Re: August Derleth
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 6 December, 2019 02:11PM
Just a personal aside, if I may indulge myself: I read Lurker in 1975. That was also the year I read the first volume of Lovecraft's Selected Letters, the de Camp biography of HPL, and Lumley's Transition of Titus Crow. In the second half of the previous year I'd read Lumley's Burrowers Beneath and the entirety of the HPL revisions, The Horror in the Museum. In this period I also read "Supernatural Horror in Literature" for the first time, and, probably, much of the Frierson booklet HPL, borrowed from one of my professors. My attempt at a Mythos-type story, "The Intruder," was published in APA-5, in, as I recall, a 'zine edited by Terry Lee Dale and/or Loay Hall.
1974-1975 seems to be the watershed period for my interest in Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, though I have continued to reread a few HPL favorites such as "The Whisperer in Darkness." But I don't suppose I ever again read so much Lovecraft-related material in a comparable period, much of it for the first (and perhaps only) time. About ten years later, in the mid-1980s, I got the other three volumes of Selected Letters but by then my interest level was such that I never did more than dip into them. While studying library science around 1985 I wrote a term paper on Arkham House for a course on publishing.
That 1974-1975 period was not just evidently the culminating time of my interest in Lovecraft and the Mythos, but also a time of discovery of a number of authors such as Chesterton who quickly became favorites, at least for a time (Mervyn Peake), or of going more deeply into some other authors I already liked.
So revisiting The Lurker at the Threshold provides occasion for me to reflect on some of my reading shortly before I entered my twenties. But it's been in recent years that I've gone back to Lovecraft enough to write a lot of list postings and a few articles about his work, to evaluate his achievement and to get a better grip on the appeal some of his stories have had on me and perhaps other readers.