Straub Peter Editor and Notes (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. New condition dark blue cloth boards with gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped photographic and color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Chronology; Note on the Texts; Notes; and List of Volumes in The Library Of America Series. Also includes a bound-into-the-volume matching dark blue satin ribbon page marker. The lower page edge contains a small remainder dot and the upper jacket spine edge is lightly rubbed. All pages are in unmarked new condition and the spine/binding is exceedingly tight and square (see photographs). "A 20th-century successor to Edgar Allan Poe as the master of "weird fiction," Howard Phillips Lovecraft once wrote, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." In the novellas and stories that he published in such pulp magazines as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories - and in the work that remained unpublished until after his death, including some of his best writing - Lovecraft adapted the conventions of horror stories and science fiction to express an intensely personal vision, cosmic in its ramifications and fearsome in its pessimistic view of human destiny. This volume brings together 22 tales, the very best of his fiction. Early stories such as "The Outsider," "The Music of Reich Zann," "Herbert West - Reanimator," and "The Lurking Fear" demonstrate Lovecraft's uncanny ability to blur the distinction between reality and nightmare, sanity and madness, the human and the non-human. "The Horror at Red Hook" and "He" reveal the fascination and revulsion Lovecraft felt for New York City; "Pickman's Model" uncovers the frightening secret behind and artist's work; "The Rats in the Walls" is a terrifying descent into atavistic horror; and "The Colour Out of Space: explores the eerie impact of a meteorite on a remote Massachusetts valley. In such later works as "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in Darkness," "At the Mountains of Madness," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and "The Shadow Out of Time," Lovecraft developed his own nightmarish mythology in which encounters with ancient, pitiless extraterrestrial intelligences wreak havoc on hapless humans who only gradually begin to glimpse "terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein." Moving from old New England towns haunted by occult pasts to Antarctic wastes that disclose appalling secrets, Lovecraft's tales continue to exert a dread fascination." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.