Lovecraft Unbound

“Readers who know Lovecraft’s legacy mostly through turgid and tentacled Cthulhu Mythos pastiches will find this book a treasure trove of literary terrors.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)   Here are nineteen Lovecraftian stories—both new and rediscovered—that take their cues from the mythos of the iconic horror writer. Today’s masters of supernatural thrills celebrate H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre with tales of weird fiction and cosmic horror, collected by Hugo and Bram Stoker Award–winning editor Ellen Datlow.   In “Commencement” by Joyce Carol Oates, a university begins its annual ceremony of renewal with three renowned scholars whose lifetime achievements are fodder for the student body. A couple desperate to have another child turn to the darkest rituals of folklore and mythology in “Catch Hell” by Laird Barron. And Holly Phillips’s “Cold Water Survival” trails a group of Antarctic explorers who encounter vast, unexplainable shapes in the ice—a danger to humanity awakening from its frozen slumber.   Rounding out the collection are more spinetingling tales from Brian Evenson, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Marc Laidlaw, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Bowes, Anna Tambour, Amanda Downum, Joel Lane, William Browning Spencer, Michael Cisco, Lavie Tidhar, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Michael Shea, Gemma Files, and Nick Mamatas.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The 16 new and four reprint stories Datlow (Poe) assembles for this outstanding tribute anthology all capture what Dale Bailey praises as horror master H.P. Lovecraft's gift for depicting the universe as inconceivably more vast, strange, and terrifying than mere human beings can possibly imagine. Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, in The Crevasse, evoke this alien sensibility through an Antarctic expedition's glimpses of an astonishingly ancient prehuman civilization preserved in the polar ice. Laird Barron's Catch Hell depicts a Lovecraft-type backwoods community in the grip of a profoundly creepy occult mythology. Selections range in tone from the darkly humorous to the sublimely horrific, and all show the contributors to be perceptive interpreters of Lovecraft's work. Readers who know Lovecraft's legacy mostly through turgid and tentacled Cthulhu Mythos pastiches will find this book a treasure trove of literary terrors. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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