The weird before Lovecraft

Lovecraft did not invent the weird tale. He said so himself, at length, in an essay that reads like a reading list. The writers he named were working twenty and thirty years before him, and most of them are now easier to find quoted than read.

The Carrier Press pre-Lovecraft line is six restored editions of those writers. It is finished. All six are out.

If you already know the shelf

Start with Carcosa. Carcosa is not one writer's invention. Ambrose Bierce made the name, Robert W. Chambers took it and built something else on top of it, and the thing everyone now associates with the word arrived later still and from somebody else again. Having the Bierce and the Chambers in one volume makes the borrowing visible in a way that reading them separately does not.

Then The King in Yellow, which is where the play that drives men mad comes from, and which is only half the book people think it is. The first four stories are the famous ones. The rest of the collection is a set of quiet Paris pieces about art students, and the argument about whether they belong is older than most of the people having it.

The Mystery of Choice is the Chambers nobody quotes. The Great God Pan is Machen doing the thing Machen does, which is to make a scientific procedure sound like a sin. The Willows is Blackwood, and it is the one Lovecraft called the best of its kind, and it has no monster in it at all.

If you have never read any of it

Start with The Willows. Two men on a canoe trip camp on a sandy island in the Danube and slowly stop being able to agree about what is happening. There is no creature, no curse and no explanation. It is the purest demonstration of the form, it is short, and if it does not work on you then the rest of the shelf will not either. That is worth knowing in an evening rather than over a year.

What restored means here

These are not scans, and they are not the free file with a new jacket. Every one has a newly set interior, an original cover, and new apparatus written for this edition: a preface that places the book, notes where a modern reader needs them, and a reader's guide. The texts are public domain. The editions are not, because the work of making a hundred-year-old book readable is real work and somebody has to do it.

One rule was absolute throughout. The original text is never altered. Not the punctuation, not the paragraphing, not the scene breaks, not a single em dash. Where a sentence is strange, it is strange because the author wrote it that way, and the note goes in the apparatus where it belongs.