If you look at the contents page of The Best of H. P. Lovecraft (Del Rey, 1982) you will find only one story from HPL’s fantasy oeuvre, collectively known as The Dreamlands stories. (This is “The Silver Key”, a tale of Randolph Carter, who loses the key to the Dreamlands, and how he finds his way back to that magical place. As a fantasy tale, it is couched mostly in our world.) The Best of H. P. Lovecraft is a large book and dominated by his later horror classics.
This is a shame, for H. P. Lovecraft was a fine fantasy writer. His Dreamlands stories are colourful and fantastic at the same time that they can be dark and haunted. I understand Del Rey’s desire to market their books to horror fans (thus, the creepy covers by Michael Whelan and the introduction by Robert Bloch). This is a reality of publishing. You don’t pollute a horror collection, especially one subtitled “Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre”, with tales of “white-capped Thurai” and “the singing Skai under its bridges down to the Southern Sea”. Del Rey did try to make amends by publishing two separate volumes, The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath and The Doom That Came to Sarnath, that contain the Dreamlands tales, along with other early pieces. The covers are from the same grisly Whelan painting but nowhere does Del Rey claim “Best of” status.
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I was glad to see this article. I’ve always liked Lovecraft and have always thought of him as a major writer of modern fantasy, even in his “horror” works. The writer Barbara Hambly, in her introduction to the Lovecraft collection The Transition of H.P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness,” wrote, “Lovecraft was a man with a vision of the world: astonishing, macabre, intricate as a Giger drawing. His sense of comsoses opening out of cosmoses, of dark abysses concealing in their hearts the entrances to further gulfs, infuses nearly everything he wrote with an atmosphere, not of horror, but of wonder.”