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The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories
Sep 2, 2025 6:23 AM

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

Part of a new six-volume series of the best in classic horror, selected by award-winning director Guillermo del Toro.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft's unique contribution to American literature was a melding of traditional supernaturalism (derived chiefly from Edgar Allan Poe) with the genre of science fiction that emerged in the early 1920s. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Storiesbrings together a dozen of the master's tales - from his early short stories 'Under the Pyramids' (originally ghostwritten for Harry Houdini) and 'The Music of Erich Zann' (which Lovecraft ranked second among his own favourites) through to his more fully developed works, 'The Dunwich Horror', 'The Case of Charles Dexter Ward', and 'At the Mountains of Madness'. The book presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S. T. Joshi's illuminating introduction and notes to each story.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft(1890-1937) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. His relatively small body of work - three novels and sixty short stories - has nevertheless exercised an incalculable influence on horror and supernatural fiction.

Reviews

An outrageous comic riot, delivered as a tear-inducing funny and pitch-black farce ... For every laugh here, there’s a haunting, echoing scream in the distance. The plot is unbridled romp ... It is hard to describe, out of context, quite how funny Coupland’s novel can be.

—— Sunday Times

Worst. Person. Ever. is very much a return to form. It had me laughing out loud on the bus to work.

—— Irish Times, Books of the Year

There are gloriously unquotable remarks and fantastically lurid images on every page. Gunt’s mind is a super-sewer in which it is a pleasure to swim. You can’t help giggling, constantly. Worst. Person. Ever. may be a raging bonfire of inanities but it contains some of Coupland’s finest writing since Shampoo Planet.

—— Evening Standard

There are some clever plot twists and fine comedy set pieces.

—— Scotland on Sunday

A comic riot of a novel.

—— Sunday Times - Must Reads

Worst. Person. Ever. succeeds by virtue of its verbal energy, the brio of its invention, the snappiness with which successive gags and ever more appalling atrocities are piled on.

—— Financial Times

Coupland has penned a bitterly funny tale of our time and created one of the grossest characters to deliver it.

—— Sport

Worst. Person. Ever., challenges the present-day with excess, satire, and biting critique

—— Dazed Digital

Sathnam Sanghera’s entertaining story is a “remix” of Arnold Bennett’s classic novel The Old Wives’ Tale Playful wit infuses the novel … But behind the humour and the plot twists, is an important novel that explores an often overlooked part of this country's history … That the story of the Victorian mercantile class told in Bennett’s novel is so easily transposed onto the community Sanghera grew up in nearly a century later is absolutely fascinating, and by recognizing and exploiting this with excellent effect, he examines the nationwide story of British immigration through the prism of the Punjabi Sikh experience.

—— Independent

A funny and touching read ... Brilliant A superbly updated version of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. At its heart, this is a simple story of family … yet, all this is handled throughout with the lightest of touches, so that on reaching the end, you want to begin again to pick up the subtle nuances of this book

—— Psychologies

It is very good and has many of the qualities found in Bennett’s masterpiece: acute observation of society and societal change, thoroughly imagined and well depicted characters, mastery of naturalistic detail, and generosity of tone. It is very enjoyable … It does what the novel can still do better than any other art-form: showing you that other people think and act in a manner very different from your own, but one which is equally valid … It is [a novel] which celebrates that most necessary of qualities, kindness … It is acute about human frailty, but also understanding of this. It is often funny and its great merit is its humanity. It’s worthy homage to Arnold Bennett.

—— Scotsman

Marriage Material is a comic feast, full of delectable matter. It does what only the best comic fiction can do: it robes important social subjects in laughter. Then, too, by the end, I felt I knew Sathnam Sanghera’s characters intimately and felt so warmly about them, I didn’t want them to go: no mean feat, given that I’ve never been into a Wolverhampton corner shop, either in Enoch Powell's scurrilous heyday or more recently. This is a splendid debut.

—— Lisa Appignanesi

Marriage Material is a wonderfully engaging book, full of heart and wit. Its exploration of what it means to feel torn is rich and subtle. Its characters stay with you. Its jokes make you laugh in the night.

—— Susie Boyt

It will take virtually no pages for you to be hooked

—— Harper's Bazaar - 5 Books for the Autumn

Sanghera’s Marriage Material has humour [and] cultural relevance…Anyone who’s grown up as a second generation immigrant can relate to the themes seen here … I’d heartily recommend Marriage Material to anyone who needs a little push to reconnect to where they’ve come from, be it Copenhagen or Punjab.

—— Stylist

Sanghera’s story captures a time of extraordinary changes in Wolverhampton […] Discrimination, mixed-race marriages and the changing face of Britain appear in both Sanghera’s timelines. As the novel progresses, the stories collide and there are startling revelations, humour and mystery. It is smartly crafted, weaving in droll observations about immigrant life and the defensiveness of south Asians living away from home, while also providing a thoughtful commentary on the casual racism of Britain, the tedium of always being out of place and the complexities of belonging in an increasingly heterogeneous world.

—— Financial Times

Sanghera ... tells a larger story about the big political and economic struggles of the past half-century. He examines changing attitudes to immigration, the rise of big-box stores and the hollowing out of Britain’s industrial centres ... Sanghera, who grew up in Wolverhampton himself, does a good job of capturing the complications of progress.

—— The Economist

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

—— Time

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

—— David Barrett , Standpoint

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

—— James Kidd , Independent on Sunday

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

—— Jo Ellison and Violet Henderson , Vogue

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

—— Irish Examiner

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

—— Tom Stoppard , Guardian

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

—— Tim Martin , Telegraph

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

—— Uncut

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

—— Michael Dirda , Times Literary Supplement

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

—— Gordon Brewer , Herald

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

—— Financial Times

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

—— Gordon Brewer , Scotsman

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

—— Stuart Kelly , Scotsman

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

—— Jonathan Jones , Guardian

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

—— Mail on Sunday

Playful and paranoid New York noir

—— Adam Boulton , New Statesman

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it

—— Stephen Joyce , Nudge
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