Lovecraft never really held an office job; he was too proud, or possibly too fragile. (Various anxieties and ailments precluded him from attending college or participating in World War I.) He spent much of his time writing, and, as a child prodigy who continued scribbling until his “death diary,” he left behind a mountain of work. He wrote hundreds of poems and scores of essays, the most famous beginning, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He wrote tens of thousands of letters—nearly 100,000, according to some estimates.

But it’s Lovecraft’s fiction—70 stories, plus a number co-written with other authors—that provide the basis for his reputation. The spirit of these tales is perhaps most aptly conveyed by the meme with his face and the caption, “AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFT—JUST KIDDING, THEY’RE ALL DEAD OR INSANE.” The titles of his stories also give a sense of the mood: “The Lurking Fear,” “The Terrible Old Man,” “The Rats in the Walls.”

Everyday scenarios held little allure for Lovecraft. “I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them,” he once wrote. And so, he wrote about the bizarre: cannibalism, reanimation, self-immolation, murder, madness-inducing meteors, human-fish hybrids, aliens, and, in the case of “The Festival,” a “horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember.” Another tale, 1924’s “The Shunned House,” offers a vaguely happy ending: an image of birds returning to an “old barren tree.” But that’s only after the narrator’s uncle transforms into a “dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness ... who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws.”

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Lovecraft sold these stories for paltry sums to pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Stories. He also made a bit of money revising the work of other authors. But it never amounted to much. Leslie Klinger, the editor of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, describes him as the “quintessential starving artist.” And, though Lovecraft developed a devoted cult following—he corresponded with a young Robert Bloch, decades before Bloch wrote Psycho—critical acclaim eluded him, too. A few years after he died, the New Yorker critic Edmund Wilson wrote, bluntly, “Lovecraft was not a good writer,” adding, “The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad art and bad taste.”

But even as Wilson derided his work, the author’s fans and friends hustled to get his work into print. As the Lovecraft biographer S.T. Joshi recounted in a 2013 speech, one young fan took a bus ride from Kansas to Rhode Island after Lovecraft’s death to ensure that the author’s papers were donated to Brown University. Other friends launched a publishing house, Arkham House, with the express purpose of publishing Lovecraft’s stories.