Even in his own lifetime, H. P. Lovecraft’s commonplace book—a series of 222 entries containing intriguing weird elements and imagery that the author jotted down over a nearly twenty-year span—served as inspiration for other writers, as Lovecraft lent the book to colleagues interested in embodying some of the entries in their own weird tales.
Now, S. T. Joshi, a leading Lovecraft scholar, has asked sixteen contemporary writers to write their own stories based on entries from the commonplace book. The result is an array of striking weird fiction that adapts these fragments from Lovecraft’s imagination to modern-day concerns relating to artificial intelligence, political instability, and the like. Other authors have employed the entries to write evocative tales of fantasy analogous to Lovecraft’s Dreamland stories.
Such leading authors as Steve Rasnic Tem, Ann K. Schwader, Donald Tyson, Jason C. Eckhardt, Geoffrey Reiter, Darrell Schweitzer, and Donald R. Burleson are represented.
The book concludes with Henry S. Whitehead’s classic story “Cassius,” incorporating a provocative entry about a man with a hideous twin growing out of his belly. Appended to the story is a long letter by Lovecraft commenting on Whitehead’s tale.
