Before I read my first Lovecraft story ("The Festival"), I had seen his books advertised on the back pages of Creepy and Eerie magazines. I had no idea what they were, but it was clear they were horror stories.
When I first picked up HPL, it wasn't in these editions, but an edition of The Shadow Over Innsmouth published by Scholastic Books. These Ballantine collections, though, were all over the place in the late seventies and were among the first I bought myself.
Looking over the contents, they leave out a lot of the major stories, and The Shuttered Room persists in claiming Derleth's stories are based on actual unfinished HPL stories and not mere fragments or jottings in his commonplace book. The two Cthulhu Mythos anthologies, originally released as a single hardcover volume edited by August Derleth, are great. Between them, you get some of the best Mythos fiction. There's "The Hounds of Tindalos," "The Black Stone," "Notebook Found in a Deserted House," and other really good stories.
So, take a moment and take a look at some of the wildest Lovecraft cover art from the late John Holmes.
