Edited by S. T. Joshi.
H. P. Lovecraft was a voracious reader of supernatural and fantastic
fiction, and he was continually on the hunt for powerful and stimulating works in these genres. Many of the stories he read directly influenced
his own writings. This first volume of H. P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Horror Stories presents 16 stories that Lovecraft found to be of particular merit.
Among them are the beautiful poetic fantasy “Idle Days on the Yann” by
Lord Dunsany; Fiona Macleod’s grimly evocative “The Sin-Eater,” which
influenced “The Rats in the Walls”; Arthur Machen’s grisly novelette
“Novel of the White Powder,” which Lovecraft adapted for “Cool Air”; and M. P. Shiel’s “The House of Sounds,” which Lovecraft ranked among the
greatest weird tales ever written. Also included are hard-to-find
stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, E. F. Benson, Théophile Gautier, John
Buchan, and others, as well as two stories from the legendary pulp
magazine Weird Tales (Seabury Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse”
and Arthur J. Burks’s “Bells of Oceana”). The volume contains an
introduction by S. T. Joshi as well as notes on the individual stories,
giving background on the authors as well as on Lovecraft’s appreciation
of the tales and their possible influence on his work.
Contents:
- Introduction by S. T. Joshi
- Idle Days on the Yann by Lord Dunsany
- Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Man Who Went Too Far by E. F. Benson
- The Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling
- The Sin-Eater by Fiona Macleod
- The House of Sounds by M. P. Shiel
- The Phantom Farmhouse by Seabury Quinn
- One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Théophile Gautier
- The Stranger from Kurdistan by E. Hoffmann Price
- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe
- Novel of the White Powder by Arthur Machen
- The Dead Smile by F. Marion Crawford
- The Ghost of Fear by H. G. Wells
- Lukundoo by Edward Lucas White
- Bells of Oceana by Arthur J. Burks
- The Wind in the Portico by John Buchan
