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Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft

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5.5" x 8.5" softcover book. 206 pages.

It is within the pages of Primal Sources that Joshi truly shines. Collecting together 23 of Joshi's most insightful essays regarding Lovecraft (with some being substantially revised), this volume provides invaluable insight into Lovecraft's life, philosophy and individual works.

Reprinted mainly from issues of Joshi's Lovecraft Studies quarterly and the Robert M. Price edited Crypt of Cthulhu, the bulk of these writings bear relevance solely to the Lovecraft scholar. The final third of the book, dedicated to studies on individual works by Lovecraft, will prove invaluable to nearly any reader with an interest in better understanding the man's literature. Especially of note is the inclusion of the previously unpublished essay "Some Sources for 'The Mound' and At the Mountains of Madness", which postulates the influence of James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder on the two works in question.

Whether your interest solely dwells with Lovecraft or with the Weird genre as a whole, this book is sure to bear strange intellectual fruit...or, as Lovecraft would have surely preferred, fungi.

Joshi is the big gun in Lovecraft studies, but this is not the Big Book. It's a collection of essays which were mostly intros to other books, now recycled. By all means read Joshi on Lovecraft. There is a one-volume and a two-volume biography, two volumes of annotated Lovecraft, and AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS with an introduction ammounting to a critical study. Joshi also edited the new editions from Arkham House. But this one's only for the completist. I'm a Lovecraft completist, but not a Joshi completist. That said, if you've never read Joshi on Lovecraft before, about half of this one would go down nicely.