Multi-eyed protoplasmic entities, flesh-eating ghouls, animate corpses, time-traveling body snatchers, and, yes, huge albino penguins. These are some of the bizarre creatures that populate the universe created by American horror author H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft has influenced many of today’s most famous writers and artists, including master of contemporary horror fiction Stephen King, Academy Award-nominated director Guillermo Del Toro, and artist and Alien set-designer H. R. Giger. This collection includes three selections from the Cthulhu Mythos: the novella At the Mountains of Madness, which is often considered Lovecraft’s masterpiece; “The Thing on the Doorstep”; and “The Shadow Out of Time.” While including all the chilling “cyclopean vistas,” monstrous abominations and appalling transformations that readers have come to expect from Lovecraft, this also showcases his fantasy writing in stories such as “The Cats of Ulthar,” “The Silver Key,” and notably The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mirror-opposite of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality. Although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades. He is now commonly regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century, exerting widespread and indirect influence, and frequently compared to Edgar Allan Poe. — Wikipedia
