The Dreams in the Witch House

Description

“The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity . . . “

Plagued by insane nightmare visions, Walter Gilman seeks help in Miskatonic University’s infamous library of forbidden books, where, in the pages of Abdul Alhazred’s dreaded Necronomicon, he finds terrible hints that seem to connect his own studies in advanced mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. The Dreams in the Witch House, gathered together here with more than twenty other tales of terror, exemplifies H. P. Lovecraft’s primacy among twentieth-century American horror writers.

This volume is a companion to the other two Penguin Classics edition of Lovecraft’s work: The Call of the Cthulhu and The Thing on the Doorstep. This original collection presents the definitive texts of the work, including a newly restored text of “The Shadow out of time” along with S. T. Joshi’s invaluable introduction and notes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.The Dreams in the Witch House And Other Weird StoriesIntroduction by S.T. Joshi
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Texts

Polaris
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Terrible Old Man
The Tree
The Cats of Ulthar
From Beyond
The Nameless City
The Moon-Bog
The Other Gods
Hypnos
The Lurking Fear
The Unnamable
The Shunned house
The Horror at Red Hook
In the Vault
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Silver Key
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
THe Dreams in the Witch House
The Shadow out of Time

Explanatory Notes

H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth centuryÆs greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale. (Stephen King)H. P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazine Weird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction—three short novels and about sixty short stories—has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.

S. T. Joshi is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (1999), and The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (2001), as well as Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories (2002). Among his critical and biographical studies are The Weird Tale(1990), Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (1995), H. P. Lovecraft: A Life(1996), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and H. L. Mencken, and is compiling a three-volume Encyclopedia of Supernatural Literature. He lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.US

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