Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who did not publish a single book during his lifetime, became a beacon and reference point for an entire genre, an idol of both the general reading masses and refined intellectuals, an inexhaustible source of inspiration for filmmakers, and his very name became a household name. Borges himself admired his stories, in which man’s place is on the distant periphery of the universal scheme of things, and supermundane forces instill sacred horror in the souls of the unwary. Books developing and analyzing Lovecraft's legacy are still published every year, and The Black Wings of Cthulhu is one of them. This anthology, compiled by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on Lovecraft, features works inspired by him by such masters of the "literature of unsettling presence" as Ramsey Campbell, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Michael Shea, Michael Marshall Smith, and others.