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This is Volume Two of a two-volume omnibus set comprising the complete fictional works of Howard Phillips Lovcecraft. Every story written for publication under his own name is included in this set, from 1917 through 1935. (Poems, ghost-written material and stories written in collaboration with other writers are not included.)

Highlights of this volume include:•    The Color out of Space•    The Case of Charles Dexter Ward•    The Dunwitch Horror•    The Whisperer in Darkness•    At the Mountains of Madness•    The Shadow over Innsmouth•    The Dreams in the Witch House•    The Thing on the Doorstep•    The Shadow out of Time•    The Haunter of the Dark

Shanghaiers ... weird cults ... dumb criminals and clumsy power grabbers ...

Since 2008 the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column has entertained and informed Oregonians with the weirdest, quirkiest, funniest, and most outrageous true stories in the surprisingly long history of their young state.

Now, for the first time, those stories have been collected together, re-researched, augmented with freshly discovered information, and presented to readers in book form!

This is Volume 3, in which you''ll find a collection of the worst ideas ever tried - ideas like ...

... using dynamite to get rid of a beached whale ...

... leaving a wife and family to start a "free love health cult" in Honduras ...

... making a cable tram service out of logging parts and a couple of city buses ...

... passing a law stripping brides of their citizenship at the altar ...

... selling milk out of the same buckets you use to slop the hogs ...

... try to take a skunk pelt using your bare hands ...

... build a sternweel riverboat powered by cows ...

... build a monument at the county courthouse honoring a mass murderer ...

... and 37 more!

You''ll also find some of the most certifiably horrible characters in any state, ranging from "lovably horrible" characters like Old Joe Huddlestun, the grumpy neighbor who blew up his local schoolhouse with dynamite because the kids were too loud at recess, to seriously awful characters like ex-Governor Charles Martin, who, as an Army general after World War I, supervised the deliberate and systematic breaking of the spirit of an entire divisional cohort of returning war heroes.

Not to mention ...

... Luther Powell, Oregon''s top leader of the multi-level marketing version of the Ku Klux Klan ...

... Greenberry Smith, the pioneer who stole his neighbor''s land from his wife and kids after he died ...

... the DeAutremont Brothers, history''s most incompetent but deadly train robbers ...

... "Bud" Thompson, prickly Southern newspaper editor, who escalated a feud with another paper to a gunfight ...

... L.G. Carpenter, the shyster lawyer who tried to steal a neighbor''s land by having him shanghaied ...

... Larry Sullivan, godfather of Portland shanghaiers and later mining-stock swindler ...

... "Ma Anand" Sheela Silverman, architect of the biggest domestic biological-warfare attack in U.S. history ...

You''ll find a total of 62 of them in this 468-page book, along with more than 100 vintage photographs, newspaper clippings, and other pieces of art.

This 860-page collection contains all of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories published during his lifetime, contextualized with biographical details of their author. The hardcover, a Multimedia Bundle Edition, includes the e-book and audiobook editions as downloadable bonus content.

Excerpt from Introduction:

"When the first Conan of Cimmeria story appeared in the pages of Weird Tales magazine in December 1932, nothing quite like it had ever before appeared in print.Author Robert E. Howard had been writing stories broadly similar to it for half a decade; but it was with Conan, and the Hyborian Age storyworld in which he was placed, that Howard finally fully doped out the sub-genre that would become known as “sword and sorcery,” of which Howard is today considered the founding father.

"Conan’s origins date back to an experiment in 1926 titled “The Shadow Kingdom,” featuring the character Kull, exile of Atlantis. The idea — Howard’s great innovation — was, at its core, historical fiction set in a pre-historical period. That pre-historical period — being, of course, lost in the mists of time — could contain anything Howard might like to include: evil races of sentient snake-things, sorcerers, undead creatures, demons walking upon the earth, anything.

"In other words, Howard was creating a secular mythology.

"And as with any mythology, secular or no, there would be a hero, a Ulysses or a Theseus, an exceptional man of legend striding through that myth-world, sword in hand, righting wrongs and slaying supernatural monsters and, along the way, providing metaphorical insight onto his world and ours.

