Lovecraft Unbound
“Readers who know Lovecraft’s legacy mostly through turgid and tentacled Cthulhu Mythos pastiches will find this book a treasure trove of literary terrors.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Here are nineteen Lovecraftian stories—both new and rediscovered—that take their cues from the mythos of the iconic horror writer. Today’s masters of supernatural thrills celebrate H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre with tales of weird fiction and cosmic horror, collected by Hugo and Bram Stoker Award–winning editor Ellen Datlow.
In “Commencement” by Joyce Carol Oates, a university begins its annual ceremony of renewal with three renowned scholars whose lifetime achievements are fodder for the student body. A couple desperate to have another child turn to the darkest rituals of folklore and mythology in “Catch Hell” by Laird Barron. And Holly Phillips’s “Cold Water Survival” trails a group of Antarctic explorers who encounter vast, unexplainable shapes in the ice—a danger to humanity awakening from its frozen slumber.
Rounding out the collection are more spinetingling tales from Brian Evenson, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Marc Laidlaw, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear, Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Bowes, Anna Tambour, Amanda Downum, Joel Lane, William Browning Spencer, Michael Cisco, Lavie Tidhar, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Michael Shea, Gemma Files, and Nick Mamatas.
Ellen Datlow, Dale Bailey, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Bowes, Anna Tambour, Brian Evenson, Amanda Downum, Joel Lane, Holly Phillips, William Browning Spencer, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Michael Cisco, Marc Laidlaw, Joyce Carol Oates, Lavie Tidhar, Simon Kurt Unsworth, Michael Shea, Gemma Files, Sarah Monette, Laird Barron, Elizabeth Bear, Nick Mamatas
<B>Ellen Datlow</B> was editor of Sci Fiction, the multi award- winning fiction area of scifi.com, for almost six years. Previously, she was fiction editor of <I>Omni</I> for over seventeen years. She has won the World Fantasy Award seven times, two Bram Stoker Awards, the International Horror Guild Award, the 2002 and 2005 Hugo Award, and the 2005 Locus Award, for her work as an editor. Sci Fiction won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Website. Datlow and Windling are the co-editors of over eleven original anthologies and of seventeen volumes of <I>The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror</I>. <br><br><I>Terri Windling</I> is an editor, writer, painter, and passionate advocate of mythic arts. She has won the World Fantasy Award seven times, as well as the Mythopoeic Award for her novel <I>The Wood Wife</I>. During the last two decades she's edited over twenty-five anthologies with Ellen Datlow, as well as several other anthologies, including one called <I>Faery</I>. Her paintings, which are based on folklore and feminist themes, have been exhibited at museums and galleries in the United States, England, and France.
