Illustrated by Dan Hillier
Introduced by S. T. Joshi
Preface by Alan Moore
This collection, spanning Lovecraft’s literary career, marries his best-known short stories with two modern masters of the macabre, the acclaimed artist Dan Hillier and author Alan Moore.
Bound in blocked cloth
Set in Italian Old Style with Goudy Forum display
472 pages
Frontispiece and 6 black & white illustrations, 2 of which are double-page spreads
Spot varnished endpapers
Gilded top edge
Printed slipcase
10˝ x 6¾˝
This collection spans Lovecraft’s literary career, and charts the development of his ‘cosmicist’ philosophy; the belief that behind the veil of our blinkered everyday lives lies another reality, too terrible for the human mind to comprehend. In stories written in the gothic tradition, narrators recount their descent into madness and despair. Through their investigations into the unexplained, they tug at the thin threads that separate our world from another of indescribable horror. ‘“Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!”’ screams occultist Harley Warren in ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, as he begs his companion to bury him alive. Another early piece, ‘The Outsider’ – a tragic and emotive evocation of loneliness and desolation – follows a man’s escape from his castle in a desperate search for human contact, but the loathsome truth he discovers destroys his mind.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far
In later tales, such as the iconic ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, Lovecraft reaches into the cosmos, bridging the divide between horror and science fiction. The extra-terrestrial ‘gods’ and cursed histories that would emerge from these stories now form the cornerstones of Lovecraft’s unique mythology: the Cthulhu Mythos. This fictional universe, built in large part by his friend and most ardent supporter, August Derleth, has in the years since been reimagined in myriad forms, and continues to act as a haunted playground for countless illustrators, fans and authors.
This edition, based on its sister limited edition, marries Lovecraft’s best-known fiction with two modern masters of the macabre, the acclaimed artist Dan Hillier and author Alan Moore. In his beautifully crafted new preface, Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived: ‘the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition’. Yet, despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he ‘possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature’.
Hillier’s six mesmerising, portal-like illustrations embrace the alien realities that lurk among the gambrel roofs of Lovecraft’s landscapes. By splicing Victorian portraits and lithographs with cosmic and Lovecraftian symbolism, each piece – like the stories themselves – pulls apart the familiar to reveal what lies beneath.
The edition itself shimmers with Lovecraft’s ‘unknown colours’, bound in purple and greens akin to both the ocean depths and mysteries from outer space. The cover is embossed with a mystical design by Hillier, while a monstrous eye stares blankly from the slipcase.
Dagon
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn
and His Family
Celephaïs
Nyarlathotep
The Picture in the House
The Outsider
Herbert West—Reanimator
The Hound
The Rats in the Walls
The Festival
He
Cool Air
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Whisperer in Darkness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Haunter of the Dark
H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He left school without attaining a diploma but showed an early enthusiasm for the written word. He first appeared in print in 1906 in The Providence Sunday Journal when he wrote a letter to the editor on astronomy – one of his great passions. In 1923 several of his short stories were accepted by Weird Tales, the same magazine that would first publish ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in 1928. Lovecraft went on to write further other-worldly and existential horror stories which would form part of the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ and secure him a prominent place among 20th-century horror writers. He died in 1937.