Alone with the Horrors
Winner of both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award for collection: the canonical one-volume Campbell and a standard text in any serious horror education.
Book Entry · Horror
What is The Case of Charles Dexter Ward about?
A Providence antiquarian's obsession with his ancestor Joseph Curwen — necromancer, slaver and salt-merchant, who was never satisfactorily killed in 1771 — proceeds from research to resurrection, and young Ward is gradually replaced by the thing he raised. Written in 1927 but unpublished until after Lovecraft's death, it is his most novelistic work: a proper gothic mystery with detection (the admirable Dr Willett), grave-dust alchemy and the genre's best use of the formula 'do not call up that which you cannot put down'.
Why it matters
Lovecraft's finest long-form narrative by many estimates; filmed (loosely) as The Haunted Palace and The Resurrected, and a model for necromantic horror since.
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