What to do when you discover that your favorite author (or comedian, or filmmaker, or actor) is a bigot? For some, it inspires a total rejection of the artist, whose work becomes suddenly intolerable. Others reassess their taste, wondering how they were ever able to enjoy a novel with pedophilia at its center, or the stand-up routine filled with misogyny. Still others try to quarantine the art from the artist, as if one might be spared the contagion of the other. And for some — like the horror writer Victor LaValle, who discovered his childhood hero H. P. Lovecraft to be a racist — it’s a long process of soul-searching that ends in compromise.

In his introduction to the second volume of THE NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT (Liveright, 512 pp., $39.95), which was edited by Leslie S. Klinger, LaValle — an award-winning African-American novelist and critic — writes that he discovered Lovecraft at the age of 10 and was “here for all of it: the high anxiety, waves of madness and the terror of human insignificance.” Then, at 15, he began to understand the underlying racial prejudices in the stories, and rejected Lovecraft entirely. Eventually he came to see that there is no way to cut a figure like Lovecraft — one of the founders of American horror, whose work has inspired generations of writers — out of his life. “You can love something, love someone,” LaValle writes, “and criticize them. That’s called maturity.”

I came to Lovecraft in my late teens when a friend gave me a copy of “At the Mountains of Madness,” the story of a geologist whose explorations of Antarctica uncover the remnants of ancient alien life-forms. I didn’t feel an emotional connection to Lovecraft the way LaValle did as a kid, but the apprentice writer in me was thrilled by his inventiveness and a certain voracity of the imagination that shaped everything — history, myth, superstition, reality, fiction, science, everything — to suit his vision. I loved his use of the uncanny. I loved his ability to create a sense of cosmic dread. Then, like now, I found parts of Lovecraft’s work bewildering, so layered in florid prose that I would return to Poe as if to a lifeboat, thankful for his solidity.

If I’d had Leslie S. Klinger as my guide, I would have been better equipped to navigate the peculiarities of the Lovecraftian universe. Klinger’s depth of knowledge about the world Lovecraft inhabited, and his ability to tease out shades of Lovecraft’s personal experiences in the stories, make this volume the most exciting and definitive collection of Lovecraft’s work out there. With hundreds of annotations and photographs, the more obscure elements of Lovecraft’s stories are explained, as are the experiences that may have contributed to Lovecraft’s racism, misogyny and generally misanthropic worldview. LaValle’s introduction, and Klinger’s annotations, give such a full picture of Lovecraft that readers can make their own decisions about whether to stick around and read his work, or turn elsewhere. For me, it is worth taking LaValle’s approach. Lovecraft is deeply flawed, and his stories cannot be read without coming to terms with that. Yet there is ample reward in doing so.