Lovecraft, H(oward) P(hillips)

(US, 1890–1937)

H. P. Lovecraft is a cult writer, whose influence on others has in the end been more remarkable than his own relatively small corpus, which consists almost entirely of short stories and novellas. These are continually reprinted under varying titles, such as The Haunter of the Dark (1951) or The Colour Out of Space (1964). Lovecraft's major invention was ‘the Cthulhu Mythos’, which alludes continually if inconsistently in many stories to an elder race of supernatural beings, self-destroyed by sorcery but still capable of being awoken once more. Lovecraft's allusions to lost works such as the ‘Necronomicon’ and the archives of Miskatonic University have inspired many fictional attempts to expand his hints and fill in the gaps.

Fritz Leiber, Michael Shea.

See SUPERNATURAL  TS