That Is Not Dead Which Still Sells

“That is not dead which can eternal lie. / And with strange eons even death may die.” These lines from “The Nameless City” are among the most resonant from H.P. Lovecraft’s relatively short but highly prolific literary career. They also help provide perspective on how the author’s work holds up in 2025. If the lines have it right, then death itself may well disappear/expire before Lovecraft’s tales begin to lose their commercial appeal. Nearly a century after the Providence writer’s precarious health finally gave out for good, publishers have diligently kept much of the oeuvre in print.

And everything from the fictional (though not the journalistic) oeuvre and more is here in Weldon Owen’s new The H.P. Lovecraft Experience.

The box set is impressive to behold. The packagers have really gone to town — the fictional town of Arkham, to be exact. The deluxe set includes two handsome volumes of his tales along with a trove of memorabilia to help situate the reader in a New England milieu of the 1920s and 1930s where unutterable horror threatened to find its way into the workaday settings of people’s lives. Readers know of the Miskatonic University of lore. Here we have a Miskatonic undergraduate course book, complete with absence policies, matriculation fees, and helpful info with regard to course credit, dismissals from the school, and graduation requirements. You will find an Orne Library card, bookmark, school pennant, and a diploma to frame for your wall, to impress visitors who had no idea you attended such an eminent school and lived to tell about it. Bet you had some near misses, burning the midnight oil in Orne as deadlines and exams loomed! If they’re awed enough, your guests might just ask to examine your forearms to check for the marks of tentacles.

The H.P. Lovecraft Experience
By H.P. Lovecraft
Weldon Owen (an imprint of Insight Editions); 1188 pages

Memorabilia aside, here is an opportunity to revisit such iconic tales as “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Whisperer in Darkness,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” “The Evil Clergyman,” “The Shadow Out of Time,” “The Hound,” “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Temple,” and many others. The publishers have gone to the trouble of reprinting, in full, Lovecraft’s novellas The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness, and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. They have included sections for his juvenilia, which few of even the most ardent fans have seen.

Some of these tales still hold their own with anything in the weird canon for power, vividness, and an ability to haunt the reader with a sense of the vulnerability of our world to sinister forces which hover just beyond it, occasionally making incursions via phenomena we do our best to deny. Readers of the 1927 story “Pickman’s Model,” about a Boston artist who depicts these invasions as chaos and bloodshed on his canvases, may become converts themselves to that school of thought that treats Lovecraft’s work as an allegory for a society in demographic and cultural flux. The forces from the outside — hideous demons — enter the sedate world of Boston bluebloods through a gap in the Boylston Street subway station. Coincidentally, or otherwise, Boylston Street was also where hideous terrorists entered the sedate world of the 2013 Boston Marathon to carry out their demonic bombing.

The deluxe set also includes a reader’s guide to ten of the most beloved stories, written by Sean Branney and Andrew Leman, founders of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. The guide offers summaries of the characters, locations, plots, and themes that make Lovecraft’s tales unique. Branney and Leman are blunt about what they term the “offensively racist” statements Lovecraft makes in certain of his letters and the “bigoted views” that some of his fictions convey. At the same time, they are adamant that those who seek to cancel Lovecraft could not be more wrong. “We believe that separating creators from their creations is a better alternative than ‘canceling’ artists outright,” they state.

This may not be the time and place to rehash all the arguments in Lovecraft’s defense. But Branney and Leman could have gone a bit further, pointing out, for example, that the supposed anti-Semitic bigot married a Jewish woman, Sonia Greene. Moreover, many of the passionate anglophile’s views would not sit well at all with present-day purveyors of white supremacist or Aryan ideology. Lovecraft was contemptuous of Germanic notions of racial purity. The 1925 story “The Temple” satirizes the fixation of its protagonist, a U-boat commander, on his subordinates’ claims to be “real” Prussians. The incompetent men incur the commander’s spite, and his branding of them as “a superstitious Alsatian swine,” “a soft, womanish Rhinelander,” or some other slur. This officer’s racism is like a snake eating its own tail. Clearly, Lovecraft gets a kick out of mocking the racial pecking order that the blowhard U-boat captain enforces at the barrel of a gun.

The writers, editors, and publishers involved with The H.P. Lovecraft Experience have done such a service to fans of the weird author that it seems almost pedantic to say that readers will not quite get the complete experience. For there is much more to the Lovecraft canon than his fiction. For copyright reasons or simply considerations of space, it may not have been possible to include all or even a sampling of the myriad antiquarian, historical, philosophical, literary, and travel writings that appear in the 1976 volume To Quebec and the Stars. But many of those writings from the amateur press of the 1920s and 1930s are vital for grasping Lovecraft’s deeply informed, nuanced worldview.

The quality of these pieces is variable and the stilted prose in some of them off-putting. But at its best, Lovecraft’s journalism engages in a dialogue with his fiction and illuminates its complexities for the reader. “The Unknown City in the Ocean,” an account of Nantucket that ran in the winter 1934 edition of The Perspective Review, conveys Lovecraft’s interest in the eternal vying for rootedness and how different invaders can drive out inhabitants who have begun to feel themselves secure. He describes how settlers from Massachusetts moved onto the island in 1660, dealing “honorably” with the indigenous Americans they met there, but displacing the whales. The whalers made a livelihood out of killing the creatures from small boats until the discovery of petroleum made whaling all but obsolete. Then, tourists displaced whalers. Quakerism flourished and then died out as new religious sprung up.

Readers will find none of that here, nor will they get a taste of the critical sensibility that produced the 1927 study, Supernatural Horror in Literature. Nor will you encounter, in what purports to offer the holistic Lovecraft experience, anything of the epistolary zeal that drove him to correspond with many colorful people, including accomplished authors such as Robert E. Howard and a teen Robert Bloch, and to mentor and share ideas with aspiring writers, fans, amateur historians, and admirers from many parts of the country. If you want to understand his life, work, and thought, it is important to go far beyond the fiction and get at the rich body of journalism and critical writing that conveys the essence of how he saw his world.

These, though, are quibbles. The publication of The H.P. Lovecraft Experience is a testament to the survival of an oeuvre amid constant attacks from the untalented and envious who slander the man and his prose in an effort to consign Lovecraft to oblivion forever. That is not dead which eternally sells to fans while winning over new generations of readers.

Memories of the Lovecraft Wars