By H.P. Lovecraft
Edited by S.T. Joshi

Dust Jacket Text

In the 1980s, S.T. Joshi prepared revised editions of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories for Arkham House. Basing his work on consultation of manuscripts, early publications, and other sources, Joshi corrected thousands of errors in the existing texts of Lovecraft’s fiction, allowing readers to appreciate the stories as Lovecraft originally wrote them. In the thirty years that have followed, Joshi has continued to do research on the textual accuracy of Lovecraft’s stories, and this comprehensive new edition is the result. For the first time, students and scholars of Lovecraft can see at a glance all the textual variants in all relevant appearances of a story—manuscript, first publication in magazines, and first book publications. The result is an illuminating record of the textual history of the tales, along with how Lovecraft significantly revised his stories after initial publication.

Along the way, Joshi has made small but significant revisions to his earlier corrected texts. He has determined, for example, that Lovecraft slightly revised some stories when a reprint of them was scheduled in Weird Tales, and he has altered some readings in light of a better understanding of Lovecraft’s customary linguistic usages. The result is the definitive text of Lovecraft’s fiction—an edition that supersedes all those that preceded it and should endure as the standard text of Lovecraft’s stories for many years.

In this first volume, Lovecraft’s earliest stories are printed in chronological order by date of writing. Included are such early triumphs as “Dagon” and “The Outsider,” along with the many tales Lovecraft wrote under the inspiration of Lord Dunsany. The celebrated “Herbert West—Reanimator” and “The Rats in the Walls” show Lovecraft experimenting with longer narratives—a tendency that will culminate in the novelettes and novellas of his final decade of writing.

S.T. Joshi is a leading Lovecraft scholar and author of H.P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft (2010), Lovecraft and a World in Transition (2014), and other critical and biographical works. He has also done significant research on such writers as Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and Ramsey Campbell.

Contents

• Introduction by S.T. Joshi
• The Beast in the Cave
• The Alchemist
• The Tomb
• Dagon
• A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson
• Polaris
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep
• Memory
• Old Bugs
• The Transition of Juan Romero
• The White Ship
• The Street
• The Doom That Came to Sarnath
• The Statement of Randolph Carter
• The Terrible Old Man
• The Tree
• The Cats of Ulthar
• The Temple
• Facts concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
• Celephaïs
• From Beyond
• Nyarlathotep
• The Picture in the House
• Ex Oblivione
• Sweet Ermengarde; or, The Heart of a Country Girl
• The Nameless City
• The Quest of Iranon
• The Moon-Bog
• The Outsider
• The Other Gods
• The Music of Erich Zann
• Herbert West—Reanimator
• Hypnos
• What the Moon Brings
• Azathoth
• The Hound
• The Lurking Fear
• The Rats in the Walls
• The Unnamable
• The Festival
• Under the Pyramids
• The Shunned House
• The Horror at Red Hook
• He
• In the Vault

Other Volumes

Additional volumes in this set include Volume 2: 1926–1930, Volume 3: 1931–1937, and Volume 4: Revisions and Collaborations.

Bibliographic Information

Collected Fiction, A Variorum Edition, Volume 1: 1905–1925. By H.P. Lovecraft, Edited by S.T. Joshi. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-61498-109-1; 530 pages; hardcover.

Purchasing This Book

This book may be purchased in hardcover from Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble or directly from the publisher, Hippocampus Press.