Letters to Lovecraft: Eighteen Whispers to the Darkness

Edited by Jesse Bullington. Stone Skin

(www.stoneskinpress.com), $13.99 ISBN 978-1-908983-10-7

Author and first-time editor Bullington (The Folly of the World) explores macabre maestro H.P. Lovecraft’s enduring legacy in this deeply satisfying anthology. Inspired by “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft’s well-known exposition on the genre, Bullington asked his “favorite storytellers” to take a fresh look at Lovecraft’s essay and craft original stories under its influence. The result is a wonderfully disparate collection of works spanning time and place, from writers both established and unfamiliar. Brian Evenson’s terrifying standout, “Past Reno,” describes a young man’s rising anxiety at the desolate landscape framing the journey back to his childhood home. The turn-of-the-last-century human monsters walking through Chesya Burke’s “The Horror at Castle of the Cumberland” are an abomination far worse than the shadows that trail them. A familiar trope gets a chilling twist in David Yale Ardanuy’s “One Last Meal, Before the End.” The stories in this essential compilation are as diverse as the contributors, and together they form a wonderful confluence of criticism and creativity. (Dec.)