The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (Annotated Books)

Great Yuggoth, hath no one review'd this tome of yet? I have been away from this site for many strange aeons, having been occupy'd with the chore of writing weird fiction full time; but I was curious to see what y'all were saying about this magnificent new hardcover edition of Lovecraft, and lo!, I

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find silence. My views on H. P. Lovecraft are, to some, extreme, in that I claim him to be a classic of American Literature, an excellent artist who remains original in this modern era.

This new edition from Liveright, superbly edited by Les Klinger, has reminded me that I am, above all, an obsess'd fanboy. Damn me but I love H. P. L.!! His fiction enthralls me, and the element of fun that I first encountered from reading him remains to this day. I quiver still with an adolescent thrill every time I begin "The Hound" or "The Statement of Randolph Carter."

I read Lovecraft's weird fiction non-stop, and so it is always a pleasure to have it in an excellent new edition. This book is quite handsome, the layout helps to make it a very pleasurable reading experience, and it is, as an edition, Klinger's own, different indeed from the fine editions ably edited by S. T. Joshi. The book is, in design, a traditional annotated volume in folio size--quite a heavy tome indeed, & I can handle it only by setting it onto a table. Lovecraft's text is in black, with annotations in dark red. Hundreds of illustrations and photographs have been included.

Choice of contents is, for the most part, fine, with the exception of the serious omission of "The Outsider." Les has included the stories that he considers form HPL's "Arkham cycle," but this makes the inclusion of the very boring "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" questionable, and one wou;d have preferred to have "The Outsider," "Pickman's Model," or "The Music of Erich Zann" instead.

Following a fine Introduction by Alan Moore, we are treated with an exhaustive forward of over fifty pages by Les. The annotations for the book are, for the most part, very good, except for the oddness of the editor's playing the "Sherlockian game," in which he pretends that Lovecraft's tales are not fictions but rather factual records of real-life events, & thus it his his editorial duty to gauge what the "real facts" of the stories may be. This simply does not work is so odd a fantasy as "The Festival."

The illustrations are sublime. At one point we have a full two-page reproduction, in Lovecraft's handwriting, of his playful account, "The History of the NECRONOMICON." I confess that I do not care for the jacket illustration of the book, for I grow weary of Lovecraft being associated with tentacles; and even the novelty of these tentacles on the cover having embossed suckers does not improve ye situation.

The book is well-researched and the notes are really fascinating, so even for those who have other editions of Lovecraft's tales, this edition offers new perspectives and biographical detail. A delightful tome indeed!

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