The Library of America scares up a collection of Lovecraft's local lore

That ability to suggest a frightful, hideous world that might exist in familiar places is the genius of Lovecraft.

Born in Providence of old Yankee stock in 1890, Lovecraft emerged from a sickly and reclusive childhood -- he never graduated from high school -- to become a freelance journalist. His early interest in the Grimms' fairy tales, the "Arabian Nights," and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe -- and astronomy -- led eventually to the writing of weird tales for pulp magazines.

In all, Lovecraft wrote some 60 tales, 22 of which are now collected in one of the Library of America's handsomely uniform editions.

During the 1920s, Lovecraft lived in New York, where he had an unsettled marriage, but traveled throughout New England, visiting places that would be his settings. He returned permanently to Providence in 1926, and died there in 1937.

Lovecraft's New England settings -- there are several tales set further afield, in the Antarctic and Australia -- are either clearly identifiable, even to street names and buildings, such as the Marblehead of "The Festival," or his native Providence of "The Haunter of the Dark," or suggestive, such as the "decayed" seaport that could be the Newburyport of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," or the north central Massachusetts of "The Dunwich Horror."

In addition to the fictionalized New England settings, Lovecraft's tales are marked by a highly developed personal mythology based on what his biographer, S.T. Joshi, described as " 'the supernormal,' that is, incidents [that] no longer defy natural law, but merely our imperfect conceptions of natural law."

They are also marked, writes Joshi in his introduction to a Penguin Books edition of Lovecraft's tales, by "plot devices" that include "a wide array of extraterrestrials" known variously as "the Great Ones" or "the Old Ones," hideously described, and headed by a being known as Cthulhu -- a "hellish entity," in Lovecraft's words, who "lies dreaming" in some underworld space waiting to be unleashed by his followers upon the world.