"At the same time, he was finding success with another historical-fiction-fusion innovation: The grim, savage English Puritan Solomon Kane. Kane’s world was the skull-strewn chaos of Europe and north Africa during the Thirty Years War, in the early 1600s. Little enough is known about specific events during that dark time that it was possible to take historical liberties with it as a storyworld, so that it could accommodate dark magic, walking skeletons, vampires, magic staffs, and, of course, N’Longa the witch-doctor.

"Howard quickly realized he was onto something with Solomon Kane. The first Solomon Kane story, “Red Shadows,” appeared in August 1928 in Weird Tales, and readers loved it. Here was a dark, brooding world of menace and witchcraft connected pseudo-genealogically to their own. It was easy for readers to “take the ride” — to suspend their disbelief and envision Kane’s adventures as a part of the real world.

"But, perhaps the connection with the real world was too close. The countries of 1630s Europe are well known; the causes of the conflict fully understood. There was only so much Howard could do in Solomon Kane’s world. Moreover, Solomon Kane is just a hard character to root for. Unlike Kull, he is, not to put too fine a point on it, really not a sane man.

"So it makes perfect sense that after the shadowy, prehistoric world of Kull and the dark, necromantic world of Solomon Kane, Howard would combine these two precursors to develop a world that was far enough into the distant past to be free of actual historical constraints — like Kull’s — yet close enough to the present to still exist as echoes and legends in the world’s mythologies.

"And so Howard created The Hyborian Age, circa 10,000 B.C. And to play the role of our avatar as we explore this shadowy, almost-historical  world, he gave us Conan the Cimmerian - to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

This volume covers H.P. Lovecraft’s “apprentice years”: roughly the first half of his literary career, the half written before his return to Providence in 1926. Every story written for publication under his own name is included in this volume, from 1917 through 1925.

Highlights of this volume include:

This volume contains the stories that nearly everyone agrees are the best work of H.P. Lovecraft’s life. Chronologically, it is the second book in a three-volume omnibus set comprising the complete fictional works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Highlights of this volume include:

What started as a lighthearted flirtation with a beautiful, strangely dressed maiden under the New Orleans moonlight ended with young Ned Minton pledged to eternal love with a girl who had died a century before -- a promise enforced by the all-too-real fangs of the demon-serpent who guarded her. Ned's only hope is that French physician and occult investigator Jules de Grandin can get to the bottom of it and end the curse that keeps the lovely Julie d'Ayen shackled to the material world -- before the eldritch serpent's fangs end Ned.

This volume is part of the three-book Pulp-Lit Omnibus Collection of all the fiction writing of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. It presents the works of weird fiction which he ghostwrote or on which he collaborated with another author.

Highlights of this volume include:

. . . and over 20 more.

THE ORIGINAL SPACE OPERA

In a fortuitous laboratory accident, crack scientist Richard Seaton has unlocked the secret of atomic energy. Now, partnered with his wealthy engineering-genius friend Martin Crane, he’s preparing to give the world the gift of limitless, virtually free energy — and of space travel.But others want Seaton’s secret for themselves. Backed by an evil industrial trust, the sinister and unscrupulous  “Blackie” DuQuesne has a plan to kill Seaton and Crane and seize their invention for himself.When DuQuesne makes his move, things go wrong, and the three of them soon find themselves lost in the farthest reaches of outer space ....

This is Volume One of a two-volume omnibus set comprising the complete fictional works of Howard Phillips Lovcecraft. Every story written for publication under his own name is included in this set, from 1917 through 1935. (Poems, ghost-written material and stories written in collaboration with other writers are not included.)

Highlights of this volume include:•     Dagon•     The Doom that Came to Sarnath•     The Music of Erich Zann•     Herbert West, Reanimator•     The Hound•     The Lurking Fear•     The Rats in the Walls•     The Shunned House•     The Horror at Red Hook•     In the Vault•     The Call of Cthulhu•     The Strange High House in the Mist•     The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Although he’s best known for his works of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft for most of his life considered himself primarily a poet. This cycle of 36 classic-form sonnets, infused with his trademark cosmic dread, represents the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s career as a poet, and it’s his most well-known and thoroughly-studied body of poetry.

This volume presents Fungi from Yuggoth in the context of Lovecraft’s literary life, with examples of his other poetry. In it, you will discover — or rediscover — the dark humor, bold imagination, and sparkling wit that is Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s enduring gift to the world.