From the Introductions

Howard Phillips Lovecraft may not have created the horror story, but his work in the genre remains vibrant and compelling to new generations of readers, spawning an entire mythos unto itself. Many of his stories were written some years before Lovecraft found a home for them in Weird Tales magazine, which was faltering at the time they printed Dagon, his first contribution to the pulp. In his letters he mentioned that he almost gave up sending stories when they insisted he re-do them by typewriter, a labor he despised. While HPL was also known to have collaborated anonymously with other authors, we have included only stories which are credited to him; the exception being several installments in 1924 recounting supposed adventures of the famous magician and escape artist Harry Houdini. HPL’s private letters confirm that he wrote the tales completely himself, based loosely on a verbal (and presumably fictitious) account Houdini gave Weird Tales founder JC Henneberger. ‘The Survivor’, printed in Weird Tales in July 1954 and written by August Derleth and HPL is considered by many to be a Derleth story with only minimal conceptual input from a Lovecraft fragment, and has therefore been excluded from [these volumes].

This is . . . a 2 volume set collecting all of HP Lovecraft’s writings from the original run of Weird Tales, stories, verse and letters to the editor. The works are presented chronologically by original publication date, aside from one or two alterations strictly for convenient page fitting. [The first] volume contains HPL’s material from oversized ‘bedsheet’ issues only. The contents pages list the story/verse title, the page(s) it appeared in the original pulp magazine, and the page it begins in [these volumes].

The content presented here is in facsimile form, scanned directly from the original pulp pages including all accompanying illustrations. No editing or resetting of the type has been done so as to preserve the true flavor of the period while distilling the HPL material. Print production was a varying commodity in the pulps, and we are at the mercy of decades-old technology coupled with the cheap, porous pulp paper. The oversized issues were especially guilty of poor production quality, with ink horded more strenuously than gold, making decent reproduction nearly impossible. These problems create many challenges for this kind of collection. Considerable cleanup has been done to the electronic files and multiple copies of the magazine were often sourced to improve the starting point. Weird Tales underwent several size and format changes over the years; the 1923 and ’24 issues with HPL (except for November 1924) were the oversized ‘bedsheet’ format. The mid to late 1920s and ’30s issues vary in size also, ’though they are closer to the ‘standard’ 7"x10" pulp size. The magazine eventually went to a digest in the 1950s shortly before its demise. We have retained the variations in size, again to preserve the content true to its original printing.

Contents

• Volume 1 (October 1923 – July 1924)
• Dagon
• Letter to the Editor
• Letter to the Editor
• The Picture in the House
• Letter to the Editor
• The Hound
• Nemesis (verse)
• The Rats in the Walls
• Letter to the Editor
• The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt, Part 1 of 2 [Not by Lovecraft]
• The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt, Part 2 of 2 [Not by Lovecraft]
• The White Ape
• The Hoax of the Spirit Lover [Not by Lovecraft]
• Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
• Hypnos
• Volume 2 (November 1924 – September 1952)
• To A Dreamer (verse)
• The Festival
• The Statement of Randolph Carter
• The Music of Erich Zann
• The Unnamable
• The Temple
• The Tomb
• The Cats of Ulthar
• Letter to the Editor
• The Outsider
• The Moon-Bog
• The Terrible Old Man
• He
• Yule-Horror (verse)
• The Horror At Red Hook
• The White Ship
• Pickman’s Model
• The Call of Cthulhu
• Letter to the Editor
• The Lurking Fear
• The Silver Key
• The Dunwich Horror
• The Ancient Track (verse)
• Recapture (verse)
• Fungi from Yuggoth (verse)
• The Courtyard, Star-Winds
• Hesperia
• Antarktos
• The Bells
• Nyarlathotep, Azathoth
• Mirage, The Elder Pharos
• Alienation
• The Whisperer in Darkness
• The Strange High House in the Mist
• In the Vault
• The Dreams in the Witch-House
• Letter to the Editor
• In Memoriam – Henry St. Clair Whitehead
• Through the Gates of the Silver Key
• Letter to the Editor
• Letter to the Editor
• The Haunter of the Dark
• The Thing on the Door-Step
• To Virgil Finlay (verse)
• Psychopompos (verse)
• The Shunned House
• Polaris
• The Canal (verse)
• From Beyond
• Beyond the Wall of Sleep
• To Clark Ashton Smith (verse)
• Where Once Poe Walked (verse)
• The Doom that Came to Sarnath
• The Messenger (verse)
• The Tree
• The Wood (verse)
• The Other Gods
• The Nameless City
• The Lamp, Zaman’s Hill (verse)
• The Quest of Iranon
• The Wicked Clergyman
• Harbor Whistles (verse)
• The Howler (verse)
• Celephais
• The Gardens of Yin (verse)
• Cool Air
• In the Walls of Eryx
• Night Gaunts (verse)
• The Dweller (verse)
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Part 1)
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Part 2)
• The Shadow Over Innsmouth
• Herbert West: Reanimator (6 Parts)
• From the Dark
• The Plague-Demon
• Six Shots by Moonlight
• The Scream of the Dead
• The Horror from the Shadows
• The Tomb-Legions
• Fungi from Yuggoth (verse; 5 Parts)
• The Port (verse)
• The Familiars, The Pigeon-Flyers (verse)
• Continuity, A Memory (verse)
• The House (verse)
• The City (verse)
• Alethia Phrikodes (verse)
• Hallowe’en in a Suburb (verse)

Bibliographic Information

The Weird Writings of HP Lovecraft. By H.P. Lovecraft, With an Introduction by Neil & Leigh Mechem. Mississauga, ON: Girasol Collectables Inc.; 2010; hardbacks; 58 and 574 pages.