The best of the 22 stories that H.P. Lovecraft scholar Joshi (The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos
) has selected for this all-original anthology take their cue from the 20th-century horror master without slavishly imitating him. High points include Laird Barron's “The Broadsword” and William Browning Spencer's “Usurped,” cumulatively creepy studies of Lovecraft-style locales where inexplicable supernatural phenomena suggest an otherworldly dimension intersecting our own. Both Caitlín R. Kiernan's “Pickman's Other Model (1929)” and Brian Stableford's “The Truth About Pickman” riff neatly on Lovecraft's ghoulish classic “Pickman's Model.” Ramsey Campbell's unsettling “The Correspondence of Cameron Thaddeus Nash” encapsulates the entirety of Lovecraft's unique ambitions as a horror writer in the rambling letters of one of his unbalanced (fictional) correspondents. A few tales are too insular to be appreciated by any but hardcore Lovecraft fans. (May)
