The Old Testament of Weird Fiction

I'll make this brief. Chapters offers its employees a contest to win a $1000 scholarship for school - books, tuition, whatever. The only catch is you have to write a two-page essay on what you consider to be the greatest book released from June 21st 2004 to June 21st 2005. The last entry day for the contest was today, so naturally I put writing this sucker off to the last minute--indeed I started it from scratch around 1 AM this morning and finished it in three hours. I know it shouldn't take very long to write two pages - but a grand is at stake, so I don't want to make careless errors (at least consciously) in my entry. For the book I chose the Library of America's recent controversial anthology of H.P. Lovecraft's tales--emphasising the overdue kudos, his influence, as well as relevance. I tried to stick to far more concrete, rather than literary arguments (though the two blended together, inevitably) to show how monumental something like the Library of America (a publisher exclusively of authors considered 'classic' or 'canon') publishing a collection of Lovecraft tales is.

Read on, read until your dream comes true.

My favourite sentence is:
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that this compendium of tales is a veritable Old Testament of weird fiction, a necessary companion to the New Testament of modern fantasy, horror and sci-fi writers.