The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation (Perspectives on Edgar Allan Poe)

H.P. Lovecraft, one of the twentieth century’s most important writers in the genre of horror fiction, famously referred to Edgar Allan Poe as both his “model” and his “God of Fiction.” While scholars and readers of Poe’s and Lovecraft’s work have long recognized the connection between these authors, this collection of essays is the first in-depth study to explore the complex literary relationship between Lovecraft and Poe from a variety of critical perspectives. Of the thirteen essays included in this book, some consider how Poe’s work influenced Lovecraft in important ways. Other essays explore how Lovecraft’s fictional, critical, and poetic reception of Poe irrevocably changed how Poe’s work has been understood by subsequent generations of readers and interpreters. Addressing a variety of topics ranging from the psychology of influence to racial and sexual politics, the essays in this book also consider how Lovecraft’s interpretations of Poe have informed later adaptations of both writers’ works in films by Roger Corman and fiction by Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. This collection is an indispensable resource not only for those who are interested in Poe’s and Lovecraft’s work specifically, but also for readers who wish to learn more about the modern history and evolution of Gothic, horror, and weird fiction.

Alissa Burger is Associate Professor of English at Culver-Stockton College, USA. She teaches courses in research, writing, and literature, specializing in gender, horror, and the Gothic. She is the author of IT, Chapters One & Two (2023), The Quest for the Dark Tower: Genre and Interconnection in the Stephen King Series (2021), Teaching Stephen King: Horror, The Supernatural, and New Approaches to Literature (2016) and The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of Six Versions of the Story, 1900-2007 (2012).

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. Other fiction includes the short story collections Secret Hours, ANTISOCIETIES, and Visiting Maze. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.

Murray Leeder is Assistant Lecturer in Film & English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, USA, and the author or editor of 25 books. He is a world expert on monsters and his relevant book publications include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (2021, co-edited with Regina Hansen); The Monster Theory Reader (2020); The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (2018); The Age of Lovecraft (2016, co-edited with Carl Sederholm); The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014); The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012); Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008); and Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2004).