Book excerpt: This volume attempts an objective reassessment of the controversial works and life of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Ignoring secondary accounts and various received truths, Gavin Callaghan goes back to the weird texts themselves, and follows where Lovecraft leads him: into an arcane world of parental giganticism and inverted classicism, in which Lovecraft's parental obsessions were twisted into the all-powerful cosmic monsters of his imaginary cosmology.