Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales — Kenneth Hite

A wide-ranging and friendly journey through H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic terror and wonder, the Tour de Lovecraft is the ideal companion to the work of the twentieth century’s greatest American horrorist.Kenneth Hite has spent decades reading and re-reading Lovecraft and his heirs, slipping through their forests of verbiage to discover the solid literary ground beneath. With his game designer’s eye for structure and connection, in this book he reveals the threads and themes that run throughout Lovecraft’s masterpieces. The Tour de Lovecraft alternately ambles and careens through all fifty-one of the Master’s horror tales in chronological order from “The Tomb” to “The Haunter of the Dark,” offering cheerful opinion, incisive literary criticism, playful speculation, and the occasional unhinged rant. It’s a response to Lovecraft, and to his occasionally humorless critics, that offers you Edmund Burke’s Gothic perspective on Cthulhu side-by-side with “The Haunter of the Dark” considered as Grail quest.Praise for Tour de Lovecraft!“Kenneth Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft is indispensable. Thorough, insightful, and compellingly readable, it’s a perfect introduction for newcomers to Lovecraft and an endlessly fascinating review for long-time Lovecraft addicts. This is the companion-book to Lovecraft’s fiction—I read it entirely in one sitting, and I know I’m going to read it again many times over the coming years.”— Tim Powers, author of Declare and Last Call“Lovecraft can be terrifying for all the wrong reasons. Kenneth Hite’s charming and accessible Tour makes it much, much simpler. This is a sharp, engaging survey of Lovecraft’s most important stories, sure to bring inspiration to new fans and fresh epiphanies to longtime devotees. And I’d recommend it to any teacher looking for an introductory critical companion to the fiction itself.”— Stephen H. Segal, editorial director, Weird Tales magazine“The prospect of Ken turning his strange illumination upon Lovecraft’s corpus was too delightful to resist. My attention was rewarded, as will be yours, with his many insights, associations, and criticisms of these familiar tales.”— John Scott Tynes, creator of Delta Green, from his Foreword“Simply put, Ken Hite knows his stuff. If you have any interest in Lovecraft beyond Cthulhu kitsch, you owe it to yourself to read this.”— Richard Dansky, author of Firefly Rain“Tour de Lovecraft is an insightful and witty romp through the fiction of the twentieth century’s master of horror.”— Daniel Harms, author of The Necronomicon Files and The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia