightsideJan B. W. PedersenHow to Read Lovecraft: A Column by Steven J. MaricondaReviewsBriefly Noted

This volume includes the complete weird writings of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), who wrote the imperishable novel Frankenstein before she was twenty. This novel not only is a pioneering weird tale but also a foundational work of science fiction; its provocative notion that human life can be created in the laboratory is rich in complex moral overtones. Shelley went on to write shorter weird tales, including the reanimation stories "Valerius" and "Roger Dodsworth"; "Transformation," a story of psychic transference; and "The Mortal Immortal," about the quest for eternal life. The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, weird fiction has been a slender but provocative contribution to weird fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.

This volume presents Lovecraft's correspondence with Maurice W. Moe, who knew Lovecraft for nearly the entirety of the latter's adult life, from 1914 to 1937. Moe, a high school teacher in Wisconsin, was a devoted amateur journalist and also a fervent and evangelical Christian, and both subjects elicited sharp discussions from Lovecraft. The Providence writer's years-long assistance on Moe's book about the appreciation of poetry, Doorways to Poetry, may have helped inspire his later weird verse, including the Fungi from Yuggoth sonnets. The volume also contains Lovecraft's extensive correspondence with Bernard Austin Dwyer, a weird fiction fan who engaged in wide-ranging discussions with Lovecraft on such subjects as cosmicism, Lovecraft's upbringing, and political developments in the 1920s and 1930s. In addition, the relatively few surviving letters that Lovecraft wrote to the poet Samuel Loveman, as well as a year-long correspondence with the noted bookman Vincent Starrett, are included here. As with other volumes, this book contains a fascinating array of writings by Lovecraft's correspondents, ranging from Moe's essay on "Life for God's Sake" to a rare weird tale by Dwyer. The volume has been exhaustively annotated by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi.

This volume presents the weird fiction of the American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). Better known for her mainstream writings focusing on the lives of men and women in New England, Freeman was frequently attracted to the weird, and her work culminated in the notable volume The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). But that book contained only a small number of her weird tales, and this volume for the first time reprints all the weird work written over her long career, including a rare play about the Salem witchcraft, Giles Corey, Yeoman. The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the "titans" of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.