Darrell Schweitzer is well-known as a novelist and short-story writer, as author of THE MASK OF THE SORCERER and THE SHATTERED GODDESS, and also as a leading critic of fantasy and horror fiction, whose work has repeatedly appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction, Lovecraft Studies, Necrofile, Science Fiction Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other publications. Here is a collection of his best essays, all of them relating to the central idea of the fantastic in literature.

Contents:

MY SKEPTICAL SELF AND OTHER EVASIONS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1. The Necessity of Skepticism
2. The Cost of Credulity
3. The Layercake of History
4. My Career as a Hack Writer

WRITING FANTASY
5. The Lands That Clearly Pertain to Faery
6. Uttering the P-Word
7. Why Horror Fiction?
8. Intimate Horror
9. Horror Beyond New Jersey
10. The Limits of Craziness.

H.P. LOVECRAFT AND OTHERS
11. H.P. Lovecraft: Still Eldritch After All These Years
12. About "The Whisperer in Darkness"
13. H.P. Lovecraft's Favorite Movie
14. M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft: The Ghostly and the Cosmic
15. Richard Middleton: Beauty, Sadness, and Terror
16. How Much of Dunsany is Worth Reading?
17. Count Dracula and His Adapters

REVIEWS
18. Philip K. Dick: Absurdist, Visionary
19. KIPLING'S SCIENCE FICTION
20. THE BLACK FLAME and Stanley G. Weinbaum
21. On Brian Aldiss's BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD
22. A FISHERMAN OF THE INLAND SEA by Ursula K. Le Guin
23. LEXICON URTHUS by Michael Andre-Drussi
24. Prospero's Dracula
25. Cthulhu 2000, edited by James Turner
26. THE DRAGON PATH: COLLECTED STORIES OF KENNETH MORRIS

LOOSE CANNONFIRE
27. An Interview with Edgar Allan Poe
28. One Fine Day in the Stygian Haunts of Hell: Being the Lore and Legend of the Fabled "Eye of Argon"
29. Creating Frivolous Literary Theories

Notes
Bibliography
Index

"Here Schweitzer's enthusiasm about and knowledge of the likes of Lovecraft, Dunsany, and many others shines through."
— Spectrum SF

"I'm impressed."
— Aboriginal SF

WINDOWS OF THE IMAGINATION made the LOCUS Recommended Reading List for 1998.