This volume attempts an objective reassessment of the controversial works and life of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Ignoring secondary accounts and various received truths, Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft’s parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.

Gavin Callaghan is an independent writer, artist, and researcher whose works have appeared in the The Comics Journal, Lovecraft Annual, Studies in Weird Fiction, and FATE Magazine. He lives in New Port Richey, Florida.

Gavin Callaghan
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 288
Bibliographic Info: 6 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2013
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7079-2
eISBN: 978-1-4766-0239-4
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Sympathy for the Shoggoths 1
One • Dark Arcadia: Arcadia, Arkham and H. P. Lovecraft’s Process of Classical Inversion 11
Two • The Birds and the Bees (According to H. P. Lovecraft) 59
Three • Secrets Behind the Locked Door: Lovecraft and the Theseus Myth 67
Four • From the Moon to the Pit: Lovecraft’s Moon-Ladder 121
Five • Lovecraft’s In Memoriam: Phillips Gamwell and the Innsmouth Coda 147
Six • H. P. Lovecraft and the Magna Mater 160
Appendix 243
Chapter Notes 247
Bibliography 267
Index 273