H. P. Lovecraft - The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature: Revised and Enlarged

Edited, with Introduction and Commentary, by S. T. Joshi

Hippocampus Press, New York

Copyright 2000, 2012 by Hippocampus Press

Introduction and editorial matter copyright 2000, 2012 by S. T. Joshi

Published by Hippocampus Press, P.O. Box 641, New York, NY 10156. http://www.hippocampuspress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Barbara Briggs Silbert.

Cover illustration by Vrest Orton from the Recluse (W. Paul Cook, 1927).

Hippocampus Press logo designed by Anastasia Damianakos.

First electronic edition, 2013.

Kindle Edition: 978-1-61498-068-1

EPUB Edition: 978-1-61498-069-8

The Favourite Weird Stories of H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. LOVECRAFT'S "Supernatural Horror in Literature" has been widely acknowledged as the finest historical treatment of the field, and yet both Lovecraft scholars and scholars of weird fiction do not seem to me to have made as full use of this document as they could have. This edition is an attempt to show to both groups of scholarsand to general readers as wellhow much we can learn from Lovecraft.

In the preparation of the text I have departed somewhat from the principles I followed in editing Lovecraft's fiction (Arkham House, 1984-89; 4 vols.). Although I have collated all relevant textsthe Recluse (1927); the serialisation in the Fantasy Fan (1933-35); the first book appearance (The Outsider and Others, 1939)I have amended Lovecraft's citation of titles to conform with modern usage. Hence, all books, long poems, and plays (of whatever length) are printed in italics; all short stories, short poems, and articles are printed in double quotation marks. I have indicated in square brackets the significant additions Lovecraft made to the essay following its first appearance.

The bibliography at the end of the volume gives detailed information on all authors (save those mentioned merely in passing) and works cited in Lovecraft's treatise. I have attempted in nearly all cases to locate 1) the first appearance of the work in question; 2) convenient modern or critical editions; and 3) criticism of the work or (if there is none such) of the author. Only for Lovecraft's "modern masters" (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, and M. R. James) and for Clark Ashton Smith have I taken the liberty of supplying bibliographical information on works not mentioned by Lovecraft; citations of other weird works by other authors are given in the notes. For foreign works I listed both appearances of the original text and of translations. The designation "LL" placed after an entry indicates that Lovecraft possessed some version of the text in his own library.

There are several persons and institutions deserving of thanks for their assistance in the compilation of this volume. I did most of my work at the John Hay and John D. Rockefeller Libraries of Brown University, and have also made use of the Providence Public Library, the Muncie (Indiana) Public libraries, the Bracken Library of Ball State University, the New York University Library, and the New York Public Library. The following individuals have contributed information: Barry L. Bender; Donald R. Burleson; Peter Cannon; Jason C. Eckhardt; Steve Eng; William Fulwiler; Jeffrey Greenbaum; T. E. D. Klein; Robert M. Price; and David E. Schultz.

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

IN NOVEMBER 1925, when Lovecraft was living alone at 169 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, he received an offer from his friend W. Paul Cook to write "an article... on the element of terror & weirdness in literature" for publication in Cook's legendary amateur journal, the Recluse. In this innocent and almost incidental way was born probably one of the most significantcertainly one of the longestessays ever written by Lovecraft; a work of criticism which even today has no rivals in keenness of historical analysis and in the pithy and penetrating studies of such modern titans of weird fiction as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, William Hope Hodgson, Ambrose Bierce, and many others. It is a sad fact that most of the better studies of the weird taleEdith Birkhead's The Tale of Terror (1921), Eino Railo's The Haunted Castle (1927), Maurice Lvy's Le Roman "gothique" anglais (1968)are solely or largely concerned with the Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; modern criticism has been unusually slow in exploring the enormous quantities of superb weird fiction written from the middle nineteenth century to the present. But Lovecraft's treatise gains its importance not merely from its discussion of the whole spectrum of horror literature from antiquity to the 1930s, but from the insight it can provide into Lovecraft's own theory and practice of weird writing.

Lovecraft admitted that "I shall take my time about preparing"

Once he received the request from Cook, therefore, Lovecraft at once abandoned his desultory reading of weird fiction and undertook a more thorough and systematic course of absorbing the weird classics, doing much work at the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library. It appears that he began writing the essay very late in 1925: by early January he had already written the first four chapters (on the Gothic school up to and including Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer) and was reading Emily Bront's Wuthering Heights preparatory to writing about it at the end of Chapter V; nearly half of it devoted to Lovecraft's essay.

But Lovecraft continued to take notes for additions to his essay for some future republication. A list of "Books to mention in new edition of weird article" survives at the end of his Commonplace Book, and most of the works on the listJohn Buchan's Witch Wood (1927), Leonard Cline's The Dark Chamber (1927), H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing (1928), etc.were in fact discussed in the revised version of the essay. Several items, however, were not discussed; they are as follows (brackets in the text are Lovecraft's):