It was originated either by Lovecraft himself or by his protégé August Derleth, who first published many of Lovecraft's works.

Although not formalised and acknowledged as a mythos per se, Lovecraft did correspond with contemporary writers ( Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Lieber – a group referred to as the " Lovecraft Circle ") – and shared story elements: Robert E. Howard's character Friedrich Von Junzt reads Lovecraft's Necronomicon in the short story " The Children of the Night " ( 1931 ), and in turn Lovecraft mentions Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten in the stories " Out of the Aeons " ( 1935 ) and " The Shadow Out of Time " ( 1936 ).

He had been severely affected by several tragedies occurring in a short period of time: Robert E. Howard's death by suicide ( 1936 ), Lovecraft's death from cancer ( 1937 ) and the deaths of his parents, which left him exhausted.

* Robert Harrison Blake, a character based on Robert Bloch from H. P. Lovecraft's short story " The Haunter of the Dark "

Robert M. Price points to a passage from " Idle Days on the Yann ", by Lord Dunsany, one of Lovecraft's favorite writers, as the source for the name Shub-Niggurath:

Arkham House also published fiction by many of Lovecraft's contemporaries, including Ray Bradbury, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Derleth himself ; classic genre fiction by authors such as William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, H. Russell Wakefield, Seabury Quinn, and Sheridan Le Fanu ; and later writers in the Lovecraft school, such as Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley to whom Derleth gave their earliest publication in hardcover.

The saga of Den is a fantasy series about the adventures of a young underweight nerd who travels to Neverwhere, a universe taking inspirational nods from Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom and H. P. Lovecraft's horror dimensions.

Schwartz and Weisinger also founded the Solar Sales Service literary agency ( 1934 – 1944 ) where Schwartz represented such writers as Alfred Bester, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, and H. P. Lovecraft, including some of Bradbury's first published work and Lovecraft's last.

The chthonians had a more prominent role in Lumley's novel The Burrowers Beneath ( 1974 ), whose title was taken from one of the stories said to have been written by Robert Blake in Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark.

Joshi and his editorial collaborator David E. Schultz have edited many volumes of Lovecraft's letters to individuals: for Necronomicon Press ( including those to Richard F. Searight, Robert Bloch, Henry Kuttner, Samuel Loveman and Vincent Starrett ); for Night Shade Books ( Mysteries of Time and Spirit: Letters to Donald Wandrei ) and Letters from New York ; and for University of Tampa Press ( O Fortunate Floridian: Letters to Robert H. Barlow ).

Volumes already issued include Lovecraft's letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, Alfred Galpin, August Derleth ( 2 volumes ), Robert E. Howard ( 2 volumes ) and James F. Morton.

* O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft's Letters to Robert H. Barlow ( with David E. Schultz ) ( University of Tampa Press, 2007 ).

Early charter members included Claire Beck ( who had printed and published, under his Futile Press imprint, an edition of Lovecraft's Commonplace Book and Clark Ashton Smith's Nero and Other Poems ( 1937 )); Harry Morris Jr ; Meade Frierson ; Stuart David Schiff, publisher of Whispers ( Magazine / Anthologies ); R. Alain Everts ; Ben Indick ; Ken Faig Jr ( who joined with 7th mailing and has been continuously in the APA until the present day ); Dirk W. Mosig ; David Drake ; Robert Weinberg ; J. Vernon Shea ; Chet Williamson ; Tom Collins ; Crispin Burnham ; Will Hart ; Glenn Lord.

While the influence of the fantasies of Lord Dunsany on Lovecraft's Dream Cycle is often noted, Robert M. Price argues that a more direct model for The Dream-Quest is provided by the six Mars (" Barsoom ") novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs that had been published by 1927:

The character, unnamed in " A Shadow Over Innsmouth ", is called " Robert Olmstead " in Lovecraft's notes for the story, published in Arkham House's Something About Cats and Other Pieces ( 1949 ).

According to Lovecraft's story notes, Marsh's daughter Alice is Robert Olmstead's great-grandmother.

Many of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories were attempts at writing stories in H. P. Lovecraft's unique horror style.

After Lovecraft's death, Bloch wrote a third segment, " The Shadow From the Steeple " ( 1950 ), in which the events of the first two stories are further explored.

The term was first coined by August Derleth, a contemporary correspondent of Lovecraft, who used the name of the creature Cthulhu — a central figure in Lovecraft literature and the focus of Lovecraft's famous short story The Call of Cthulhu ( first published in pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928 )— to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors.

Penguin Classics has at present issued three volumes of Lovecraft's works: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories, and most recently The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories.

Hence, Weird Tales may only have owned the rights to at most six of Lovecraft's tales.

P. Lovecraft: Alone in Space ,” chapter 3 in Emperors of Dreams: Some Notes on Weird Poetry by S. T. Joshi ( Sydney: P ’ rea Press, 2008: ISBN 978-0-9804625-3-1 ( pbk ) and ISBN 978-0-9804625-4-8 ( hbk )), discusses some of Lovecraft's weird poetry.

Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.

His first appearance in print, however, was in H. P. Lovecraft's story " The Whisperer in Darkness ", written in 1930 and published in the August 1931 Weird Tales.

Set in Lovecraft's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, it was first published ( in abridged form ) in the May and July issues of Weird Tales in 1941 ; the first complete publication was in Arkham House's Beyond the Wall of Sleep collection ( 1943 ).

After Lovecraft's death ( and Wright's ), it appeared in an unauthorized abridged version in the January 1942 issue of Weird Tales.

It eventually appeared in the Fall 1936 issue of Fanciful Tales, published by Donald A. Wollheim and Wilson Shepherd, and was reprinted in the November 1938 issue of Weird Tales after Lovecraft's death.

After Lovecraft's death, it was resubmitted to Weird Tales and finally published in its October 1939 issue.

The story contains several other in-jokes, including references to " farnoth flies " ( for Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright ) and " ugrats " ( derived from " Hugo the Rat ", Lovecraft's unaffectionate nickname for Wonder Stories editor Hugo Gernsback ).

Abdul is a common Arabic name component ( but never a name by itself ; additionally the ending-ul and the beginning Al-are redundant ), but Alhazred may allude to Hazard, a pun on the book's destructive and dangerous nature, or a reference to Lovecraft's ancestors by that name.

According to Lovecraft's " History of the Necronomicon " ( written 1927, first published 1938 ), Alhazred was:

Price, however, believed that Lovecraft's writings could at least be divided into categories and identified three distinct themes: the " Dunsanian " ( written in the vein of Lord Dunsany ), " Arkham " ( occurring in Lovecraft's fictionalized New England setting ), and " Cthulhu " ( the cosmic tales ) cycles.

Several of Lovecraft's stories of the Old Ones ( alien beings of the Cthulhu Mythos ), propose alternate mythic human origins in contrast to those found in the creation stories of existing religions, expanding on a natural world view.

Other notable works with Lovecraft as a character include Richard Lupoff's Lovecraft's Book ( 1985 ), H. P.

Lovecraft's: Necronomicon ( 1993 ), David Barbour and Richard Raleigh's Shadows Bend ( 2000 ), Peter Cannon's The Lovecraft Chronicles ( 2004 ) and Stargate SG-1: Roswell ( 2007 ).

Lovecraft's poetry is collected in The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft ( Night Shade Books, 2001 ), while much of his juvenilia, various essays on philosophical, political and literary topics, antiquarian travelogues, and other things, can be found in Miscellaneous Writings ( Arkham House, 1989 ).

), and University of Tampa Press ( O Fortunate Floridian: H. P. Lovecraft's Letters to R. H. Barlow ).

* Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe ( ISBN 0-8131-1728-3 ), by Donald R. Burleson, PhD, a longtime scholar on Lovecraft and acquaintance of S. T. Joshi, is probably the only book analyzing Lovecraft's literature from a deconstructionist standpoint.

* The Gentleman From Angell Street: Memories of H. P. Lovecraft ( ISBN 978-0-9701699-1-4 ), written by Muriel and C. M. Eddy, Jr. is a collection of personal remembrances and anecdotes from two of Lovecraft's closest friends in Providence.

* Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos ( ISBN 0-586-04166-4 ), written by Lin Carter in 1972, is a survey of Lovecraft's work ( along with that of other members of the Lovecraft Circle ) with considerable information on his life.

* Other significant Lovecraft-related works are An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia by Joshi and David S. Schulz ; Lovecraft's Library: A Catalogue ( a meticulous listing of many of the books in Lovecraft's now scattered library ), by Joshi ; Lovecraft at Last, an account by Willis Conover of his teenage correspondence with Lovecraft ; Joshi's A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft.

* An Epicure in the Terrible ( Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991 ), edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi is an anthology of 13 essays on Lovecraft ( excluding Joshi's lengthy introduction ) on the centennial of Lovecraft's birth.

Lovecraft's celebrated short story, The Call of Cthulhu ( 1928 ), the titular entity emerges from the vast and ancient alien city of R ' lyeh, which is described in terms of " non-Euclidean geometry " and contains angles which are " all wrong " ( appearing acute but behaving as if obtuse, for example ) and planes which could be horizontal or slanted depending on how the observer looks at them.

Her first mention under Lovecraft's byline was in The Dunwich Horror ( 1928 ), where a quote from the Necronomicon discussing the Old Ones breaks into an exclamation of " Iä!

The Black Goat may be the personification of Pan, since Lovecraft was influenced by Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan ( 1890 ), a story that inspired Lovecraft's " The Dunwich Horror " ( 1929 ).

Though Nyarlathotep appears as a character in only four stories and two sonnets ( which is more than any other of Lovecraft's gods ), his name is mentioned frequently in other works.