Miscellaneous Writings

Years in preparation, this massive assemblage of Lovecraftiana is organized into nine sections, each preceded by editor S.T. Joshi's illuminating commentary: Dreams and Fancies, The Weird Fantasist, Mechanistic Materialist, Literary Critic, Political Theorist, Antiquarian Travels, Amateur Journalist, Epistolarian, and Personal. The individual works by Lovecraft -- over eighty in number -- are too numerous to be listed here, but include such central statements as the "Commonplace Book, " "History of the Necronomicon, " "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, " "The Materialist Today, " "Observations on Several Parts of America, " "Some Notes on a Nonentity, " "Cats and Dogs, " and much, much more.

Amazon.com Review

For any fan of H.P. Lovecraft, this is an essential volume of hard-to-find miscellanea, juvenalia, and other forgotten writings.

From Publishers Weekly

Nearly 600 pages of second-level nonfiction by the master of cosmic horror, Lovecraft (1890-1937), might seem too much of a half-good thing. And what is one to think when editor Joshi suggests that the truest body of Lovecraft's writing lies not in essays, as here, or in his deservedly famous fiction, especially At the Mountains of Madness, but buried in his huge body of unpublished correspondence (nearly 100,000 letters)? Going by the present collection of minor Lovecraftiana, we might want to pass on the letters altogether. Even Joshi suggests that, aside from a handful of titles, the miscellanea is not worth its printer's ink. Lovecraft fancied himself an antiquarian of lofty style, and the bulk of his writing in this voice, though skilled, quickly gets old. Joshi assembles the letters and largely amateur essays by type rather than chronologically, and a distinct picture of the strange life and insular character of their author emerges. For cultists and completists only. Illustrations. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Since the mid-1980s, Arkham has published several revised editions of horror master Lovecraft's collected stories; the publisher now adds a hefty gathering of nonfiction. Redoubtable editor Joshi calls us in his introduction to mark Lovecraft's "rhetorical skill." Lovecraft employed long sentences, a large vocabulary, and epithets rather than plain nouns--all of which reflect the oratorical styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lovecraft's prose often sounds better than it looks on the page. It's old fashioned, and Joshi shows us the range of uses Lovecraft put it to by reproducing literary essays, criticism, philosophical and political articles, the kind of journalistic pieces now called op-eds, personal letters, and even some advertising copy much longer-winded than any agency nowadays would accept. This stuff is strictly ancillary to the peerless stories, but Lovecraftians will want to sample it. Ray Olson

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