Howard Philips Lovecraft, 1890-1937, regarded by many as the greatest author of macabre fiction, (sorry Steven King and Edgar Poe, there's nothing wrong with being tied for second place) was much more than just the master of frightening and inventive yarns. He was also an extremely gifted poet, and when it came to writing letters there are probably few who are regarded as his being his equal.

Howard wrote throughout the teens and twenties and much of the 1930s and would have been responsible for even greater creations had not a premature death thwarted his efforts at the early age of forty-six. While it's true that much of the acclaim for his writing comes from other countries around the globe, there is still a significant number of admiring fans in the United States that read with intense fascination and pleasure his tales of horror and fantasy and collect for their own private libraries some of the fabulously rare editions that have his byline attached. His tales continue to maintain the same popularity they enjoyed when they first appeared in the pages of Weird Tales and other magazines of the bygone pulp era. If one should doubt this assertion they have but to type the name of Lovecraft into the search engines of their over-worked computers and view the enormous number of sites available for their perusal. Further, and possibly even more important, there are many, many fans of this great author who dare to write their own yarns in imitation of his, stories which they know to be grossly inferior but which they informally designate as Lovecraftian Tales. Again, click on the search engines and view the host of web sites that offer places for the Lovecraft fans to share what they have written, in the same manner as their mentor, with other fans. I regard this as a well deserved tribute to Lovecraft and wonder if there is any other author, living or nonliving, who has, year after year, such a large host of followers who enjoy his works and also attempt to expand upon them in their own way.

His letter writing is also of keen interest to me. Howard wrote probably more than a hundred thousand letters to a wide variety of correspondents during his brief lifetime. Thirty-five letters and postcards were written by HPL to Richard Searight between 1933 and 1937, vaulted treasures now preserved where humidity and vermin cannot intrude, safe from "The Rats in the Walls", many of them fifteen pages or so long. Howard never wasted paper, often writing on the backs of letters he received from others. In small spidery script, his barely legible strokes would cover a sheet of paper, filling most of the page from one edge of the paper to the other, with just the hint of a margin. These letters dealt with writing and colleagues and philosophy and genealogy, and a wide range of topics that engaged the interest of the two correspondents.

For a complete reading of these letters, you might order the Necronomicon Press publication H.P. Lovecraft Letters to Richard F. Searight. In my biased estimation, this is a must edition for all fans of Lovecraft to savor and study to further understand and appreciate their chosen guru of gruesome and ghastly gore.