Cthulhu Mythos Gets the Fancy Foil Treatment from Flame Tree Publishing
The timelessness of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror has proven itself yet again with Flame Tree Publishing’s Lovecraft Short Stories. Launched this year, it’s one of the first of various special companion volumes to its popular Gothic Fantasy anthology series. This 480-page, illustrated deluxe edition pops from the shelf with its foiled and embossed hardback cover.
“We chose Lovecraft due to his huge influence in horror fiction,” Maria Tissot, Flame Tree’s sales and digital marketing coordinator, told Dread Central. “We did a lot of research into which tales seemed to be the most popular amongst readers, which stories were seminal to Lovecraft’s canon, and just including a really nice range of stories with slightly different themes and spanning different periods of Lovecraft’s writing. At the end of the day though, we had to believe that every story included was a great read in its own right.”
The anthology is arranged chronologically according to when these tales were penned, instead of published, showing Lovecraft’s own evolution as a writer. Each story comes with suggestions to other similarly-themed works that might also interest the reader.
S. T. Joshi, literary critic and an authority in the study of Lovecraft, provided the book’s foreword. “He was extremely helpful in providing some insight into which were some of Lovecraft’s stronger stories – for example, he was a big proponent of ‘Rats in the Walls’ as a great story from Lovecraft’s early period,” said Tissot.
Not only does the collection have some of Lovecraft’s most memorable short stories, it also includes contributions to the Mythos from other giants of weird fiction. Tissot explains, “As Lovecraft himself was very much in favour of the idea of creating a shared universe, it seemed very fitting to include Cthulhu Mythos stories from Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Bloch, who were often in correspondence with Lovecraft.”
Check out the Gothic Fantasy series here.
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