 Declaring that "Lovecraft has suffered much at the hands of unmindful critics and even more from uninspired and talentless imitators," Mitchell declares that the collection's goal is "to dig deeper, to bypass the superficial and access the subterranean channels of archetype and inspiration with which Lovecraft was connected... [Lovecraft] crafted morbid and disturbing allegories of social and biological upheaval--cryptically prophetic and spiritually exploratory--this latent content of his work now needs excavating.