H. P. Lovecraft and His Influence

I hold, above, my very favourite volume of S. T.'s Penguin Classics editions of Lovecraft's weird fiction. It contains so many of Lovecraft's very best tales, including the wee novels The Case of Charles Dexter Ward  and At the Mountains of Madness . It also includes one of my Lovecraftian obsessions--"Pickman's Model." That story has influenced me in a way I cannot quite understand, especially after I spent time haunting ye lanes of Boston with my chums and stumbled among ye tombstones of Copp's Hill Burying Ground. It was wonderfully weird, after having imagined the scenes of Lovecraft's fiction during my myriad readings of ye tales, to actual walk their ground  and drink in their aura with mine eyes. I felt a tremendous surge of unspeakable joy  when I walked up to 10 Barnes Street and touched my hand to the number 10 fastened to the house, while behind me S. T. Joshi was chanting all the masterpieces that Lovecraft had penned while living there...

So I got this huge box from Penguin just now, and I got all excited. I thought, wow, they must be sending me a bunch of cool books that I don't remember ordering! Did I order a big book on Amazon and forget about it? The last big tome I have purchas'd is ye handsome THE ANNOTATED POE, but that's already arriv'd. As I picked up ye box from the porch where ye UPS bloke dropped it, I was surprised to find it rather light, not weighty. So I gets me scissors and slice through the packaging tape, dig through the bubble packing and found-- one book.   Ah--but whut  a book! Of course, Titan's ridiculous decision to change ye original title, Black Wings , to BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU still annoys me. I'm hoping that ye day comes soon when the hideous and alien word "Cthulhu" isn't such an advantage to selling books, such a  commercial gimmick. One of the editorial stances for this series is that cliche Cthulhu stories will not be consider'd. This is ...

So, this is too typical of me. I totally  forgot about writing this book and recording this video! I found it again quite by accident, because of Bobby Derie's new posting regarding Henry S. Whitehead. Whitehead was buddies with H. P. Lovecraft and the author of a number of cool vodou stories, many of which were publish'd in Weird Tales . Such is my admiration for Whitehead and his weird fiction that, on a whim, I based a character on him for my story, "Ye Unkempt Thing," whut was included in my last book, Monstrous Aftermath . My character was named Reverend Henry St. Clair, author of ye book Midnight Din and other Weird Stories . Well, at ye moment I am trying to write new stories for a collection of Enoch Coffin stories that I'm doing with Jeffrey Thomas, and I thought, hmmm, let's write a story called "Midnight Din." So I went to Google to see if anyone had already used that title, because quite often I find that a character name I come up wit...

Knowing that a second NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT volume will be forthcoming next year or early 2018 has me contemplating what illustrations will be used for some of the stories; and that made me reflect on some of ye cool illustrations I have seen for "The Lurking Fear." I love that story and have an almoft-intimate relationship with it. When I was ask'd to write a story for the weird journal, Fungi , the editor told me he wanted a story of around 11,000 words, he wanted it in segments or chapters, and he wanted each chapter to have its own title. This made me think immediately of "The Lurking Fear," a story of 8,170 words that Lovecraft divided into four episodes, each with its own title. My fanboy juices began to bubble, and I knew that I was going to write my own Sesqua Valley version of "The Lurking fear." I had my own Martense mansion, located on Tempest Hill, near Sesqua Valley's monstrous Mount Selta. I had a doomed character named Ar...

Leslie Klinger had announc'd that, because NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT is selling so extremely well, Liveright/Norton has ask'd him to do a second volume, tentatively titled New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond the Mythos . The focus of the first volume were those stories that Klinger felt were a part of the "Cthulhu Cycle"; so this 2nd volume will have tales that are not a part of that cycle. The selected stories are: The Tomb Polaris Transition of Juan Romero The Doom that Came to Sarnath Ex Oblivione The Terrible Old Man Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family The Cats of Ulthar Celephais The Temple The Outsider The Other Gods The Music of Erich Zann The Quest of Iranon The Lurking Fear The Rats in the Walls The Shunned House He Cool Air The Strange High House in the Mist Pickman's Model The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath Klinger notes, "I'll be working with my friend S. T. Joshi to use the most accurate tex...