Lovecraft was, of course, an uneven writer, as all writers are. In the works of his first decade of fiction writing there are many mediocrities, some outright failures, and some genuine triumphs (“The Rats in the Walls” being perhaps the most notable of them). But in the last decade the triumphs far outweigh the failures and mediocrities. And yet, it is still remarkable that Lovecraft’s entire fictional corpus (exclusive of revisions) can be accommodated comfortably into three large volumes. No writer in the field of weird or science fiction, save Poe, has achieved such distinction and
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