Joyce Carol Oates on Lovecraft
One of the most battered and well-loved books in my collection is a Lovecraft collection, the Lovecraft reader I most often lend out and carry around with me for my Lovecraft-on-the-go needs. Now, what caught my eye in the store when I bought the thing was the Mike Mignola art on the cover, but what really impressed me after the fact is the Joyce Carol Oates introduction.
At the time I thought of Joyce Carol Oates as someone who wrote books my mother reads. I've learned more since then. a) My mother doesn't really like Joyce Carol Oates. b) Oates's books actually run very dark. Not really on the Lovecraftian side of things, but certainly they dip into the Gothic.
Her introduction, which I've always found to be excellent and accurate in a way that many others are not, is available for free to read on the New York Review of Books website.
The King of Weird, by Joyce Carol Oates (Thanks to Open Lovecraft for posting about this.)