Selected Essays

This collection gathers eight of H.P. Lovecraft’s most important non-fiction works. The centrepiece is Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), a sweeping ten-chapter survey of the horror tradition from Gothic romance through Poe, Machen, Blackwood, and Dunsany—still the essential critical text on weird fiction. Alongside it are Notes on Writing Weird Fiction (1933), a compact craft essay; A History of The Necronomicon, the mock-scholarly history of his invented grimoire; and five shorter pieces on poetics, pastoralism, materialism, and the eternal debate of cats versus dogs. Together they reveal the mind behind the Cthulhu Mythos: widely read, fiercely opinionated, and deeply serious about the literature of the strange.