I’m happy to tell you a bit about my next book, The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, to be published by the Liveright imprint of W. W. Norton & Co. Norton of course previously published my New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and New Annotated Dracula, and I love working with the people there, because they care so much about the quality of the books they published.

This will be another lavish annotated edition, with a brilliant introduction by Alan Moore (who has his own Lovecraft project coming soon, a graphic novel called Providence, featuring H. P. Lovecraft as the protagonist). The first hard choice was selecting the stories. I may have wished to be complete, but with 85 stories by Lovecraft, I had to be selective. The ones I chose focus on what I’ll call the “Arkham cycle,” including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and At the Mountains of Madness. Unlike the previous annotated editions of some of Lovecraft’s stories, edited by the estimable S. T. Joshi, I’ve attempted to show the range of Lovecraftian scholarship and focus on explanatory material rather than biographical details. With his assistance, I’ve used Joshi’s carefully edited texts, rather than other slipshod sources. The 21 stories span Lovecraft’s career, and I’ve added a long detailed foreword placing 21 Lovecraft’s work in context, as well as close to 90,000 words of editorial content and almost 1,100 footnotes. The edition will also contain over 250 images, many of them photographs of the places mentioned in the stories, as well as all of the original Weird Tales illustrations. Yup, probably another 5-pound book!

I’m hopeful that for those of you unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s work, you’ll come away with a sense of why he belongs in the pantheon of the founders of the science-fiction and horror genre, among the most influential writers of the 20th century. For those who are already Lovecraft devotees, I’m very grateful for the support of the long-time Lovecraft scholars in assembling this book, and I hope that you will find new insights of which you never dreamed!

The book is projected for publication in October 2014, in bookstores everywhere.

Meanwhile, rest assured, DC Entertainment promises that volumes 3 and 4 of The Annotated Sandman will appear in 2014! And, the book gods willing, Laurie R. King and I will complete In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, another anthology of stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, by an incredible and diverse group of authors!

Stay tuned! And thanks for reading!