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 twenty 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. Michael Chabon’s “In the Black Mill” follows an archeologist who visits a small Pennsylvania town to study Mound Builders, but becomes singularly obsessed with the dark and sinister mill that looms over the area. 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.