In this post-literate age, it is difficult to imagine an era in which writers kept in touch with letters and social visits, but such were the days of books, magazines, and literary exploration. Pulp magazine writers gathered a fan base, and the authors of the 1920s and 1930s were prolific and imaginative. The authors’ stable of Weird Tales included Robert E. Howard, of Conan fame, Robert Bloch, who later wrote “Psycho,” Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, and several others to include a young August Derleth. These writers established round-robin communication and encouraged each other’s writing, much to the benefit of the reading public who enjoyed horror and fantasy tales. As an example, in Weird Tales, we see Robert Bloch “killing off” a thinly disguised Lovecraft in “Shambler from the Stars,” and Lovecraft matching him by destroying a “Robert Blake” in the tale “Haunter of the Dark.” The leavening of the Lovecraft Circle left a rich heritage.
It was a shock to all when Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937, more than two years before I was born, and August Derleth emerged as the champion of Lovecraft’s work, forming Arkham House Publishers in 1939, with Donald Wandrei, to collect and publish all of Lovecraft’s works as well as publishing Derleth’s own competent stories. It is no secret that Derleth took many of Lovecraft’s scribbled ideas and fleshed them out into full stories—even a book Lurker at the Threshold with Lovecraft as author but actually written primarily by Derleth. Derleth was Literary Editor of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisc., and he should be credited with stories that expanded the Cthulhu mythos beyond what Lovecraft had sketched out.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Derleth was still Lovecraft’s protector, seeing that opportunist writers did not piggyback on the reputation of the original. Thus it was that when I wrote to Arkham House in 1965, I hoped Derleth would consider my “novel”— that first big effort of a 23-year-old “wannabe,” but instead of brushing me off, Derleth asked me to send him my manuscript, which he savaged and diced in his critique. It was the best basic training I could have wished for, even though it was devastating at first. I was then selling a half dozen stories to men’s magazines, just as was Stephen King, who became wealthy and famous as a horror writer (very rare!), while I ended up with a day job teaching journalism and pursuing my writing until the present day.
The chain of correspondence between myself and Derleth was very similar to what I understand passed among the writers of the original Lovecraft Circle, and I came to see myself as part of the second tier of the old Lovecraft Circle when Derleth in 1965 accepted my short story “The Family Tree” for a now-scarce Arkham House anthology Travellers by Night. His letters over the years, until his death July 4, 1971, were instrumental in helping me develop professionalism in the craft of writing supernatural horror.
With the intervening years, my books and stories remain in the vein of classic supernatural horror in the great tradition of Poe, Dunsany, Le Fanu, Robert Howard, Machen, Lovecraft, and those following the tradition of true cosmic horror and mystery.
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Sun Cross Publications was established to provide an outlet for books that advance the literature of classic supernatural horror in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James, Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, and other greats, with an emphasis on settings not often treated in the fiction of the macabre and offered as a contribution to a great tradition, which though narrow, is a memorable part of all human storytelling.
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