Words by Matt Jarvis
Stephen King, the modern maestro of spooky storytelling, once called H.P. Lovecraft “the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale”.
King’s recognition of the author in the early eighties neatly summed up the remarkable boom in popularity and recognition that Lovecraft’s work had experienced in the half-century following his death in 1937, when he had died largely unknown by the wider public, his fame confined to the small readership of pulp magazines in which his stories were published.