"The interesting thing is in Lovecraft, people don't do the wrong thing in the way that you normally do in horror fiction," says author Neil Gaiman in the 2004 documentary The Eldritch Influence: The Life, Vision and Phenomenon of H.P. Lovecraft. "In horror fiction, you do the wrong thing: You go into the shop and you buy that cat-headed object you probably shouldn't, or whatever, and everything goes bad. In Lovecraft, you simply get a room in a wrong place, move to the wrong town, read the wrong story. You're just screwed."

Maybe that's why nothing says Halloween quite like the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Interestingly enough, nearly seventy years after the death of the pioneer of "weird fiction," Lovecraft's tales of cosmic horror could not be more popular.

In fact, 2005 could easily be called the Year of Lovecraft. The literary world provides ample evidence to support this case. For starters, novelist Michel Houellebecq's ecstatic tribute, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, was at last translated into English. Two new volumes of Lovecraft's previously unpublished writings appeared this year, one of letters and one of essays, both edited by preeminent Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi, who likewise edited the new Fritz Leiber and H.P Lovecraft: Writers of the Dark .

Douglas A. Anderson's anthology H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales: The Roots of Modern Horror debuted this year along with analytical works such as Don G. Smith's H.P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture: The Works and their Adaptations in Film, Television, Comics, Music and Games and Jason Colavito's Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture. And Modern Library reissued Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness with a fresh introduction by hip science fiction writer China Mieville.

Most notably, the Library of America's anthology H.P. Lovecraft: Tales appeared this year, permanently cementing the status of Lovecraft's fiction for the mainstream reading audience. Since those at the Library of America pride themselves on being gatekeepers for the literary canon, their choice to grant their blessing to an author is to have arrived, to be considered an indispensable part of (in the press's own words) "our nation's literary heritage." Not only has Lovecraft earned his own volume alongside the likes of Robert Frost and Henry James, but he also has become the very first writer of exclusively speculative fiction to receive the honor. Although the volume undoubtedly would have been better if edited by a Lovecraft scholar such as S.T. Joshi rather than author Peter Straub, and if it had included other key works such as Lovecraft's insightful essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," its very existence is reason enough for celebration.

Lovecraftian film also seems to be thriving. The often Lovecraft-inspired director Stuart Gordon has shot a version of "The Dreams in the Witch-House" for Showtime's Masters of Horror October lineup. The H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival is going strong, as are MiskatoniCon and NecronomiCon. Of particular interest is The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's award-winning, 1920s-style silent film The Call of Cthulhu, which is newly available this month on DVD.

The press release reads like a fantasy for Lovecraft fans:

The famed story is brought richly to life in the style of a classic 1920s silent movie, with a haunting original symphonic score. Using the "Mythoscope" process -- a mix of modern and vintage techniques, the HPLHS has worked to create the most authentic and faithful screen adaptation of a Lovecraft story yet attempted.

This extraordinary motion picture is now available on DVD. The DVD also features a making-of documentary, high-fidelity and Mythophonic audio, special features, and intertitles in twenty-four languages.

(Note: If you do visit The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, be sure to check out the CD and songbook A Very Scary Solstice for a Christmastime infusion of horror and madness.)

All of this creativity and attention isn't bad for an author who fully expected to become -- or, rather, remain -- an obscure footnote in genre history. Instead, Lovecraft seems to be gaining fans at every turn, this writer included.

Neil Gaiman, who won a 2004 Hugo Award for his Lovecraft/Arthur Conan Doyle crossover short story "A Study in Emerald", sums up Lovecraft like this: "He simply gave you a vision of an impossibly inhospitable universe in which we are screwed."

What's not to love?