Hillier’s six mesmerising, portal-like illustrations embrace the alien realities that lurk among the gambrel roofs of Lovecraft’s landscapes. Yet, despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he ‘possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature’. In his beautifully crafted new preface, Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived: ‘the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition’. This edition, based on its sister limited edition, marries Lovecraft’s best-known fiction with two modern masters of the macabre, the acclaimed artist Dan Hillier and author Alan Moore. This fictional universe, built in large part by his friend and most ardent supporter, August Derleth, has in the years since been reimagined in myriad forms, and continues to act as a haunted playground for countless illustrators, fans and authors. The extra-terrestrial ‘gods’ and cursed histories that would emerge from these stories now form the cornerstones of Lovecraft’s unique mythology: the Cthulhu Mythos.

In later tales, such as the iconic ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, Lovecraft reaches into the cosmos, bridging the divide between horror and science fiction. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far Another early piece, ‘The Outsider’ – a tragic and emotive evocation of loneliness and desolation – follows a man’s escape from his castle in a desperate search for human contact, but the loathsome truth he discovers destroys his mind. ‘“Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!”’ screams occultist Harley Warren in ‘The Statement of Randolph Carter’, as he begs his companion to bury him alive. Through their investigations into the unexplained, they tug at the thin threads that separate our world from another of indescribable horror. In stories written in the gothic tradition, narrators recount their descent into madness and despair. This collection spans Lovecraft’s literary career, and charts the development of his ‘cosmicist’ philosophy the belief that behind the veil of our blinkered everyday lives lies another reality, too terrible for the human mind to comprehend.

Hp lovecraft the call of cthulhu