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 emerging from their epoch of hibernation and extinguishing both our individual sanity and entire civilization.
Over the course of his career, Lovecraft made a marked departure from the gothic style of his predecessors that focused mostly on ghosts, ghouls, and witches, instead crafting a vast mythos in which humanity is but a blissfully unaware speck in a cosmos shared by vast and ancient alien beings. Weaving together a broad base of existing scholarship with his own 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. Klinger charts 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. Now, well over a century after his birth, Lovecraft is increasingly being recognized as the foundation for American horror and science fiction. No lover of Gothic literature will want to be without this literary keepsake.Summary: At the time of his death at the age of forty-six, Lovecraft's work had appeared only in dime-store magazines, ignored by the public and maligned by critics. With hundreds of annotations and dozens of rare images, Beyond Arkham provides the complete picture of Lovecraft's achievements in fiction. In addition to his ground-breaking writing, we glimpse a personal side of Lovecraft: his favourite stories are highlighted and his vulnerability as a young writer is obvious. Best-selling author and editor Klinger reanimates Lovecraft with clarity and historical insight, offering a revelatory volume in which the author's story-writing method is uncovered, his vivid dreams are recorded and first drafts of stories are seen in immaturity. The stories magnify the creative ideas and writing processes of the literary genius. Included are "Rats in the Wall", a post-First World War story about the terrors of the past and the newly contextualised "The Horror at Red Hook", which has been adapted recently by Victor LaValle.
In this follow-up, twenty-five more Lovecraft stories are re-presented as well as a number of never-before-seen revisions and collaborations with other authors.
The landmark volume included twenty-two stories but there are many others worthy of attention, including Lovecraft's favourites. Lovecraft was published and devoured by the Lovecraft community and general readers alike.
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