Books by H. P. Lovecraft

“The narrator of the story, a guy named Thurber, starts off by recounting why he’s filled with anxiety on a daily basis, particularly as concerns subway tunnels or anything that would take him underground. He recounts how he came to be in this particular state through his interactions with a painter named Richard Upton Pickman, who paints very ghoulish pictures. His artwork is not typically welcomed within more polite society because of the subject matter that he chooses to pursue. But Thurber recognizes that his artistry really is quite exquisite, that Pickman is quite an accomplished painter, even if the subject matter that he chooses is not what one would consider to be tasteful. So Pickman invites Thurber to his studio, where he sees the various paintings in progress.” Read more...

The Best H.P. Lovecraft Books

Jeffrey Weinstock, Literary Scholar

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth is a story from 1931 involving a trip that goes awry, we could say. We have a character who is traveling through New England, who boards a bus and ends up in the town of Innsmouth. It’s a quintessential Lovecraft setting: an old, decaying seaport town with inscrutable characters. A dark history begins to emerge, and the revelation is that there are creatures under the sea called the deep ones, that have interbred with the human beings that lived in Innsmouth. At a certain age, people who grow up in Innsmouth then go into the water, and they go down into the deep to join the deep ones who dwell below the waves. Then there’s a twist at the end…” Read more...

The Best H.P. Lovecraft Books

Jeffrey Weinstock, Literary Scholar

“At The Mountains Of Madness is one of Lovecraft’s longer contributions to speculative fiction, and it develops the Cthulhu Mythos much more fully. It’s about an Antarctic expedition that penetrates further into the continent than any expedition preceding it, and discovers evidence of a long-abandoned city. As they begin to explore the city, they piece together a story about extraterrestrial entities that preceded human life on the planet by millennia. They had conflicts among themselves, and had servants called shoggoths, who were amorphous blobs of protoplasm that could be shaped in different ways… So, we get a whole history of another civilization, a very powerful one, traces of which are still present in our universe. It’s really an exercise in world-building.” Read more...

The Best H.P. Lovecraft Books

Jeffrey Weinstock, Literary Scholar

“The Call of Cthulhu was published in 1928, and it is Lovecraft’s most famous story. It’s a story that’s told in several parts, in which an investigation pieces together, from various clues, the existence of monstrous forces that have impinged upon our world. It introduces the monstrous figure, Cthulhu, who is a tentacle-faced extraterrestrial entity so powerful that human beings can’t resist, so much as just try to keep our heads down and not attract its attention.” Read more...

The Best H.P. Lovecraft Books

Jeffrey Weinstock, Literary Scholar

A short story first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928, HP Lovecraft’s deranged tale has become a centrepiece in horror fantasy of the slime-covered, otherworldly kind. Cthulhu, “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body,” is said to be so terrible to behold that it destroys the sanity of those who see it. Lovecraft’s phantasmagorical vision established an entire Cthulhu Mythos and inspired everyone from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore. In the figures of the Demogorgon, the Mindflayer and even Vecna himself, you can see the tentacles of this myth extending into the subconscious of the Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things. If you liked Stranger Things, you’re going to love the books of HP Lovecraft.

From our article Books like Stranger Things

“I know that for some people Lovecraft might be scarier for his racism. Some people have even argued that his racist discourse is one of the things that filters through the way he writes about the alien Other. These are very valid points, and certainly explain his complex reception, with his profile gradually rising from obscurity to recognition and then to disdain. Ultimately, the message in his stories is that the human does not matter … For me, his writing really creates tension and shock. I think Lovecraft was a master of suspense, among other things” Read more...

Scary Books

Xavier Aldana Reyes, Film Critics & Scholar

“This one is a bit out there. It’s set on a submarine in the First World War. It represents what I like about the sea as a setting, but does so in a scary horror way. The sea is perfect for that—all the things you don’t know about. It links to sci fi in a way, because it is a bit like spaceships on the edge of what we know..With some stories, people build up to a point, and then, at the end, they back away from what could be an interesting conclusion to the story or an interesting character moment, and they go a bit safer. Lovecraft sets it up and then he goes for it. This is not traditional naval fiction. It’s only a dozen or so pages. But it’s got a lot of the same themes as the sea stories and the naval fiction that I like.” Read more...

The Best Naval Historical Fiction

Katie Daysh, Novelist