This work has definitively removed Lovecraft from the realm of pulp fiction and enshrined him as a canonical figure in American literature-a status endorsed by the Library of America, which published a volume of his Tales in 2005. There is little evidence that Baxter has read the leading scholarship on Lovecraft (he claims to have read my biography, but does not appear to have done so comprehensively or sympathetically) or is aware that the scholarly work of the past half-century has revolutionized our understanding of this author-work by such critics as Dirk W. Baxter has done no original research on Lovecraft or published anything about him. So far as I know (and I have prepared two versions of a comprehensive bibliography of Lovecraft that lists every article written about him from the 1910s to the present day), Mr. Baxter was assigned to write the review in the first place. Whatever the case, I think some words on the other side might be useful. Baxter has some kind of personal animus against Lovecraft. P.I was taken aback at the vehemence of Charles Baxter’s screed on the American supernaturalist H. Read a passage from The Call of Cthulhu by H.

I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things-in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Library of america lovecraft