Distinguished author Joyce Carol Oates has taken the opportunity to carefully select ten of H.P. Lovecraft's major works to new audiences and longtime fans alike, with the publishing of "Tales of H.P. Lovecraft--Major Works Selected and Introduced by Joyce Carol Oates" (The Ecco Press). "Of all the major works in this volume," Oates writes in her extensive Introduction, "it was 'The Rats in the Walls' and 'The Dunwich Horror' I first encountered at about the age of thirteen and seem not to have forgotten in the intervening years, in the way that recurring nightmares of childhood are never wholly forgotten. Whatever the mythic underpinnings of such wild tales, whatever symbolic and thematic meanings the author may have intended, it can be argued that the surface of a tale is the tale; 'myth' is its residue, its penumbra. The immediate appeal of the successful gothic tale is visceral for, as Lovecraft observed: 'The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.'"
Ms. Oates excerpted a letter written by Lovecraft in 1921, where he details why 'The Unknown' was endlessly fascinating to him: "I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relationship to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background."
The Top Ten Tales of HPL that Joyce Carol Oates selected for this volume:
The Outsider
The Music of Erich Zann
The Rats in the Walls
The Shunned House
The Call of Cthulhu
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
The Shadow Out of Time
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