The Wicked Clergyman
When did it
begin? When was I first tainted by the cosmic contagion that is Lovecraft?
Actually, it is no big mystery. Back in 1967, when I was first
enthusiastically swimming in the paperback revival of pulp fiction from
Ace, Lancer, Dell, and others, I was comparing notes one afternoon with my
pal Russ Farrington, and he suggested I read these new Lancer paperbacks
he had just finished, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour out of Space and
The Dunwich Horror. I did. (At least that’s the way I remember it;
Russ tells me he recalls me telling him about HPL!) And to
this day I could probably tell you just where I was and how I felt while
reading each one of those wonderful tales! I was thirteen years old, which
I much later discovered is the optimum age for discovering Lovecraft.
Encountering the Old Gent then can mark one for life. It certainly marked
me! Lovecraft has loomed much larger in my life than he does right now,
but he still casts a pretty long shadow over me, and I look forward to an
opportunity to reread this or that tale again soon. And I’m planning on
buying the Cthulhu action figure when it comes out.
Anyway, back
to 1967: I was soon buying and reading the Arkham House Lovecraft
collections, then the related works by other authors, including August
Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, and Colin Wilson. Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
became a kind of Bible for me. Together with other material I was then
reading (Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Doc Savage, Lin Carter, Burroughs,
etc.), Lovecraft and his Mythos composed an imaginative world I happily
lived in as a junior high and then high school nerd. Soon my teenage
fundamentalism swelled up to demand all my time and attention, but by
1978, I had exorcised fundamentalism and decided to look up some of my old
favorite fantasy authors. The next year I discovered the Necronomicon
Press journal Lovecraft Studies and decided to submit an article. I
did, and editor S.T. Joshi accepted it, “Higher Criticism and the
Necronomicon.”
Joshi, a
cultured and gracious young man, kindly invited me to drive up to
Providence, Rhode Island, to meet “the Providence Pals,” the gang who put
together Necronomicon Press publications. It was great fun meeting
publisher Marc Michaud, illustrator Jason Eckhardt, writers Don and Mollie
Burleson (they weren’t married yet, but it wouldn’t be long) and Peter
Cannon, and fan editor and collector Ken Neilly. What a bunch! What a
hobby! We would walk around various Lovecraft sites in Providence (places
he had lived, places he had mentioned) and would haunt bookshops and
examine our finds over pizza. I treasure those times!
Soon I joined
the merry crew again for a regional horror convention at Roger Williams
College in Rhode Island (NeCon 1981) where I was delighted to hear Les
Daniels, Peter Straub, Michael McDowell, and other genre pros,
disappointed only that Stephen King had bowed out. It was here that I met
another great friend and colleague, Will Murray. A few years later, I
would be tagging along with Will through the streets of Lower Manhattan,
looking for the exact spot where Richard Henry Savage, the prototype for
the fictional Doc Savage, was killed in a cart accident (yes, that’s
cart, not car). Around the same time, Will led a bunch of us on an
eerie expedition through South Boston to recap the route to Pickman’s
studio in “Pickman’s Model.” I will never forget rooting around in Copp’s
Hill Burying Ground where we discovered that, just as in the story, it was
honeycombed with a series of tunnels to which staircases beneath false
tombstones led!
On that NeCon 1981weekend, the Providence Pals told me
about the Esoteric Order of Dagon Amateur Press Association and suggested
I join. All it required was cranking out a few pages of HPL-related
material for the mailing list every three months. I figured I could do
that with no trouble. And so Crypt of Cthulhu was born! My mother,
Mable Price, a retired typist and executive secretary, once a high school
yearbook editor, joined me in what would become our greatest hobby. I soon
discovered local stores, then regional dealers, would sell Crypt
and that I could make some money off it. The mag was a bizarre
miscegenation; half Lovecraft Studies rip-off, half humor magazine,
a “pulp thriller and theological journal.”
