While sharing similarities with Bradbury's Halloween Tree and the English ghost stories that were my first Halloween book picks Lovecraft has a scariness that is uniquely his. While Bradbury writes of imagination and history and the ghost story writers mine our fear of the dead Lovecraft brings us an existential creepiness, a realization of humanities tininess in the grand scale of existence. The monsters here are both in your backyard and in the depths of the vacuum of space.
I chose this edition for the wonderful cover by
Mike Mignola. I think there might be a new addition out with less interesting cover art so please track down this one. You can buy it Amazon
here. While this is a great introduction to Lovecraft there are also a number of paperbacks available with incredibly creepy art by John Jude Palencar which are also highly recommended.
