The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

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Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H.P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe.This selection of stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as 'The Outsider' and 'Rats in the Walls', through the grotesquely comic 'Herbert West - Reanimator' and 'The Hound', to the extra-terrestrial terror of 'The Call of Cthulhu', which fuses traditional supernaturalism with science fiction. Including the definitive corrected texts, this colection reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a hugely influential - and visionary - American writer.

Author Bio

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