Black Seas of Infinity

To those who have never enjoyed Lovecraft before, we caution you: read these tales on a sunny public beach in the middle of the day because you’re in for a strange, dark and exhilarating ride.

Lovecraft’s stories envisage the Cthulhu Mythos—an awesome and utterly inhuman cosmos, riddled with hideous entities who plunged to Earth vast aeons ago—architects of unfathomable alien cities who wait silently beneath sea, sand and snow until they are released into the world again. Lovecraft’s protagonists are scholars and Everymen who desperately hang onto shreds of sanity as all around them creeping dread turns into shivering madness. Great stuff, this.

The adventure begins with “The Call of Cthulhu,” arguably Lovecraft’s most famous story, the harrowing chronicle of a young anthropologist who investigates an astounding tale of an Elder God from the stars, sleeping beneath the sea until awoken by unsuspecting fishermen. “The Shadow Out of Time,” one of Lovecraft’s last major stories, recounts the tale of a man whose strange dreams lead him on a perilous expedition to a bizarre ancient city—the cyclopean home of the Great Race, keepers of epoch-embracing knowledge and guardians of a monstrous, subterranean terror.

Decay and desolation taints “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” as blasphemous abnormalities from the deep overrun a crumbling seaside village, while a fossil-hunt in the Antarctic (“At the Mountains of Madness”) revivifies denizens of a murderous race of nonhuman creatures. A doctor’s scheme of murder has grotesquely unexpected consequences in “Winged Death” and a researcher’s exploration of an American Indian burial site takes a turn into the macabre in “The Mound”—two stories that have only appeared in a small-press collection.

Rounding out this volume are four appendices: Lovecraft’s own tongue-in-cheek history of The Necronomicon; a brief autobiographical essay; his notes on writing weird fiction; and a chronology of his work—all of which will heighten your appreciation and understanding of Lovecraft and his works. Jacket art by Ian Miller.