Peter H. Cannon is an H. P. Lovecraft scholar and an author of Cthulhu Mythos fiction. Cannon works as an editor for Publishers Weekly, specializing in thrillers and mystery. He lives in New York City and is married with three children.
Nonfiction
Cannon first made his name as a critic in H. P. Lovecraft studies with his graduate theses written in the 1970s - A Case for Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Lovecraft's New England. Lovecraft's Old Men appeared in a mailing of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in 1977; another by him, "You Have Been in Providence, I Perceive", published in Nyctalops, studies the influences of Sherlock Holmes upon Lovecraft. Another article re: the Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft influence, "Parallel Passages in 'The Adventure of the Copper Beeches' and 'The Picture in the House'" was published in Lovecraft Studies 1, No 1. Two essays on Lovecraft appear in S.T. Joshi's critical anthology H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, respectively examining the influence of Vathek and of Nathaniel Hawthorne upon Lovecraft. Cannon later published a definitive critical study on Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft. Cannon's writings on Lovecraft include the books The Chronology Out of Time: Dates in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft and Sunset Terrace Imagery in Lovecraft. He edited Lovecraft Remembered, a collection of reminiscences by friends and acquaintances of Lovecraft, and co-edited More Annotated Lovecraft with S. T. Joshi. He also wrote a personal memoir about another writer in the Lovecraft Circle, Long Memories: Recollections of Frank Belknap Long. Cannon's column "The Cannonical Lovecraft" appeared in The New Lovecraft Collector in issues 12-26 inclusive. Occasional critical articles on the weird fiction genre still appear, e.g. Better Than Half a Yard I Think: Arthur Machen and Real Tennis in Faunus: The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen. Cannon provides the Introduction to The essential H.P. Lovecraft and to Leigh Blackmore's collection Horrors of Sherlock Holmes
Fiction
His fiction includes Pulptime, in which Lovecraft, Long and Sherlock Holmes team up to solve a mystery; Scream for Jeeves: A Parody, which retells some of Lovecraft's stories in the voice of P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. An omnibus of these two titles has been issued as The Lovecraft Papers ; this contains the corrected/expanded version of Pulptime. He has also penned Lovecraft Chronicles, a novel based on Lovecraft's personal life. Later stories are collected Forever Azathoth and Other Horrors ; rev. ed. Hippocampus Press, 2012. He has also issued The Sky Garden and Episode of Pulptime and One Other and its companion volume Tales ofLovecraftian Horror and Humor: The Early Cannon Volume Two. The latter contains a checklist of Cannon's tales between 1979 and 1995. Cannon's story "The Letters of Halpin Chalmers", a direct sequel to Frank Belknap Long's "The Hounds of Tindalos", in which the main characters are thinly disguised versions of Frank and Lyda Long, appears in Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg, 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories.
