Through his collaborations with today's most talented and acclaimed practitioners of Lovecraftian fiction, editor S. T. Joshi has made the Black Wings of Cthulhu series essential for every library of horror and the macabre. Volume four offers up seventeen new masterpieces, each exploring the roots of fear employed so famously by the master himself, H. P. Lovecraft.

This is a critical study of many of the leading writers of horror and supernatural fiction since World War II. The primary purpose is to establish a canon of weird literature, and to distinguish the genuinely meritorious writers of the past fifty years from those who have obtained merely transient popular renown. Accordingly, the author regards the complex, subtle work of Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, T.E.D. Klein, and Thomas Ligotti as considerably superior to the best...

Sixteen all-new stories spring from the concepts of doomed exploration, remote terror, and cosmic horror. A who's-who lineup of authors instills new energy into the sub-genre that is Lovecraft, featuring authors who rarely contribute to a Lovecraftian anthology, including Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Alan Dean Foster, Jonathan Maberry, William F. Nolan (Logan's Run), and more. New foreword by Kim Newman and edited by S. T. Joshi.

As Stephen King will attest, the popularity of the occult in American literature has only grown since the days of Edgar Allan Poe. American Supernatural Tales celebrates the richness of this tradition with chilling contributions from some of the nation’s brightest literary lights, including Poe himself, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and—of course—Stephen King. By turns phantasmagoric, spectral, and demonic, this is a frighteningly good additi...

Volume 5 in the successful and critically acclaimed series of Lovecraftian horror anthologies by the most prominent acolytes of the horror master.H. P. Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror has long forced readers to an inexorable truth—there are powers in the universe whose immensity dwarfs petty human conflicts. Inspired by Lovecraft and brought together by editor S. T. Joshi, the stories in Black Wings of Cthulhu 5 explore the very essence of fear.Between the...

Modern Masters of Terror The works of H. P. Lovecraft have inspired brilliant writers for decades, leading Stephen King to call him the "twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." S.T. Joshi-the twenty-first century's preeminent expert on all things Lovecraftian-gathers greatest modern acolytes, including Caitlin R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, Darrell Schweitzer and W.H.Pugmire, each of whom serves up a new masterpie...

In this second volume of his expansive history of atheism, S. T. Joshi examines the major trends in the last four centuries. The Scientific Revolution, culminating in the work of Galileo and Newton, expressed an increasing awareness of the natural functioning of the universe without the intervention of a god. In spite of the emergence of major religious figures in philosophy (Descartes, Spinioza) and literature (Pascal, Milton, Bunyan), the trend was toward secularism. This trend erupted i...

Curated new collections. H.P. Lovecraft was the inventor of cosmic horror, of weird fiction and the Cthulhu mythology. His stories, incubated by a lonely and febrile childhood, found purchase in the fertile earth of pulp fiction where he inspired many other writers, from Robert E. Howard, to Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith, many of whom also collaborated on the several short stories, some of which are also included here, in this special deluxe edition. This title, alongside H.G. Wells ...

An exhaustive work covering the full range of topics relating to vampires, including literature, film and television, and folklore.Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture is a comprehensive encyclopedia relating to all phases of vampirism—in literature, film, and television; in folklore; and in world culture. Although previous encyclopedias have attempted to chart this terrain, no prior work contains the depth of i...

Baltimore native Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) was an essayist, literary critic, magazine editor, novelist, and journalist. Starting as a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the century, Mencken eventually became associated with the Baltimore Sun and his work for the newspaper spanned five decades.In H.L. Mencken: An Annotated Bibliography, S.T. Joshi provides the most exhaustive and comprehensive bibliography of the writings of H. ...

When 22-year-old Alison Mannering returns to her home in northeastern Pennsyl-vania after college, she finds a troubling situation. Her father, Guy Mannering, a longtime coal miner, has died recently under suspicious circumstances, and her mother refuses to provide any details of his passing. Alison feels she has no option but to investigate the matter herself, enlisting her high school sweetheart, Randy Kroeber, as well as Randy's twin sister, Andrea called Andy, to assist her.In t...

The six volumes in the Black Wings series, from which these "Best of" tales are selected, stand as a monument to H. P. Lovecraft's incalculable and unassailable influence on contemporary weird fiction, and so the time seemed right for a retrospective volume that exhibits the choicest items from the series. The task of selection was not a simple or straightforward one, for every tale in the series had some claim to be chosen; let it then be said that this volume does not contain necessarily...