You just try to cherish them, overlook their flaws.” As the main character, Atticus - a fan of pulp fiction and Lovecraft’s tales - tells the lady he’s walking with in the first scene: “Stories are like people. The show acknowledges this clearly, but then tells a story steeped in Lovecraftian mythology, complete with hordes of shoggoths. Lovecraft Country was a fantastic show, and it shined a light on the most significant problem with H.P. But other than skimming through some of the artwork, I did not read a page of it until last year when HBO released Lovecraft Country. So, in 2014, I bought a beautiful, hard-bound copy of The New Annotated Lovecraft with an introduction by Alan Moore.

Lovecraft had been to the genres of horror and speculative fiction, inspiring a legion of writers from Fritz Leiber to Stephen King. Still, I was well aware of how influential H.P. Howard, who were Lovecraft’s contemporaries in speculative fiction, I found myself disappointed by the story that gave Lovecraft’s fictional mythos its name. And having read several books by Edward Rice Burroughs and Robert E. More like a disjointed narrative than a well-plotted tale. The first of his stories that I had ever read was one of his most famous: The Call of Cthulhu. What I didn’t know at the time was how controversial he had become nearly a hundred years after his career as an author in the 1920s and 1930s. I’d known about his fictional mythology surrounding Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones since the first edition of Deities & Demigods, but I never got around to reading any of his works until much later in life.

The ballad of black tom