Table of Contents

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird StoriesIntroduction by S. T. Joshi
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text

The Tomb
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
The White Ship
The Temple
The Quest of Iranon
The Music of Erich Zann
Under the Pyramids
Pickman's Model
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Dunwich Horror
At the Mountains of Madness
The Thing on the Doorstep

Explanatory Notes

About the Author

H. P. Lovecraftwas born in 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island, where he lived most of his life. Frequent illnesses in his youth disrupted his schooling, but Lovecraft gained a wide knowledge of many subjects through independent reading and study. He wrote many essays and poems early in his career, but gradually focused on the writing of horror stories, after the advent in 1923 of the pulp magazineWeird Tales, to which he contributed most of his fiction. His relatively small corpus of fiction-three short novels and about sixty short stories-has nevertheless exercised a wide influence on subsequent work in the field, and he is regarded as the leading twentieth-century American author of supernatural fiction. H. P. Lovecraft died in Providence in 1937.

S. T. Joshiis a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft'sThe Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories(1999), andThe Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories(2001), as well as Algernon Blackwood'sAncient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories(2002). Among his critical and biographical studies areThe Weird Tale(1990),Lord Dunsany- Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination(1995),H. P. Lovecraft- A Life(1996), andThe Modern Weird Tale(2001). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and H. L. Mencken, and is compiling a three-volumeEncyclopedia of Supernatural Literature. He lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.

Reviews

Praise for Penguin Horror Classics:

“The new Penguin Horror editions, selected by Guillermo del Toro, feature some of the best art-direction (by Paul Buckley) I've seen in a cover in quite some time.” – Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Each cover does a pretty spectacular job of evoking the mood of the title in bold, screenprint-style iconography." – Dan Solomon, Fast Company