I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.
Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.
Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville.
I read H.P. Lovecraft. I also like Sword and Sorcery stuff, Arthurian legend.
I tend to look way back for my inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe.
The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.
Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me
The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.
My natural tendency is to write about zombie bunnies, but one of my first writing teachers got incorporated into my writing superego, and I keep hearing his admonition to make things feel more real the weirder they get.
Richard Gavin is one of the bright new stars in contemporary weird fiction. His richly textured style, deft character portrayal, and powerful horrific conceptions make every one of his tales a pleasure to read.
Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.
Pulver's skills as a post-Beat visionary are in rare form. A House of Hollow Wounds is a thrilling foray into the dark frontier of the weird.
Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law - an imaginative escape from palling reality - hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes.'
I loved The Weird (one of the stories in it inspired Blackalley in Discourse).
The prose of Joe Pulver can take its place with that of the masters of our genre – E.A. Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti – while his imaginative reach is something uniquely his own.
It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!
I feel like I'm lost in an anime movie" I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. "One of the tentacle-monster ones." Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.
I wanted to write a story set in the Lovecraftian universe that didn't gloss over the uglier implications of his worldview.
I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class.
I grew up reading a lot of these super weird, genre-bending Southern gothic writers.
'Borne,' in a weird way, even though it's a totally different universe, picks up where the 'Southern Reach Trilogy' leaves off, because it's post-apocalyptic.
I'm into weird kind of, anything that resembles magical realism.
I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.
I'm a science fiction author at heart, and what I like about the Cthulhu Mythos setting is that, at its core, it is horror science fiction. I can take ideas from modern theoretical science, manipulate them in truly bizarre and weird ways, and remain true to the Cthulhu Mythos vision.
