The year is nineteen-sixty-something, and after endless millennia of watery sleep, the stars are finally right. Old R'lyeh rises out of the Pacific, ready to cast its damned shadow over the primitive human world. The first to see its peaks: an alcoholic, paranoid, and frightened Jack Kerouac, who had been drinking off a nervous breakdown up in Big Sur. Now Jack must get back on the road to find Neal Cassady, the holy fool whose rambling letters hint of a world brought to its knees in worship of the Elder God Cthulhu.
This book is designed to serve as a companion to Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2005), and covers the remaining two main branches of fantastic fiction, fantasy and supernatural horror. Critics have argued for years about precisely where the borderlines should be drawn within fantastic fiction as a whole, but some broad assumptions can be made, although even in these cases there are numerous exceptions to the rule.
