Today is the 77th ...

... anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft's death. I have no particularly profound observations to make here, but I thought we ought to have thread about it!

Lovecraft wasn't the first Weird author I read*, but he was the one that left me definitively hooked on the genre.

* Can't say which one was - Lord Dunsany is a definite suspect, as is John W. Campbell, if he counts as Weird. The story in question was "Who Goes There?" which does count by the Deep Ones test!

I didn't read any Lovecraft until the first of S T Joshi's Penguin collections, so that would be 1999-2000. But he was - I now see - a massive influence on much that I'd read and seen before then.

My first Weird author was probably Robert E Howard, firstly via the Roy Thomas Conan comic book adaptations were republished for the UK children's market. This was in 1975, I think (so I would have been eight).

I know I bought a couple of the Ace paperback posthumous collections ('The Howard Collector', etc.) that appeared in a local newsagent in the early eighties (with a notch cut in the bottom of each book. I think this was to indicate they were sold outside the Net Book Agreement (a thing we used to have). I wonder if they were some of the last US popular culture materials to come over to the UK as ship's ballast. This was the way of lot of material got to e.g. Liverpool and enabled Brits to absorb US culture and - in some cases - sell it back.)

REH's books were published in the UK too, but I think I was a bit shy of purchasing them with their Frazetta-style covers!

Good call, Andreas. I hearby raise a tankard of eldritch ale to Grandpa. Thanks to recent Lovecraft studies and new works of fiction inspired by his vision, I find HPL's writing to be even more intriguing and nuanced than when I first encountered it, aeons ago. I'm pretty sure that I came to Robert E. Howard first, thanks to the "Best of" paperbacks from Zebra that I received as xmas presents when I was a young teen. I moved on to Lovecraft shortly after devouring those.

I was turned on to Yog-Sothothery in about 1980 by the AD&D Deities and Demigods volume, and followed up immediately with a visit to my local public library, where I was able to check out a copy of The Dunwich Horror and Others. Read it all and arrived in this universe, or one precedent to it.

I first discovered H.P. Lovecraft during my jaded teen years. The idea of the human race being driven to extinction or slavery by the Great Old Ones just seemed very appealing to me. Hell, I even bought myself a copy of Simon's Necronomicon just to speed things along. My attitude towards the human race has since improved. :P

1971, paperback edition of The Colour Out of Space (and some other stories). Got the Arkham House editions at various SF cons by careful saving of allowance.

I don't know the exact date I discovered Lovecraft. I know the book. It was Sam Moskowitz's Masterpieces of Science Fiction which included Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space". It still remains my favorite Lovecraft story, and it was also the work that he thought the best. At some time in high school, I found The Lurking Fear collection with the odd John Holmes cover shown here.

It was a glancing Lovecraft blow, no more an impression on my mind than many of the new authors I discovered than. Then, on my first break from college, a friend lent me a copy of Brian Lumley's The Burrowers Beneath. I went back to college and spent a January reading Lovecraft in Arkham House editions from the college library, including, appropriately enough for a dorm room with a faulty heater and ice on the walls, "At the Mountains of Madness". Neither that nor his "The Shadow Out of Time" made a big impression on me.

But, even though I don't reread a lot of authors, I did re-read Lovecraft. Somewhere along the line I read all of the Titus Crow/de Marigny series started by The Burrowers Beneath (which deteriorated book by book from its opening two novels), came across Michael Shea's intriguing sequel to the "The Colour Out of Space", The Colour Out of Time, got my own editions -- with texts corrected by Joshi, of Lovecraft. I even got Lovecraft's ghost writing work. And even though I no longer needed the text, I kept the Del Rey editions of Lovecraft just for their Michael Whelan covers.

Somewhere before 1987, I read volumes 1 of the Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, but it didn't impress me much. I read the second in 2005 after a bout of Poe reading. It was then I decided that "modern" writers might do something interesting and novel with Lovecraft's Mythos.

I was dimly aware of a current of contemporary Lovecraft writing going on. I'd seen the Chaosium tie-in anthologies around along with the various authors. So, in 2005, I started to get more involved in reading Lovecraft -- critical works on him, his letters, and his poetry -- as well some of his modern disciples.

I actually discovered Edgar Allan Poe, Robert E. Howard, and Shirley Jackson before HPL. Didn't read my first Grandpa story until I was in my mid-twenties. Once I got into him, I quickly realized what a profound influence he had been on many of the writers, comics creators, and filmmakers I was into.

To expand a little on what I said in the OP, Dunsany and Campbell were '90s encounters in the city library, when my teenage self devoured almost anything fantasy or science fiction. Neither made a huge impression back then. Read bits of Poe in the late '90s / early '00s, which left a bigger mark.

Online references - not least an article using Cthulhu as a metaphor for group I introns! - made me curious about HPL in about 2005-06, and fairly soon I found myself in possession of his complete prose fiction. Branching out to various contemporaries, inspirations, and disciples felt eminently logical. Along the way I rediscovered Dunsany, whom my adult self better appreciates.

In the last few years, LT in general and this group in particular has helped maintain and extend interest.