The reasons why H.P. Lovecraft's fiction has been so widely imitated and elaborated, especially after his lifetime, are not easily explicable. His selfstyled disciples are nearly as numerous as those of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes continues to spawn pastiches, parodies, and takeoffs— some, indeed, from a Lovecraftian perspective. In the case of Lovecraft, both his life and his work were of a sort to attract fascination, devotion, adulation, and imitation, much of it sadly uncritical and inept. The gaunt, eccentric ‘recluse of Providence’ (who, in fact, was anything but reclusive in his final decade, travelling up and down the eastern seaboard from Quebec to Key West) had become a figure of myth perhaps even before his death in 1937; while the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’—an invented body of myth upon which many of his later tales draw—was seized upon by the readers of Weird Tales, and by fellow writers, as something new and distinctive in horror fiction.

Lovecraft is only now coming to gain the recognition he deserves as both a master and a pioneer in the horror story. Early in his career, he was content to write relatively conventional tales of the macabre, inspired largely by Poe and the Gothic novelists; although he produced several early triumphs, including the celebrated ‘The Outsider’ (1921) and ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1923), this apprentice work was perhaps of use only in allowing Lovecraft to develop the technique of documentary realism that would hold him in good stead throughout the rest of his career. His discovery of Lord Dunsany's work in 1919 was critical, although the shift in his literary work did not become evident for some years; Lovecraft found Dunsany's notion of an imagined pantheon of deities so striking that, beginning with ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1926) and continuing for the next decade, he fashioned his own ersatz theogony. But there was a significant difference: whereas Dunsany's gods operated in a decadent cosmos of pure imagination, thereby appearing less horrific than piquant, Lovecraft boldly inserted his deities into the fabric of the real world, so that they appeared as dim clouds of terror hanging over the very fate of the human race and perhaps the entire universe.