Rating: 
Summary: Not a good introduction to Lovecraft
Review: This book is obviously a labor of love. However, it's not a book that will please all Lovecraft lovers. It will appeal mostly to Lovecraft fans who also enjoy minutiae for its own sake. Those who read Lovecraft for literary pleasure, on the other hand, will be better off buying a less cluttered text. If they want more information on HLP the man, there are several excellent biographies available that also throw light on HLP's literary antecedents and influences. Several reviews on this site have represented this book as an introduction to Lovecraft. However it's important to understand that it's meant more as a part of S. T. Joshi's ongoing project to make writers of "Weird Fiction" academically respectable. Certainly, such authors as Dunsany and Machen are excellent writers and this ought to be recognized by all who thrill to fine literature. Moreover, HLP and Clark Ashton Smith are badly under-recognized by both academia and the literary establishment. But the fact remains that most of the writers have more readers than ever before. So why does Joshi continue to strive against a hostile audience of philistine academics and half-read literati? I must confess I don't see any point in it; academic recognition won't bring add anything to HLP, except a body of tedious academic literature. In fact, the final nail in the coffin's HLP's reputation will come when academia grants its approval. HLP will then be known not merely as an obscure writer, but as a writer who is obscure, worthy, and boring. The subversive appeal that draws so many curious and intelligent readers to Lovecraft will evaporate. Consequently, although this book is well done, I have to conclude that it was not worth doing. Lovecraft pleases as literature, he interests as a type, but as a thinker worthy of serious scholarly interest, he falls flat. His atheism and his positivism look old fashioned, and could only appeal to someone with equally unreflective views.
Rating: 
Summary: One more layer of the onion...
Review: This is definitely not a "beginner's" Lovecraft. For those who are taking their first glance, I recommend "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)." or "Best of H.P. Lovecraft : Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre ." It is also not an "expert's" Lovecraft, who have already tackled the fine Arkham House "Selected Letters" volumes, or such arcane tomes as "The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft : The Route to Horror (New Studies in Aesthetics, Vol. 29)." What it is, is an "intermediate's" Lovecraft, perfect for those who enjoy his stories, and want to peel back one small layer of the onion and look beneath the surface. The volume focuses on his major works, and the annotations range from the broad, such as definitions of words, to the minute, such as genealogy of local towns. There is a nice selection of photographs of Lovecraft's early homes and some locations of stories. The annotations also include some informative biographical notes that help explain his stories, such as Lovecraft's fear of seafood and the cold, or the fact that he was dressed as a little girl when he was a baby. Definitely read other editions of his works first, so that you may enjoy his stories as stories. Then, when you want to take one small step further, give this annotated edition a try.
Rating:
Summary: One more layer of the onion...
Review: This is definitely not a "beginner's" Lovecraft. For those who are taking their first glance, I recommend "The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)." or "Best of H.P. Lovecraft : Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre ." It is also not an "expert's" Lovecraft, who have already tackled the fine Arkham House "Selected Letters" volumes, or such arcane tomes as "The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft : The Route to Horror (New Studies in Aesthetics, Vol. 29)." What it is, is an "intermediate's" Lovecraft, perfect for those who enjoy his stories, and want to peel back one small layer of the onion and look beneath the surface. The volume focuses on his major works, and the annotations range from the broad, such as definitions of words, to the minute, such as genealogy of local towns. There is a nice selection of photographs of Lovecraft's early homes and some locations of stories. The annotations also include some informative biographical notes that help explain his stories, such as Lovecraft's fear of seafood and the cold, or the fact that he was dressed as a little girl when he was a baby. Definitely read other editions of his works first, so that you may enjoy his stories as stories. Then, when you want to take one small step further, give this annotated edition a try.
Rating:
Summary: Lovecraft Rescued From Pulp Graveyard
Review: This trade paperback attempts to kindle renewed interest in H.P. Lovecraft's work by treating it with the scholarly attention paid by academics to more literary writers. S.T. Joshi makes the case that Lovecraft was more a writer in the tradition of Poe than pulp writers like Robert E. Howard, and he manages to clear away a lot of the brush that has crept over the man. That Lovecraft was an unusual, even eccentric figure is not disputed, but he was very intelligent, read widely in a number of scientific fields, and was serious about his fiction. Joshi makes a compelling case that Lovecraft's work should be separated from the penny-a-word pulp writers that he's lumped with today.
