From the Back Cover and the Afterword

“I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night; . . . . I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world’s tombs, and at what you planned afterward, and I know how you did it.”

It is certainly a pity that Lovecraft made no efforts to prepare Charles Dexter Ward for publication, even when book publishers in the 1930s were specifically asking for a novel from his pen; Lovecraft judged the novel to be an inferior piece of work, a “cumbrous, creaking bit of self-conscious antiquarianism.” It has certainly now been acknowledged as one of his finest works, and it emphasizes the message of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath all over again: Lovecraft is who he is because of his birth and upbringing as a New England Yankee. The need to root his work in his native soil became more and more clear to him as time went on, and it led to his gradual transformation of all New England into a locus of both wonder and terror.

Contents

• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• Notes
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Lovecraft’s Providence: Photographs by Donovan K. Loucks
• About the Author
• About the Editor
• About the Book

Bibliographic Information

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. By H.P. Lovecraft, Edited with an afterword and notes by S.T. Joshi. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press; 2010; ISBN 978-159732-081-8 (hardback) and 978-159732-080-1 (paperback); 260 pages.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in paperback from Amazon.com or directly from the publisher, University of Tampa Press.