H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20 1890 - March 15 1937) was an American author of fantasy and horror fiction, noted for giving horror stories a science-fictional framework. His early fantasies were greatly influenced by the stories of Lord Dunsany, but later took on a much darker tone with the main thrust of his work, the Cthulhu Mythos, which deals with a lurking older pantheon and horrors which live extra-dimensionally. His fiction often mentions the Necronomicon, the secret grimoire purportedly written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

His prose is somewhat repetitious and tends towards the grand guignol. He was fond of heavy use of unfamiliar adjectives such as "rugose" and "squamous", and of attempts to transcribe dialect speech which have been criticized as inaccurate.

Much of Lovecraft's work was directly inspired by his nightmares, and it is perhaps this direct insight into subconscious fears that helps to account for their continuing popularity.

Many later creators of horror writing and films show influences from Lovecraft, including Clive Barker and H. R. Giger. Others, notably Clark Ashton Smith,August Derleth and Brian Lumley, have written stories that are explicitly set in the same "universe" as Lovecraft's original stories.

Some stories:

• The Dunwich Horror
• Pickman's Model
• The Call of Cthulhu
• The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - his only novel-length work
• At the Mountains of Madness
• The Shadow over Innsmouth

The definitive edition of his work is published by Arkham House, a publisher originally started with the intent of publishing the work of Lovecraft, but which has since published a lot of other fantastic literature as well.

Films based (generally very loosely) on Lovecraft's works:

• The Haunted Palace, an adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. See: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0057128
• Re-Animator
• Bride of Re-Animator
• Beyond Re-Animator
• From Beyond
• The Dunwich Horror
• Unnamable
• Unnamable II
• Dagon

For a biography of Lovecraft, see `Lovecraft, a biography' by L. Sprague de Camp

An extensive web page about Lovecraft, including on-line texts of his complete works can be found at http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/