I’ve had a fondness for H.P. Lovecraft since I was thirteen, when I first read a handful of his weird tales from a Del Ray paperback I bought off a drug store bookrack back in 1984. But even before I read anything he wrote, I had stumbled across his influence two years before.

Back in 1982, I had started playing Dungeons & Dragons. By way of Christmas and birthday presents and saved-up paper route money, I acquired four of the AD&D hardcover books, including a copy of Deities & Demigods. Among its Greek gods and heroes, Egyptian gods, and other familiar mythological figures, Deities & Demigods also depicted a mythos I had never heard about—the Lovecraft mythos—that is, the Great Old Ones, their monstrous servitors, and other alien creatures. These eldritch entities were fascinating to me, even more so than the sourcebook’s other familiar mythologies.

The Cthulhu Mythos was first revealed in a group of related stories by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Beginning with “The Call of Cthulhu” in Weird Tales, Lovecraft began referring in his horror stories to a pantheon of beings known as the Old Ones, who had descended to Earth from the stars in pre-human times. First worshiped by the non-human races of the planet, the Old Ones were later banished or locked away by the elder gods. The elder gods do not enter into the stories much, and their identity is a mystery. They left the Old Ones weakened, but not destroyed. When man appeared, he found traces of the older civilizations and remnants of the pre-human races. Religions grew up around the Old Ones and legends of their imminent return to power – especially around Cthulhu. Bits of the old lore were discovered and transcribed into books, extremely dangerous books.

Lovecraft’s friends (who included Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard and August Derleth), wrote stories that “tied in” with the discovery of pre-human relics, the revival of ancient worship, or the consequences of finding a “forbidden book” dealing with the Old Ones and their secrets. No great effort was made to keep these stories consistent with each other. After Lovecraft’s death in 1937, August Derleth founded Arkham House publishing company to reprint his works. Derleth also wrote a number of stories dealing with Lovecraftian themes or based on fragments of Lovecraft’s writings. Since then a number of younger authors, outstanding among whom are Lin Carter, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley, have written stories based on the growing Cthulhu mythology.

Most of the creatures presented here were introduced by the earlier authors: Lovecraft, Derleth and Smith. Derleth introduced the concept of a struggle between the Old Ones and the forces of good. Lovecraft’s original concept was for less sanguine – all of his gods were evil and chaotic, and the best mankind could expect from them was indifference.

If you have not read any stories in the Cthulhu tradition, start with Lovecraft himself. Many of his stories are straight supernatural tales and do not deal with the Old Ones, but “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Whisperer in Darkness”, “At the Mountains of Madness”, “The Dunwich Horror”, and “The Shadow Out of Time” give the flavor of his work. Then read the imitative writings of Derleth and the modern writers. Fortunately, most of these stories are gathered into collections of Lovecraft’s work and published in paperback.

Deities & Demigods, 1980, p. 43

The Dungeon Masters Guide also briefly mentioned H.P. Lovecraft as one of the chief influences on the game (DMG, 1979, p. 224). 

My curiosity was aroused. So I tried to track down any of Lovecraft’s writings at my local public library, but I had no luck there or anywhere else in finding his stories for a long time—that is to say, a long time for an 11-year-old. 

Two years later, I stumbled upon a small Lovecraft collection in paperback, The Lurking Fear and other Stories, on a drugstore bookrack. Finally, when I was able to read those strange tales, something in them resonated with me, and they stuck with me to this day: the monstrously inbred Martense-kin in The Lurking Fear, the terrible invention of Crawford Tillinghast in From Beyond, the monster of oneself in The Outsider, the hybrid horrors of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and so on. Especially resonant was mans’ relative insignificance in the vast universe, or as this worldview would come to be known, cosmicism or cosmic horror.

Every year after that, when I started going to the local shopping mall, I’d pick up a new Lovecraft collection that Del Rey had republished. Particularly, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath captured my growing interest in dreams and nightmares.

Today I have a thick tome of HPL’s collected works, and Cthulhu is practically a household name.

So those were my first encounters with the author’s works and influences.

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Onward, briefly for now, to an author of a different magnitude.

Fast forward to 1995 in Vermont, my wife and I are on our honeymoon. I buy a book on lucid dreams from a shop. In it is a sidebar on G.I. Gurdjieff and how “man is asleep”. 

The book was a real “hodge-podge”, as Gurdjieff might have put it, of paths and traditions and ideas, typical of New Age cafeteria-style spirituality. Still, this was my first exposure to this idea that “man is asleep” and to the person of G.I. Gurdjieff. 

It would not be for another thirteen years that I would come across Gurdjieff’s writings again, and this time it would be through my first instructor in Gurdjieff’s teaching.

More on both of these authors later.