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I grew up in Texas, the land that gave Robert E. Howard so much inspiration, and now live in Wisconsin, home of August W. Derleth, the land that gave him inspiration.

But part of my mind lives somewhere else, some where that also provides inspiration. It’s a dark place of non-euclidean and cyclopean architecture dripping with foul ichor that can cause insanity, nay, total psychic destruction at the mere site of it. It’s a place of formless things from outside ye spheres, ancient monstrosities from the stars, and ghouls casually munching a mouldering skull it found in a long forgotten tomb.

It’s the Dreamland of Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Any writer or reader of horror has been influenced by H.P. Lovecraft whether they know it or not. Take John Carpenter’s The Thing. While not a direct adaptation of Lovecraft (it was actually a remake of a movie based on a story by John W. Campbell), the cold desolate paranoia created by the shapeless alien in the movie was all Lovecraft.

All modern horror writers, and a lot of sci-fi writers, love Lovecraft, and at some point attempt to write in Lovecraft’s anachronistic style. Hell, Stephen King has even written Mythos stories. An argument, which I may make at another time, can be presented that he was the most important horror writer of the 20th century.

But I’m not going to do that right now, nor am I going to talk about his other importance, or the importance of Mythos literature. Why? Cause it’s Lovecraft Month at Tor.com and I wanna read the stuff they are putting up.