The Works of H.P. Lovecraft (4 volume set)

The definitive four volume set of H.P. Lovecraft's works by Arkham House Publishing. Each book fine in a fine dust jacket. The only full set currently on the market. Quite rare thus, especially in this excellent. Includes the definitive and highly acclaimed three volume compendium H. P. Lovecraft's works edited by S.T. Joshi, the leading authority on H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of Weird and Fantastic Tales:  (1) The Dunwich Horror and Others, (2) At the Mountains of Madness, and (3) Dagon and Other Macabre Tales; together with the final supplemental edition, by Joshi, The Horror in the Museum. An amazing collector's set for the H.P. Lovecraft fan!

Arkham House is considered the definitive source for Lovecraft’s fiction and letters, and S.T. Joshi the leading authority on Lovecraft. Joshi edited, corrected, and compiled all of Lovecraft's stories in these four volumes based on Lovecraft’s original autograph and typewritten manuscripts. Based upon S.T. Joshi’s extensive and painstaking collation of these extant materials, Joshi's corrected editions by Arkham House are considered the complete, authoritative stories from Lovecraft.

From The Dunwich Horror: "In the whole range of fantastic literature, Lovecraft created a new form that is neither pure fancy nor pure science fiction. He combined a factual and accurate scientific knowledge with its extension to the absolute limit in supernatural bizarrerie. His work defies classification, for it is as much myth as reality—both lore and legend at their haunting, haunted best, and at the same time science at its most provocative. His tales have been termed the finest weird fantasy ever written, and yet also the most superbly literate science fiction. Lovecraft’s work has achieved an honored eminence among the great visionary fiction of the ages precisely because, while betraying no trace of the commonplace, his stories are based convincingly in the world of everyday reality, yet lure the mind into the farthest reaches of the imagination, the star-flung spaces of the universe, the cosmic realm of a master mythmaker."

Each volume fine in a fine pictorial dust jacket. Dust jacket flaps taped to pastedown in Mountains, Dagon, and Horror. Quite rare as a set and in this fine condition. The Dunwich Horror and Others, (the Corrected 7th Printing, 1963), Octavo. 433 pp.; At the Mountains of Madness (the Corrected 7th Printing, 1964), Octavo. 458 pp.; Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (the Corrected 7th Printing, 1965), Octavo. 448 pp.; and The Horror in the Museum (the Corrected 4th Printing, 1989), Octavo. 450 pp.

The Dunwich Horror includes such classic works as the title, story, “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Music of Erich Zann,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “The Outsider.” Here too are those memorable nouvelles of the Cthulhu Mythos—“The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” as well as such chilling tales of pure grue as “In the Vault” and “Pickman’s Model.”

The second volume in the compendium trilogy, At the Mountains of Madness, remains one of the few works of American science fiction from the 1930s that can be read today for genuine literary pleasure rather than dutiful historical interest. This volume also includes “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which is perhaps Lovecraft’s most precisely wrought masterpiece of demonic horror. The third short novel in the book, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” presents an odyssey through the byways of dream-land and is one of the several narratives featuring Lovecraft’s alter ego, Randolph Carter.

The final volume of the trilogy, Dagon, collects all the remaining fiction by H.P. Lovecraft. Although sometimes considered secondary to the remarkable fiction and tales in The Dunwich Horror and At the Mountains of Madness, the early Lovecraft works in this volume constitute absorbing testimony to his creative development. In addition, completing this volume is the only critical recension of “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the single most significant essay on the horror genre.

The supplemental volume to the three book compendium, The Horror in the Museum, represents remaining original work by Lovecraft, including such notable contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos as “The Electric Executioner,” “Out of the Aeons,” and “The Diary of Alonzo Typer.” Supreme among the revisions in this volume is the brilliant nouvelle “The Mound,” which embodies Lovecraft’s satirical commentary on the Machine Age “decadence” of his era and which receives its first unabridged publication in this edition.