buy Dagon and Other Macabre Tales by H.P. Lovecraft at Amazon
Author: Donald Wandrei
Release date: January, 1987
Media: Hardcover
ISBN: 0870540394
[By S. T. Joshi:] A Note on the Texts; [by Robert Bloch:] Heritage of Horror [an introductory essay by a protégé of Lovecraft and the author of PSYCHO]; [short stories by Lovecraft:] In the Vault; Pickman's Model; The Rats in the Walls; The Outsider; The Colour Out of Space; The Music of Erich Zann; The Haunter of the Dark; The Picture in the House; The Call of Cthulhu; The Dunwich Horror; Cool Air; The Whisperer in Darkness; The Terrible Old Man; The Thing on the Doorstep; The Shadow Over Innsmouth; The Shadow Out of Time
This is the first in a series of four matching hardcover volumes that present nearly all of Lovecraft's prose fiction. This first volume emphasizes Lovecraft's better short stories (in fact, its original editor, August Derleth, had initially planned to title it BEST SUPERNATURAL FICTION OF H.P. LOVECRAFT). The second volume, AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS AND OTHER NOVELS, features Lovecraft's three novellas, his three short stories concerning the character Randolph Carter (who's also featured in one of the novellas), and a few other short stories. The third volume, DAGON AND OTHER MACABRE TALES, presents many lesser, or at least less popular, works of fiction, plus Lovecraft's monograph, "Supernatural Horror in Literature". The fourth, THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM AND OTHER REVISIONS, which includes most of his ghostwritten and collaborative stories, is the weakest in this series, but some gems still lie within.
This series of volumes was originally published by Arkham House Publishers, Inc., in the 1960s, edited, as noted above, by August Derleth. Years later, after Derleth's death, the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi prepared texts of Lovecraft's fiction that corrected errors that had plagued various print versions thereof and otherwise tried to do a better job of honoring Lovecraft's intentions. Though Joshi had hoped to edit a chronological presentation of Lovecraft's fiction, Arkham House only agreed to publish Joshi's revised texts arranged according to the old Derleth collections, so that the Derleth Estate, which owns Arkham House, could cash in on much of the royalties of the revised texts for Derleth's old editing job. So, alas, this series of matching volumes now in print as published in the '80s isn't arranged as systematically as should be: Lovecraft's work tends to be best enjoyed, understood, and consulted in the chronological order of its composition.
Joshi deserves great credit for bringing these vastly improved texts to the public. Still, some of his textual editing decisions deserve to be called into dispute. Take, for example, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", one of the stories in THE DUNWICH HORROR AND OTHERS. The three dictionaries I consulted say that "cyclopean" and "Cyclopean" are both valid forms of the same word; yet Joshi arbitrarily changes Lovecraft's unmistakable choice of the former to the latter. Those dictionaries also indicate a general preference for not hyphenating adjectives ending with the suffix "like" - yet Joshi inexplicably changes Lovecraft's use of the words fishlike, froglike, sheeplike, barnlike, parklike, and doglike to fish-like, frog-like, sheep-like, barn-like, park-like and dog-like.
Other times, the standard rules of English are on Joshi's side, as when he corrects Lovecraft's habit of hyphenating between adverbs and adjectives (as in "thickly-settled"). But in these and other such reasonable corrections, Joshi presumes too much. Lovecraft was highly literate and well-educated, a professional editor himself, and must have had carefully thought out reasons for spelling and punctuating as he did. Joshi is inconsistent by restoring some nonstandard features of Lovecraft's writing, such as a preference for British and certain archaic spelling, on the one hand, and to "correct" other idiosyncratic features on the other.
All that aside, THE DUNWICH HORROR AND OTHERS, as with the others in this series, has fine content amd belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Lovecraft reader. - an Amazon customer review