English 165

Book List

Datlow, Ellen, editor: Lovecraft Unbound; Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderland; Lovecraft, H.P.: Tales; Price, Robert, editor: Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos

Description

--William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland (Dover: 978-0486468792)

--D. Thin, ed., Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror (New York Book Review of Books Classics).

--H. P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America: 978-1931082723)

--Robert Price, editor, Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos (Ballantine Books).

--Ellen Datlow, editor, Lovecraft Unbound (Dark Horse Books).

--Paula Guran, ed., The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu (Running Press)

“The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”—H. P. Lovecraft.

Despite his unseemly political predilections, Lovecraft has proven to be a persistently influential American writer, perhaps more so now than ever. We will begin with several stories that Lovecraft identified as influences in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” proceed to Lovecraft and then explore some weird fiction inspired by Lovecraft. Class meetings will be mostly discussion, because I have more interest than expertise in these works: our task will be to figure out what sort of questions we ought to ask about them. Two ten-page essays will be assigned.