Rating:
Summary: Good for an intro, but not for a current hardcore fan.
Review: Though not as packed full of stories as some of the other collections published in paperback, the included are excellent. They annotations are nice and are a plus, but also the major upset. Some pages are half annotations. This can get very distracting because you will want to read all of them and this shifts the focus from the story to them. They can be annoying, but are not so bad that you should pass this book up. They contain lots of info that many would not have known about HPL and how the stories were written. Overall, this is a great for an intro to HPL. (It actually was MY intro also.) But, if you've already read the tales included, you have little to buy this for. But, the annotations are cool and the facts and introduction by the editor are not just some common facts you'd pick up by researching for yourself. To sum it all up: Buy it if you have had little exposure to HPL. You will regret it if you pass it up and it will haunt you for the rest of your life.
Rating:
Summary: The Contents of This Book
Review: With so many different Lovecraft collections out there, it may help prospective buyers to know what's actually in this one: [By S. T. Joshi:] Acknowledgments; Introduction [an essay about H. P. Lovecraft and his fiction]; [By Lovecraft:] The Rats in the Walls [a short story]; The Colour Out of Space [another short story]; The Dunwich Horror [still another short story]; At the Mountains of Madness [a novella]; Lovecraft on Weird Fiction [excerpts from four letters to correspondents]; [By Joshi:] Lovecraft in the Media [an essay about dramatizations of Lovecraft's fiction in film, radio and television]; Select Bibliography But there's more: A scattering of achival photos of persons and places in Lovecraft's life; another scattering, this time of brief tributes to Lovecraft excerpted from various writers; introductions by Joshi to each of the featured pieces by Lovecraft; and, above all, footnotes, lots of footnotes, by Joshi at the bottoms of the pages. Most of the footnotes are pretty useful -- Lovecraft was a sophisticated, scholarly writer, and the typical contemporary (i.e. post-literary, electronic era) reader would miss or be stumped by many of his literary, historical, geographical and foreign language references. But too often Joshi goes beyond helping the reader better enjoy and appreciate Lovecraft's fiction, instead relating the fiction to picayune details of Lovecraft's personal life. For example, on p. 28, the first person narrator of a story includes this sentence: "My father died in 1904 [footnote 10], but without any message to leave me, or to my only child, Alfred [footnote 11], a motherless boy of ten." Footnote 10 reads: "In fact, it was not Lovecraft's father but his grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904), who died on March 28, 1904. Lovecraft's father had been hospitalized in 1893 and died in 1898, and Whipple Phillips had in effect become his father." Footnote 11 reads: "Alfred: the name is possibly derived from Lovecraft's young friend Alfred Galpin (1901-1983). They had come into contact in 1918 and remained voluminous and close correspondents to the end of Lovecraft's life. When Lovecraft first met Galpin in Cleveland in August 1922, he addressed him as 'my son Alfredus' (Selected Letters, I, 191)." Give me a break! That's important material for a detailed biography of Lovecraft -- and Joshi has written and had published just such a book elsewhere -- but of little significance to the reader simply trying to get at the meaning and intrinsic pleasure of a work of fiction. Who but a biographical researcher would want to be distracted by such stuff? So on the one hand Joshi speaks to the stuffiest scholar, and yet often talks down to the reader who's reasonably well-educated. Do we really need to be told what Druids were (p. 30), or who the Marquis de Sade was (p. 32), or what silicon is (p. 66)? Nonetheless, read discriminately, the annotations are helpful for better fathoming Lovecraft. As to the printing of the volume, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that the typeface of the main texts is large and easy to read. (The annotations are quite small, though.) The bad news is that the text is rife with typos. Dell Publishing, get your act together! In sum, this book (and its sequel, More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) probably belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Lovecraft reader, right next to Arkham House' Lovecraft collections. The Annotated H. P. Lovecraft (like its sequel, More Annotated H. P. Lovecraft) is a handy and inexpensive reference for some of Lovecraft's best stories. A warning, though: Don't read Joshi's footnotes on a first reading of a Lovecraft story -- allow yourself to follow Lovecraft's narrative uninterrupted so you can capture the mood and sense of surprise that lie within.
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