The Lovecraft Lexicon: A Reader's Guide to Persons, Places and Things in the Tales of H.P. Lovecraft Paperback - 2005

First line

It all began for me with a used book I had picked up somewhere, as a 12-year-old: a copy of the 1965 Lancer Books edition of selected H.P. Lovecraft tales, The Colour Out of Space, a paperback edition whose cheaply-bound, sun-burned pages were already brownish, brittle, and crumbling apart, like poor Nahum Gardner and his wife at the end of the title story.

From the jacket flap

Though Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft died in 1937, his remarkable body of work, including The Dunwich Horror and The Call of Cthulhu, continue to intrigue and horrify readers from all over the world. Its elements of horror, fantasy and magic have captured an enormous and varied audience. But Lovecraft's world of imagination can be highly complex. It is filled with a daunting array of bizarre and obscure characters, monsters, places and things which can be quite a task for anyone to sort out. Anthony Pearsall has done just that. From "Abbadon" (a demon in the Nameless City) to "Zuro" (a river in The Quest of Iranon), Pearsall has meticulously covered hundreds of the People, Places and Things in H.P. Lovecraft's writings. Armed with The Lovecraft Lexicon, you have the definitive guide to the people, places and things which influenced his life and his writings. And if that isn't enough, a special, extended Appendix details one of Lovecraft's recurrent themes: Caves, Caverns and Abysses.