I decided to
send out free copies to some big names in the field of Lovecraft
scholarship and latter-day Lovecraftian fiction. Before long, the letters
pages became the equivalent of a modern computer message board where
unknown fans could trade barbs with their favorite authors. And I was able
to persuade a number of those authors to contribute fiction and articles
to the mag. It was great! Inevitably I began penning my own horror
stories, most of them Mythos pastiches.
Occasionally
we ran all-fiction issues of Crypt of Cthulhu, and for these I
lined up new material by the pros (Lin Carter, Gary Myers, Brian Lumley,
Frank Belknap Long) as well as old manuscripts by Howard, Carl Jacobi, and
others. Crypt functioned very much like the old fanzines
contemporary with Lovecraft and his generation, like The Acolyte,
Fantasy Magazine, and Phantagraph. Lin Carter took an active
interest in Crypt, and before long a bunch of us New Jersey and New
York fans had begun meeting every other Saturday at his Manhattan
apartment for the New Kalem Club. Sometimes the ancient Frank Belknap Long
would make his way across the city for the meetings. We basked.
These fiction issues, filled with Mythos collector’s items
and rare obscurities, led directly to the next phase of my Lovecraftian
involvement, editing fiction anthologies. It was 1990, and a bunch of us
were shooting the breeze at Eileen MacNamara’s apartment during the
Lovecraft Centennial conference hosted by Brown University. Phil Rahman,
kingpin of Fedogan & Bremer publishers, invited me to put together a
hardcover anthology of Mythos tales, and the eventual result was Tales
of the Lovecraft Mythos, followed many years later by The New
Lovecraft Circle and Acolytes of Cthulhu. Three years after
this, Chaosium Publishers approached me with the idea of my compiling
collections of Mythos stories to answer the needs of a younger generation
of fans who had discovered Lovecraft through the medium of fantasy
role-playing games. The new series would focus on a Mythos deity, a magic
book, a major locale familiar to the fans from their role-playing and
allow them to catch up with the source material. I did a dozen or so of
these, and several more are awaiting publication from Chaosium even now. I
branched out to other publishers, including Arkham House, for whom I put
together Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies, a collection of
rare early Robert Bloch pulp tales. Now I’m trying to finish out the
series of topical collections with new publishers including Mythos Books,
Die, Monster, Die! Books, Lindesfarne Press, and Hippocampus Press.
Perhaps my most bizarre (and most fun!) adventures in
Lovecraftianity were the series of biennial “NecronomiCons,” or Cthulhu
Mythos conventions, held in Danvers, Mass, or Providence. I loved
pontificating on panels to packed rooms of Mythos addicts. Even more I
loved hosting the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfasts which formed the climax of
each Con. We would gather for a breakfast buffet and present lifetime
achievement awards to elders of the movement including Robert Bloch, Gahan
Wilson, L. Sprague de Camp, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Dirk W. Mosig,
Fred Chappell, and others. And then I would come on stage, dressed in
Innsmouth finery, and give a sermon. I’d lead into it with some stand-up
material, then do a serious and (I hoped relevant) homily, which would
inevitably slide into a crazed display of Cthulhuvian tomfoolery, as I
would begin to rant about the return of the Old Ones or to speak in
tongues (R’lyehian, specifically), and lead the crowd in strategically
reworded hymns. It was always a thrill. Too bad those days are over! My
precious keepsake from back then is my copy of the first edition of the
Schlangekraft-Barnes Necronomicon (you know, the one that looks
like a high school yearbook), whose once-blank end pages are covered with
the autographs of major Lovecraftian writers, many of them now dead and
suffering Hell’s torments. I’m glad I thought of it before it was too
late. Now no one could duplicate it.
These days, I have sold off most of my Lovecraft criticism
volumes. I do not race to acquire the latest Lovecraft pastiche and don’t
bother keeping up with them. Now my Lovecraft fixation tends to be a more
private matter. Lovecraft remains indelibly a part of me, and I would
never have it any other way.
