The Free Complete Ebook Works of H.P. Lovecraft

In early December (2010), I used a file from the Australian Project Gutenberg to create an EPUB of most of Lovecraft’s works. It wasn’t a comprehensive file and while it’s been popular (just having hit 1,000 downloads this morning, in under 3 months), it isn’t what I want for my own use or what the librarian-in-training in me thinks should be out there.

So, after several months of working on the project when I could—snatching minutes and hours between work, grad school, and making Cthulhus—I am very proud to announce that I have finished an eBook of The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft.

You have heard of H. P. Lovecraft, haven’t you?

Howard Phillips “H. P.” Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction.

Lovecraft’s guiding literary principle was what he termed “cosmicism” or “cosmic horror”, the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. As early as the 1940s, Lovecraft’s work had developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fiction featuring a pantheon of humanity-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Humanism and Christianity. Lovecraft’s protagonists usually achieve the antithesis of traditional gnosis and mysticism by momentarily glimpsing the horror of ultimate reality and the abyss.

Although Lovecraft’s readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now regarded as one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th century. According to Joyce Carol Oates, Lovecraft — as with Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th century — has exerted “an incalculable influence on succeeding generations of writers of horror fiction”. Stephen King called Lovecraft “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.”  King has even made it clear in his semi-autobiographical non-fiction book Danse Macabre that Lovecraft was responsible for his own fascination with horror and the macabre, and was the single largest figure to influence his fiction writing.

If you haven’t read his books & short stories, maybe you have seen them…

  • The Haunted Palace (1963)
  • The Dunwich Horror (1970)
  • Re-Animator (1985)
  • From Beyond (1986)
  • The Unnamable (1988)
  • The Resurrected (1992)
  • In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
  • Necronomicon (1994)
  • Bleeders (1997)
  • Cthulhu (2000)
  • Dagon (2001)
  • Beyond Re-Animator (2003)
  • The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
  • H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch-House (2005)
  • Cthulhu (2007)

Like most movie adaptions, there maybe very little of the book’s content in the movie.

Jump over here, and read the original works, for free…  Free Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for Nook and Kindle.