It was never the case that I just one day simply discovered or encountered a Lovecraft tale, as much as I was at first haunted by the man and his worlds: as in a typical Lovecraft story, I first correlated the contents of an early life spent immersed in horror, sci-fi and fantasy genre, where every now and then I would discover hints and whispers concerning this Lovecraft fellow, and his strange stories about something called ‘the Cthulhu mythos’ (whatever that was) - alongside occasional mentions of stories with incredibly evocative titles such as ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. I knew I was on to something special - and something weird beyond my childish imaginings - before I even laid eyes on my first Lovecraft tale. One traceable source of my childhood haunting by Lovecraft is
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction by Peter Nicholls, which my parents bought me one weekend when we were on holiday somewhere in thevsouth of England in 1979, and which quickly became something akin to a sacred text to me; here too, was a generous entry on Lovecraft, yet still only enough to whet my appetite. This remains one of the few things I still retain from that period of my childhood, and as such is something of a treasured item - such that I have since bought a second reading copy in hardback, in order to save wear and tear on my old original paperback edition - which I spent many a long, rainy afternoon pouring over.
Good times.
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