SOURCE: Winter, Douglas E. “Those Eldritch Horrors.” Book World 27, no. 43 (26 October 1997): 6.

In the following review, Winter offers a favorable assessment of Tales of H. P. Lovecraft and The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft.

Fear lurks in the shadows of American letters, its pleasures plebeian and guilty. The “genre” fiction of horror and the supernatural is Cain to the Abel of literary fiction, maligned and maverick, until time heals its wounds and makes it classic, if not literature.

Consider, if you will, the facts in the case of the “Gentleman from Providence,” the haunted savant known as H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937).

Born to Rhode Island gentry, Howard Phillips Lovecraft suffered through a childhood that reads like a recipe for the making of a horror writer. Before Lovecraft's eighth birthday, his father had died, apparently of syphilis, after years in a mental hospital. His emotionally unstable mother, who would die in the...