The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft

The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft / edited and with an introduction by S.T. Joshi. 360 p.

A friend asked me to recommend some Lovecraft Mythos stories, so I got the yen to read him again. Also, I generally enjoy annotations. In this case, the annotations range from very helpful--lots of comments on various scientific details, including the fact that continental drift was a fringe theory in 1936 when the story mentioning it was published--to completely useless--trying to figure out whence Lovecraft derived every character name, even though clearly (by his own admission, quoted here) he sometimes just made them up! The stories were fun to read again; "Colour" and "Mountains" are two of my favorites, and I found "Rats" more enjoyable than I remembered.

The stories included in this volume are "The Rats in the Walls," "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dunwich Horror" and "At the Mountains of Madness." "Rats" is the only non-Mythos story.