Finds At The Used Book Store: 13 February 2007 Part 3

Chripy recently got a wonderful find at Half Price Book Stores: A $2 copy of Great Untold Stories of Fantasy and Horror, Pyramid Books, 1969, 3rd ed. 1970.

Sam Moskowitz says, "One of the paradoxes of Lovecraft;s admirers is the annoyance they have felt when that talented author was referred to as a majot science fiction writer as well as a master of the supernatural.

"... The paradox rests in the strong efforts some of these same people have made to show tha The Dreams in the Witch-House is as much science-fiction as it is supernatural. ... H P Lovecraft ... in the context of the story referred to Einstein's theories, the space-time continuum, "the elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to identify. The possibility of stepping from the third to the fourth dimension and back again, extra-dimensional geometry was considered, and finally the statement 'the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex whcih obeyed laws unknown to physics...

"The truth was that H P Lovecraft did not believe in the supernatural. Never did and never would to the day of his death and felt that many of his readers didn't and attempted to offer the possibility that there was some scientific rather than supernatural explanation for witchcraft to make his stories more convincing."