When I was in about the 6th or 7th grade I discovered Howard Philips Lovecraft. In what will hopefully be my final reference to the band, I credit Metallica and Iron Maiden with intriguing me with the famously quoted couplet:

˜That which is not dead but eternal lie
And in strange eons even death may die”

This was before Borders, or at least before they came to my area of Chicago, and in stores like B&N or Waldenbooks you could not readily find any of Lovecraft’s stuff. Eventually I found a paperback copy of “Lurker at the Threshold” at the old Record Swap in Tinley Park and cheered at my good fortune. I still remember taking it home that night, curling up in my room by meager lamp light, windows open and allowing a raging thunderstorm to penetrate my room and my mind with its apocalyptic bursts of electrically charged air as I read my first tale of what lies just beyond our world waiting to get back in.

Years later I would come to realize that Lurker is not a proper Lovecraft tale “ based on unfinished notes by HP, the actual novel was written by his close friend August Derleth, the man who inherited Howard’s massive Cthulhu mythos, formed Arkham Publishing House and worked tirelessly to bring his friend’s beautifully macabre fiction to an audience he insisted existed even as the rest of the publishing world seemed determined to deny those claims. It didn’t matter; Derleth followed so closely to Lovecraft’s style and themes it might as well be regular canon.

Soon after a Borders opened locally and I began to find those nifty little mass market paperback collections “ if you’re an old school HPL fan you know the ones “they featured the same cover art that was seen around the same time on the band Obituary’s ‘Cause of Death’ album. This was of course my introduction, proper, to one of the finest and most intriguing imaginations of our culture.

Unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s work? No, you are probably not. If you are here reading this it means you like movies, probably especially horror movies, and if that’s the case there is no way you have not encountered some of Lovecraft’s canon at one time or another.

Evil Dead? Yep. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon*

Re-Animator? Yep. Stuart Gordon directed this adaptation of a classic HPL story.

John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness? Yep, the evil author in the film, Sutter Cain is based largely on Howard. And there are so many more, although maybe nothing yet as big as those. Stuart Gordon works almost relentlessly to bring adaptations and interpretations of Lovecraft’s stuff to the screen. Most of the time they don’t come close to capturing the deep, nervous animosity and painfully articulate horror of the written works, but they usually always contain some moments interesting to Lovecraft fans.

So then, interested in reading HPL? Or if your already a fan like me but sick of your beat up old Obituary-esque MMs? Well, good news. I was overjoyed recently to find that Orion Books of the UK has just put out an almost 900 page ‘Commemorative Edition’ behemoth entitled, what else? Necronomicon and it contains some 36 of the author’s stories and poems (mostly stories mind you) as well as what appears to be a ridiculously in-depth afterward by the editor Stephen Jones all about Lovecraft. It’s roughly $27.00 and although the binding looks a bit dodgy (hard to perfect bind 900 pages, so why do people still try) its quite a catch.

There, if You’re new to HPL I recommend reading The Call of Cthulhu first, as the opening paragraph, I feel, sums up everything wonderful about this man’s uncanny ability to sidestep language and write that which cannot be written.

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*There are of course those who argue that the Necronomicon was around before Lovecraft first wrote about it, the books insidious powers infecting the sensitive writer with its birth much like one of the characters in his stories, but that is a tale for a different time.