Penguin Weird a celebration of the very best of the weird, a store of novels and tales that for generations have delighted and horrified. Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, something happened, something... weird. In the dark halls of ivy-clad manors, in the ancient woodland escapes of New England, a generation of authors were inspired to radically reinterpret the horror and fantasy writing of the past. From the terrible plagues of Edgar Allan Poe to the religious terror of May Sinclair and on to the awful, tentacle-faced mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, this anthology celebrates the very best of this writing, a collection of brilliant tales that for generations have delighted and horrified. ‘Escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest . . .’ H.P. Lovecraft
Authors
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
