New on archive.org, Collected Fiction of Henry Kuttner, ordered by date across 8,400 pages. Including his Lovecraftian tales and his poem “H.P.L.” for Lovecraft.

The young Kuttner at an early SF convention.

For a short overview of his best Mythos tales see Shawn Ramsey’s “Henry Kuttner’s Cthulhu Mythos Tales: An Overview”, Crypt of Cthulhu #51 (Hallowmas 1987). Also the anthology The Book Of Iod (1995) which collected ten Mythos tales by Kuttner and added an introduction by Robert M. Price, a collaboration, and one tale by Price himself. The book Discovering classic fantasy fiction: essays on the antecedents of fantastic literature (1996) has an essay of wider scope, “Henry Kuttner, Man of Many Voices”.

The Lovecraft letters to Kuttner were first published in the early 1990s, and these are now to be found at the back of the volume H.P. Lovecraft: Letters to C.L. Moore and Others.

Also on Archive.org is The Best Of Henry Kuttner (1975) from Doubleday with an introduction by Ray Bradbury (the influence was ‘Kuttner influencing Bradbury’, rather than the other way around), and The Best Of Henry Kuttner Vol. 1 (1977) from Mayflower in the UK, with a very different story list.

Many of his magazine covers can be seen in date order at Dark Worlds Quarterly’s survey which starts with Henry Kuttner Part 1 – 1936-1939.

Kuttner’s ‘repeating character’ series are: the Hogben tales of a family of weird mutant hillbillies; and the Galloway Gallegher series about a brilliant but penniless inventor who can only invent when drunk, and when sober finds himself at a loss to explain his new inventions. We see him here considering a fabulous (but also fabulously vain and preening) robot he’s created.