A Book That Is Not Nearly As Cyclopean As It Should Be

This post would have been much better served to appear yesterday morning, when a confluence of storms roiled the air above my abode, casting down sheets of rain and raising high winds, as if some cylopean entity was raging in its otherwordly confines. But that was impossible; the book in question only arrived in yesterday's mail.

The book is the new Library of America volume of H.P. Lovecraft's
Tales, a very handsome volume and a very welcome publishing event. I was surprised when I heard that Lovecraft was going to get the LoA treatment at all, being a greasy genre author, but he has been the focus of a very active, and very professional, critical circle for more than a generation now, and I guess that's more than one can say for most dead American writers. The LoA also seems to be trying to expand its remit; a book of Lousia May Alcott's novels came out at the same time as this volume, and the series headed out into mystery-novel territory starting about a decade ago, with books from Chandler and Hammett and a couple of omnibuses. So I suppose this shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, though I still think they should have done Ambrose Bierce (a much more important, and, I have to say, better writer of post-Poe horror) first.

So why am I about to complain about this book?

Well, let's leave that aside for a moment, and talk about the good things. Tales has the usual great LoA presentation, with subscriber's copies arriving in slipcases and the bookstore version in a subdued black jacket featuring Lovecraft's cadaverous mug. The book itself is bound in full cloth, in a jaunty blue. (I've tried and failed to figure out the significance of the binding color to the LoA. Twain and Melville are both blue, as is the American Poetry series. But so are Henry Adams's two history books. Steinbeck is tan and Hawthorne is red. So it's neither by genre nor by historical era; it may just be whatever color they felt like using that year.) The text is clear and very readable, and the books are a great size; they fit in the hand very nicely and are comfortable to read for long periods of time. I love the Library of America, and I'm not ashamed to say it. These are wonderful books, physically and textually, and I already have at least four shelves of them.

There's essentially no scholarly apparatus, as usual for the LoA; no critical writings of any sort and only brief notes on the texts and a condensed chronology of Lovecraft's life. That's deliberate, since these editions are designed to last for generations (and, I'm sure, the LoA hopes to keep selling them for a few decades), and critical fashions can change very quickly and nothing is sillier than the solemn pronouncements of the previous generation. All that is to be expected; that's the standard Library of America treatment, and it's all here.

What I was surprised by was the length of this book. Library of America volumes regularly run longer than a thousand pages. (My edition of Benjamin Franklin's Writings is the champ, ending its index at page 1605. In fact, that book may have been too big, since it seems to have been retired and replaced by two new volumes, each just a bit longer than 800 pages.) Perhaps the LoA is trying to do shorter books now; it's possible that paper costs are making their older thousand-page monsters uneconomic. But Lovecraft's Tales was the shortest Library of America book I've seen, at only 838 pages. (Yes, I know. That sounds huge. But, in the context of their list, it's a mere slip of a thing.) The next shortest LoA book I have at hand is Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, which clocks in at 892 pages. So it looks like Lovecraft is being short-changed, or (to the new reader) as if this book collects all of the Lovecraft stories worthy to be remembered.

Now, I myself edited a book of Lovecraft's best stories a few years back (Black Seas of Infinity, which I think you can see here), so you may think this is mere sour grapes. (And I'll admit that I would have loved to have had an extra 300 pages in my book.)

But I think it's more than that. From the LoA's history, I expected a larger book, and one more complete. This volume excludes all of Lovecraft's Dream-Lands tales (even "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath," which really should have been here), to focus, apparently, on his later Mythos writings. Again, there is no introduction, so the choice of stories is unexplained. Usually, LoA volumes collect the "complete works" of their author in the particular area, so this is not a problem. The Lovecraft Tales seems to be their first "Selected Works of," and that does not work as well in their format. For another example, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," a very short story that surely could have been shoe-horned in, is not included here.

More defensibly, Tales doesn't include any of Lovecraft's "revisions," the stories he re-wrote for other writers. I happen to think "The Mound," a novella-length revision Lovecraft did for Zealia Bishop, is among his very best works. (And so I included it in Black Seas of Infinity, along with "Winged Death," another excellent revision.) Including any of those stories could have opened a can of critical worms, though, so leaving them out is reasonable. I think it's a bad decision, but it's a decision with a firmer basis than leaving out any hint of the Dream-Lands.

For those of us who think of Lovecraft as a particularly science-fictional writer (the short form of that argument: all of his horrors are aliens, creatures outside what we expect from the world, and the horrific notion they embody is that the universe is a cold place, controlled by equations and beings that care nothing about us), this book is also problematic. One of the strongest texts for that view is Lovecraft's only obviously SFnal story, "In the Walls of Eryx," which is not included here. (I also consider it one of his best works, and included it in Black Seas of Infinity.)

All in all, this is a specifically selected set of stories, designed to promote a view of Lovecraft as a particular kind of writer. A horror writer, to be precise. The stories were selected by Peter Straub, a highly respected contemporary horror writer, and, though he does not explain their selection anywhere in this book, the aim of his selections is still clear.

In the past, I've always been able to recommend Library of America volumes to any readers, and especially to those new to a writer. Since they didn't have any critical essays, and did include definitive texts and complete works, they were very well suited to help readers make up their own minds about a writer. I'm afraid this is not the case with Lovecraft; I couldn't recommend this book to anyone not already familiar with his works. It is very much a selection, and the reasons for that selection need to be clear to the reader. Since the book itself doesn't make them clear, it is thus only really suitable for those who already know the whole of Lovecraft's work. (And thus this book is essentially superfluous.)

It's too bad. If the Library of America had been willing to do two Lovecraft volumes, they could have collected all of his fictions (including the revisions, perhaps in a separate section), and provided the definitive edition of a fascinating and idiosyncratic American original. As it is, though, they made a book that really only belongs on the shelves of those who already have five or six feet of Lovecraft books already (like me, for instance).