H.P. Lovecraft's Book of Horror Horror Book Review

One of Lovecraft’s great achievements, aside from his tales of cosmic horror, was his non-fiction essay “Supernatural Horror In Literature”.  Written between 1925 and 1927,  then later revised in 1935, it surveys the roots of weird fiction,  from its origins in the gothic novel, through great authors such as Dickens and Kipling who dallied in the supernatural genre from time to time, up through “modern” (meaning 1930’s) masters such as M.R. James and Clark Ashton Smith.


While the essay itself is readily available, including an excellent annotated edition, the older stories are harder to get ahold of.  Many of them are obscure, rarely published, or part of several larger collections of that author’s work, making it expensive to read the stories that inspired Lovecraft.


This book, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror”, collects both Lovecraft’s original essay along with twenty one of the stories mentioned.  The stories range from the famous, such as Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher”, to the obscure, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain”.  All of the stories are excellent, and any fan of weird fiction is going to find this a treasure trove.


The stories collected are:


Charles Dickens - The Signalman

Edward Bulwer-Lytton - the House and the Brain

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Body Snatcher

Hanns Heinz Ewers - the Spider

Theophile Gautier - The Foot of the Mummy

Guy de Maupassant - The Horla

Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher

Ambrose Bierce - The Damned Thing

Marion Crawford - The Upper Berth

Robert W. Chambers - The Yellow Sign

Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman - The Shadows on the Wall

Ralph Adams Cram - Fishhead

Edwards Lucas White - Lukundoo

Clark Ashton Smith - The Double Shadow

Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast

E. F. Benson - Negotium Perambulans

Hugh Walpole - Mrs. Lunt

William Hope Hodgson - The Hog

Arthur Machen - the Great God Pan

M. R. James - Count Magnus