"What, pray tell," asks editor Robert Price, "is wrong with sequels?" This remarkable stewpot of original stories inspired by H.P. Lovecraft answers that question decisively: Not a thing is wrong with them! Indeed, everything is deliciously right.

Lovecrafts' fictional world, after all, is well worthy of emulation, so it's no surprise to find it generating sequels like these tales. You see, it's rather like natural selection: What is successful in the gene pool survives to copy itself into thefuture, and what we have here is the welcome spectacle of Lovecraft's fictional DNA replicating itself with a vengeance. Darwin would be proud. Lovecraft would be mystified. Readers will be pleased.

So climb abour the creaky bus, take that sinister ride to Innsmouth and Arkham and other unspeakable places, and see how good a job these contemporary writers have done of proving that old Lovecraftian maxim true:" That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die."

--- Donal R. Burleson, author of H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, and Wait for the Thunder.