You too can be a Lovecraft scholar

H.P. Lovecraft is my favorite writer. I can remember reading him for the first time when I was in the fifth grade and came across a battered comic book version of his short story “The Outsider.” I’ve been hooked ever since.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Lovecraft, he wrote horror stories and supernatural fiction for pulp magazines like “Weird Tales” during the 1920s and 1930s. He was largely unknown during his lifetime (1890-1937) and died at age 47 from stomach cancer. In all, he wrote three short novels and about 60 short stories.
A handful of influential writer friends kept his stories in print, and he would go on to heavily influence such modern writers as Stephen King. Today, there is an entire field of literary scholarship devoted to the study of Lovecraft’s supernatural fiction.
Earlier today, I finished reading “The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories.” This book was one of three Lovecraft story collections published by Penguin Books in 2004. (The other two were titled “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Call of Cthullu and Other Weird Stories.”)
“The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories” contains 21 of Lovecraft’s most popular stories. Stories in the book include “Polaris,” “The Doom That Came To Sarnath,” “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Tree,” “The Cats of Ulthar,” “From Beyond,” “The Nameless City,” “The Moon-Bog,” “The Other Gods,” “Hypnos,” “The Lurking Fear,” “The Unnamable,” “The Shunned House,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “In the Vault,” “The Strange High House in the Mist,” “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” “The Silver Key,” Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”
Among these, my personal favorites include “The Lurking Fear,” “The Shunned House,” “The Horror at Red Hook,” “The Dreams in the Witch House” and “The Shadow Out of Time.”
This book also contained two Lovecraft stories that I'd never read before: “The Terrible Old Man” and “The Tree.” Lovecraft wrote “The Terrible Old Man” in January 1920, and it was published in the August 1926 edition of “Weird Tales.” “The Tree” was also written in early 1920 and was printed in the 1938 edition of “Weird Tales.”
Another highlight of the book is the insightful introduction by noted Lovecraft scholar and biographer, S.T. Joshi of Seattle, Washington. Joshi also wrote the intros to the other two Penguin Lovecraft collections.