The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation - Reviews

Oct 6, 2026

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Critical review of Sean Moreland’s collection The Lovecraftian Poe, which uses the contemporary revival of H. P. Lovecraft to illuminate Edgar Allan Poe’s profound influence on Lovecraft and his circle. The essays trace cross-pollination of themes and narrative strategies, mapping shared motifs from Poe’s horror tales and cosmic intimations to Lovecraft’s “weird” fiction. The review emphasizes the book’s value for scholars and readers by clarifying their lasting points of contact and cultural legacy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

Overview

Poe’s influence on Lovecraft

Shared motifs and narrative strategies

The volume’s scholarly value

R E V I E W S The Cthulhian Face of E.A.P. Sean Moreland, ed. The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation. Bethlehem: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2017. 276 pp. $100 cloth. Like some hellish force inexplicably reawakening after eons of hateful, brood ing sleep, heralded by blasphemous, nauseating tremors and the deranged, inhuman shrieks of his frenzied worshippers . . . H. P. Lovecraft has been having a moment. His tales of horror are now canonized as high literature in editions from Penguin Classics and the Library of America. Philosophers have weighed in on the significance of his “weird” fiction—with its anxious and loquacious narrators circling around the discovery of maddening realities from other dimensions, such as the ancient gods slumbering beneath the ocean in his most famous tale,“The Call of Cthulhu”—while critics have traced his impact from Steven King and H. R. Geiger to the TV series True Detective, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones, the latter with its “Cthulhoid religion of the Drowned God.”1 The new attention to Lovecraft makes his relationship to his most important and most often acknowledged precursor, Edgar Allan Poe, interesting in new ways. The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation, and Transformation, a collection edited by Sean Moreland in a series edited by Barbara Cantalupo, capitalizes on the Lovecraft revival to make clear the profound debts Lovecraft and his followers owed to Poe. Its contributors are critics and literary historians (including major interpreters of Lovecraft) as well as authors of horror fiction. The work dissects the many strange growths deriving from the cross-pollination of their influences and the combined (and gleefully unhealthy) cultural impact of the authors whom S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft’s prolific biographer and defender, calls in the book’s preface “the two leading writers of weird or supernatural fiction in American literature and perhaps in all literature” [ix] . The book is a valuable contribution; it is the first to concentrate on the relation between these two enormously influential authors. It will be immensely useful for scholars of horror, of decadent and speculative fiction and sci-fi, and of Lovecraft. For readers of Poe it efficiently introduces Lovecraft and many of the conversations around him, making clear the strong points of contact between the two—beyond the chance parallels of their brief, often unhappy Vol. 51 (2018): E3–E17 © ~~2018~~ Johns Hopkins University Press and Washington State University P o e S t u d i e S , Vol . 5 1 , ~~2 0 1 9~~ E3 POE 51 1st proof reviews. indd 3 3/4/2019 3:55:20 PM R E V I E w S lives, a shared attitude of proud if fallen nobility, their curious domestic relations and cult followings, and their connections to the city of Providence, where Poe spent time in 1848 in tortured pursuit of Sarah Helen whitman and where Lovecraft spent most of his life. Poe’s influence was early and lasting. Lovecraft distilled from him a writing that keeps the reader moving forward with breathless wonder and terror toward unthinkable revelations: When I was seven I encountered Poe—which fixed my taste for all time, so far as the subject matter and mood of fiction are concerned. Somehow I cannot become truly interested in anything which does not suggest incredible marvels just around the corner—glorious and ethereal cities of golden roofs and marble terraces beyond the sunset, or vague, dim cosmic presences clawing ominously at the thin rim where the known universe meets the outer and fathomless abyss. The world and all its inhabitants impress me as immeasurably insignificant, so that I always crave intimations of larger and subtler symmetries than these which concern mankind. [Lovecraft in Moreland, xix] In these few lines Lovecraft skips across the wide and varied landscape of Poe’s works: the sinuous journey of the voyager in “The Domain o

FAQs

What relationship does the collection focus on between Poe and Lovecraft?

It argues that Lovecraft and his followers owed profound debts to Poe, while also showing how Lovecraft reshaped Poe’s place in American and international literature and popular culture.

Which aspects of Poe are highlighted as shaping Lovecraft’s writing?

The review points to Poe’s ability to propel readers toward wonder and terror, along with cosmic intimations and motifs drawn from specific tales such as “The Black Cat,” “The Raven,” and “MS. Found in a Bottle.”

Why is the book considered important or useful for readers and scholars?

The review calls it the first to concentrate on the relation between these two highly influential authors, making it valuable for scholars of horror, decadent and speculative fiction, and science fiction, as well as for introducing Lovecraft to readers of Poe.

Oct 6, 2026

Upload by Stanley