[fantasyfan]

I recently bought The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft.This is an edition of H.P. Lovecraft's work that anyone interested in the writer should make a point of getting.

Edited, annotated and with a Bibliography by Leslie S. Klinger, it includes 22 stories all centring around the fictional Arkham locale and involving Lovecraft's cosmic themes. The stories are presented in the chronological order in which they were written and include the two major novels At The Mountain of Madness and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Included, of course, are many of the tales which August Derleth included as part of the "Cthulthu" mythos. The annotations give both contextual and explanatory matter and are preceded by an introduction by Alan Moore and a very extensive Foreword by the editor.

This Foreword develops the nature of the stories--specifically their place within the pulp genre, their thematic concerns and their influence on other writers. The "Critical Reception of Lovecraft's Work" is a major section of the essay. Lovecraft died considering himself a failure. After his death only hard-core fans really paid much attention to his writing but there were always those who felt that he offered more than most pulp writers.

It was Edmund Wilson who wrote the devastating essay in 1945 that probably delayed interest in Lovecraft among serious readers for years. Klinger gives a fair summary of Wilson's arguments while reminding us that he also "expressed his unfettered disdain for J.R.R.Tolkien." (If I recall correctly, Wilson compared "The Lord of the Rings" to "Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout.") The problem for Wilson was clearly that Lovecraft was both a pulp and a genre writer and thus a bad writer.

But there were signs of a reassessment in the seventies and in 1990 "the dam was effectively broken . . . helped by publication of Peter Cannon's H.P.Lovecraft in 1989. Cannon wished to persuade the sceptics that "Lovecraft is more than a mere horror writer." Since then there have been many substantial critical analyses of the man and the material.

Klinger gives fairly useful biographical details of Lovecraft including some of his quite xenophobic attitudes and discusses their relevance to the writer's philosophy and the impact they make on his stories.

There is an extensive concluding section of "Additional Material." These comprise a range of material organised as a series of appendices. There is a Chronological Table and various topics of interest to Lovecraft fans such as the Faculty of Miskatonic University, a History of the "Necronomicon", A Genealogy of the Elder Races, a list of the works of H.P.Lovecraft, the "Revisions" of H.P.Lovecraft and H.P. Lovecraft in Popular culture.

Throughout the book is enhanced with many photographs and colour illustrations of some of the pulp magazines to which Lovecraft contributed work.