My Lovecraft Annotated Bibliography

Fear: The Mind Killer, The Little Death


H.P. Lovecraft: At The Mountains Of Madness


Annotated Bibliography


Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Print..


Freeland examines what the possible nature of evil is in relation to horror. She examines the complexity of fear, how we cope with death in relation to horror, and the various and interesting depths achieved emotionally by horror when it comes to our human limitations. She looks at the flesh vs. the soul and examines whether or not horror is simply a shallow depiction of evil, or something more. She examines the question of beauty in evil, and the question of whether it is concieved in a way that we can cognitively engage in an intellectual way. Freeland examines the asthetic appeal registered in our brain versus the physical response as part of a natural process. This will give a framework of horror and fear from which to work.


Freeland, Cynthia A. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. Print.


Phillips examines fear as something having value, possibly even an ultimate or supreme value. There is a discussion in relation to fear that can validate our own life. There is an analysis from an existential point of view from Sartre, as well as a search for truth in the text Phillips conveys. He uses direct psychoanalysis done by Freud and Klein. I will use this text to show how Lovecraft creates fear through repetition of certain words in his literature to imply something is recognizable and how it separates the familiar from the unfamiliar as well as the effect of fear on the human psyche.


Morse, Josiah. "Emotional States Allied To Fear. Page 108." The Psychology and Neurology of Fear. Worcester, MA: Clark UP, 1907. Print.


This was published before Lovecraft’s work, so I hope to use the excerpt listed to examine fear from the point of view available to Lovecraft at the time he wrote his literature. Morse defines Horror as an altruistic fear and how it is strong in those who are particularly sensitive or sympathetic. There are other definitions in the book that might have been examined by Lovecraft. This will help me to see what Lovecraft may have been aiming for when it comes to fear at the time he wrote At The Mountains Of Madness. The psychological point of view of several emotions examined by Morse and used in Lovecraft’s literature could be used to intensify the feeling of fear. I will relate these in the essay to the other pieces of psychoanalysis.


Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin De Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1998. Print.


Navarette proposes that in order to write about decadence, one must imitate Lovecraft just as he imitated fin de siècle horror. She goes on to talk about constructing fear in a way where our natural human instincts are connected to memories of fright. She talks about fear being the richest source of evidence of the human instinct. This will be a good book to use to explain how fear affects us from a mind altering instinctual standpoint, and how it affects our thought process. I will use this to examine Lovecraft’s use of fear to queue our instinct.