Lovecraft & Poe

H.P. Lovecraft

In another post recently, I talked about my love of macabre fiction. This love was fostered when my dad's best friend gave me his copy of Stephen King's Pet Sematary. My appreciation of the genre was even furthered by my dad when he came across his old horror comic books from the 1960s. After giving them a nostalgic once-over, he gave them to me when I was about 9 or 10, and a fan was born. 

I'm still a die-hard fan of King's, but it was this gesture on my dad's part that really fostered a deep appreciation for Horror Fiction. As the years moved on, I graduated to reading Clive Barker, Thomas Tryon, and Dean Koontz, among many others. I enjoyed them all immensely, and devoured any book I could get my hands on.

Edgar Allan Poe

It was my dad's old comic books (you can read the post I wrote about them here) and old books that he had kept--like Weird Tales--that piqued my interest in writers of the macabre older than them. I'm talking about H.P Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, in particular, was a favored author to use for Creepy and Eerie magazine stories, and I can remember how much those illustrated stories both mesmerized and frightened me. I can remember The Call of Cthulu and how uniquely different it was from the horror fiction I had read before.

As I got older, I began to actively seek out Lovecraft and Poe books to read, deciding that I should go straight to the source. Between Lovecraft's The Picture in the House, to Poe's The Cask of Amantillado, I spent many hours poring over their fiction. To this day, their work still packs a punch, and they still hold a large influence over my likes, my tastes, and my life.

Have you read any Poe and/or Lovecraft? If so, what have you read, and what do you think of these stories? Leave me comments below.