H. P. Lovecraft and His Influence

I am ending this year with a month of rewrites. As I explain'd in my other blog, I spent some time earlier this month completely revising and partially rewriting "The Zanies of Sorrow," a non-Lovecraftian story. Now I have completely a complete revision of the story I consider my finest, "Inhabitants of Wraithwood," after discovering that I didn't have my own personal doc of the story. I did find an old file with a bunch of stories, one of which was "Wraithwood"; but it was a "read only" file, and being utterly computer-clueless I didn't know how to save it as a single file, my computer wouldn't let me. I was, however, able to print out that version, & so I did and used that copy while typing up a new doc. As I began to type, I was dismay'd to discover how much of the writing of that original version displeas'd me, how clumsy some of the writing was; & so, of course, I began to revise as I typed, and by the end...

I confess that I love what I suppose wou'd be describ'd as "traditional Lovecraftian horror", stories that paint imagery such as we have in ye illustration beside this text: the full moon, the abandoned necropolis with its overgrown grass and twisted tress, the hoary antient sarcophagus nestled in its lonesome mausoleum, & ye solitary haunter of ye dark. Just as there are motifs and moods and such that I love to paint in my stories, there are tales and settings by H. P. Lovecraft that continually draw me to them as I seek his texts for inspiration, from which I sup as if the story was some unholy fount. One setting that I continue to visit in my own work is Kingsport, the city in mist. I have a vague fancy to eventually write some handful more tales set there and then collect all of my Kingsport stories in a single book, as I collected my tales of Nyarlathotep in The Strange Dark One . A wee few months ago I finalized ye Contents for my forthcoming second omnib...

Ye trade pb edition of A MOUNTAIN WALKED is #3 in ye Amazon charts of best-selling horror anthologies! The Contents is slightly different from the hardcover edition, missing the two stories by H. P. Lovecraft (they were added to ye hardcover by the publisher, and S. T. wasn't entirely happy with their inclusion in ye tome), and some few other items. Ye Contents of the trade pb and Kindle edition from Dark Regions Press follows: Introduction, S. T. Joshi The House of the Worm, Mearl Prout Far Below, Robert Barbour Johnson Spawn of the Green Abyss, C. Hall Thompson The Deep Ones, James Wade The Franklyn Paragraph, Ramsey Campbell Where Yidhra Walks, Walter C. DeBill, Jr. Black Man with a Horn, T.E.D. Klein The Last Feast of harlequin, Thomas Ligotti Only the End of the World Again, Neil Gaiman Mandelbrot Moldrot, Lois H, Gresh Black Brat of Dunwich, Stanley C. Sargent The Phantom of Beguilement, W. H. Pugmire ...Hungry...Rats, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. Virgin's Is...

One of August Derleth's finest ideas was ye publication of a series of marginalia-themed books that not only included rare items from H. P. Lovecraft's pen but also, importantly, memoirs of E'ch-Pi-El by still-living members of ye Lovecraft Circle. The vile aspect of these books is that they "inspir'd" Derleth to pen one or two new collaborations "with" Lovecraft, and Augie's ego then allow'd that ye new fake collaboration serve as book title. The book's inner-flap perpetuates the myth that Derleth was completing stories that Lovecraft left unfinish'd: "In the novella which is the title story of this collection of Lovecraftiana, August Derleth develops an incompleted Lovecraft story linking the Innsmouth and Dunwich themes, achieving a typical Lovecraftian horror." There are so many things about that statement that are horribly false. Lovecraft wrote one  story about Innsmouth and one  story about Dunwich--he wou...