Product Description

One of the masters of ‘weird fiction’, H. P. Lovecraft expanded the vast boundaries of the horror genre with his vividly imagined stories of exotic and fantastical otherworlds, nightmarish dreamscapes or the supernatural terrors lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. The shadow of New England’s witch-hunting past hangs over many of the tales, as in ‘The Shunned House’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’, in which malevolent spectres return to haunt the region. Others, such as ‘From Beyond’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’, depict the catastrophic results when cosmic channels of time and space are opened, while stories such as ‘Polaris’ and ‘The Doom that Came to Sarnath’ portray the downfall of mythical civilizations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95980 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
Horror master Lovecraft (1890-1937) frequently used dreams in his tales of the supernatural to evoke fantastic worlds inconceivable to the conscious mind. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focussed on the writing of horror stories. S.T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. Among his critical and biographical studies are The Weird Tale (1990), and H.P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996). He has also edited Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories for Penguin.

Customer Reviews

More from the Master of Horror
Much like The Call of Cthulhu, The Dreams in the Witch House sees another great collection of stories ranging from the "far out crazy" stuff like Polaris, to the more conventional horror stories like Dreams... or the Shunned House.

The edition itself is great value for money. It is clear that Joshi possess an large pool of knowledge on the life and works of Lovecraft. Every story contains several notes with references to other works of Lovecraft himself or other authors for further reading.

Horror stories are meant to be just that, stories, not novels or books or trilogies. Lovecraft follows more on the tradition of Poe and Dunsany than Stoker. And for my money, I'll take Lovecraft over Poe any day.

The Weakest of Penguin's Trilogy
Having read Penguin's Call of Cthulhu and The Thing on the Doorstep, I felt obliged to buy the final instalment of the series.

If you're new to Lovecraft, the Penguin series is an excellent place to start, being one of the few publishers to produce attractive editions of his collected stories. They are also well annotated with S T Joshi's informative, unobtrusive endnotes.

Joshi, an academic who seems to have made Lovecraft his primary interest, does not seem to think very highly of many of the stories in this collection. "Cannot be ranked among his better later efforts", Joshi says of the title story. He has similar doubts about many of the other stories herein. (So had Lovecraft it seems, though often the writer was too harsh on himself).

I tend to agree with Joshi: many of the stories in this collection are hard going (to say the least). The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath borders on unreadable: at around 100 pages long, Lovecraft's elaborate, uninterrupted prose quickly wears very thin.

It made me miss the shorter, simpler stories from the earlier volumes. There are simply too many stories about dreamt cities here, and not enough "creepy tales" like The Colour out of Space or The Music of Eric Zahn (two of Lovecraft's best stories).