The Folio Society is releasing a new edition of Lovecraft’s best-known fiction, The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories, featuring the contributions of two modern masters of the macabre, the acclaimed artist Dan Hillier and author Alan Moore. The collection will also be available as a 750-copy limited edition, packaged in a presentation box and including a print signed by the artist. Each edition shimmers with Lovecraft’s ‘unknown colours’—purple and greens akin to both the ocean depths and mysteries from outer space. Each copy also features a mystical design by Hillier.
This collection spans Lovecraft’s literary career, his ‘cosmicist’ philosophy and the belief that behind the veil of our blinkered everyday lives lies another reality, too terrible for the human mind to comprehend. Writing in the gothic tradition, narrators recount their descent into madness and despair. Through their investigations into the unexplained, they tug at the thin threads that separate our world from another of indescribable horror. The alien gods, death cults and forbidden tomes that cast their maddening shadows over of his fictitious New England would introduce the world to a new set of terrors, reflecting the strange, uncaring universe being unraveled by physics and cosmology. These ‘weird’ tales, and their vast influence, have since carved their creator a tentacle-shaped throne among the monoliths of American literature.
In his beautifully crafted new preface, Alan Moore finds Lovecraft at once at odds with and integral to the time in which he lived, calling him “the improbable embodiment of an estranged world in transition” and saying that despite his prejudices and parochialisms, he “possessed a voice and a perspective both unique in modern literature.”
You can view an introductory video below, in which Dan Hillier and Art Director Raquel Leis Allion provide a guide to the illustrations and gorgeous purple-and-green bookbinding…but beware, what has been seen cannot be unseen:
H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu & Other Weird Stories illustrated by Dan Hillier is exclusively available from The Folio Society.
