The germ of inspiration came from Lovecraft reading Cotton Mather and running across a quote from Borellus.

Additional milieu were provided by Chaosium with the release of Dreamlands, a boxed supplement containing additional rules needed for playing within the Lovecraft Dreamlands, a large map and a scenario booklet, and Cthulhu By Gaslight, another boxed set which moved the action from the 1920s to the 1890s.

An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that apparently exist in the universe, with Lovecraft constantly referring to the " Great Old Ones ": a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep.

") He was a member of the Lovecraft circle, ( Smith's literary friendship with H. P. Lovecraft lasted from 1922 until Lovecraft's death in 1937 ).

This was followed by a fan letter from H. P. Lovecraft, which was the beginning of 15 years of friendship and correspondence.

* The Mi-go aliens in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, first appearing in the story " The Whisperer in Darkness " ( 1931 ), can transport humans from Earth to Pluto ( and beyond ) and back again by removing the subject's brain and placing it into a " brain cylinder ", which can be attached to external devices to allow it to see, hear, and speak.

Themes from Gothic writers such as H. P. Lovecraft were also used among gothic rock and heavy metal bands, especially in black metal, thrash metal ( Metallica's The Call of Ktulu ), death metal, and gothic metal.

Another inspiration came from a totally different kind of source ; the scientific progress at the time in such diverse areas as biology, astronomy, geology, and physics, all contributed to make Lovecraft see the human race seem even more insignificant, powerless, and doomed in a materialistic and mechanical universe.

Lovecraft was a keen amateur astronomer from his youth, often visiting the Ladd Observatory in Providence, and penning numerous astronomical articles for local newspapers.

Aside from his thinly-veiled appearance in Robert Bloch's " The Shambler from the Stars ", Lovecraft continues to be used as a character in supernatural fiction.

Although Lovecraft is known mostly for his works of weird fiction, the bulk of his writing consists of voluminous letters about a variety of topics, from weird fiction and art criticism to politics and history.

The initial interest in letters stemmed from his correspondence with his cousin Phillips Gamwell but even more important was his involvement in the amateur journalism movement, which was initially responsible for the enormous number of letters Lovecraft produced.

Today there are five publishing houses that have released letters from Lovecraft, most prominently Arkham House with its five-volume edition Selected Letters.

Regardless of the legal disagreements surrounding Lovecraft's works, Lovecraft himself was extremely generous with his own works and actively encouraged others to borrow ideas from his stories, particularly with regard to his Cthulhu mythos.

Lovecraft drew extensively from his native New England for settings in his fiction.

* 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.

* Extract from H P Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq

Her ideas also inspired other writers, ranging from horror authors like H. P. Lovecraft and Dennis Wheatley to Robert Graves.

Author H. P. Lovecraft is alluded to often, with many mentions of characters ( e. g., Robert Harrison Blake, Henry Armitage, Klarkash-Ton ), monsters ( e. g., Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth ), books ( Necronomicon, Unaussprechlichen Kulten ) and places ( Miskatonic University ) from his Cthulhu Mythos.

The Not-to-Be-Named-One, not being named, is difficult to identify ; a similar phrase, translated into Latin as the Magnum Innominandum, appears in a list in " The Whisperer in Darkness " and was included in a scrap of incantation that Lovecraft wrote for Robert Bloch's " The Shambler from the Stars ".

Robert M. Price proposes that the name Nyarlathotep may have been subconsciously suggested to Lovecraft by two names from Lord Dunsany, an author he much admired.

At the center of the area they discover the Nameless City ( the setting of the Lovecraft story of the same name ) and in Derleth's text the domain of the Great Old One Hastur.

According to the genealogy Lovecraft devised for his characters ( later published as " Letter 617 " in Selected Letters ), Yog-Sothoth is the offspring of the Nameless Mists, which were born of the deity Azathoth.

* H. P. Lovecraft places it somewhere near The Nameless City in his stories.

" The Nameless City " is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft in January 1921 and first published in the November 1921 issue of the amateur press journal The Wolverine.

In " The Nameless City ", Alhazred is not yet identified as the author of the famous Necronomicon, but the " unexplained couplet " that Lovecraft attributes to him is later established as coming from that work.

Though Lovecraft counted " The Nameless City " among his favorite stories, it was rejected ( following its original amateur appearance ) by a variety of professional outlets, including Weird Tales ( twice ), Fantasy Magazine and possibly The Galleon.

* Publication history for " The Nameless City ", The H. P. Lovecraft Archive.

Likewise, Lovecraft used Robert E. Howard's Nameless Cults in his tale " Out of the Aeons ".

Arkham House is a publishing house specializing in weird fiction founded in Sauk City, Wisconsin in 1939 by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei to preserve in hardcover the best fiction of H. P. Lovecraft.

The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep ( Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1943, 395 – 407 ) and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft ( San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2001, 64 – 79 ).

The horror film City of the Living Dead, directed by the late Lucio Fulci, features a town called Dunwich, named as a tribute to Lovecraft.

As early as 1971 an APA dedicated to the study of the life and works of Lovecraft had been proposed by Texan writer Joseph F. Pumilia ( a member of the famous Turkey City Writer's Workshop ) and Bill Wallace.

Klein was born and lives in New York City and attended Brown University where he wrote his honors thesis on H. P. Lovecraft, edited The Brown Daily Herald and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1969.

Abdul Alhazred is a fictional character created by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.

The name Abdul Alhazred is a pseudonym that Lovecraft created in his youth, which he took on after reading 1001 Arabian Nights at the age of about five.

Like his creation the Necronomicon, Alhazred is often referenced in works that are not generally considered part of the Cthulhu Mythos, either as a subtle nod to Lovecraft or to create a connection to his world.

The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft emphasised the point by stating in the opening sentence of the story that " The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

With studied playfulness, Smith and Lovecraft borrowed each other's coinages of place names and the names of strange gods for their stories, though so different is Smith's treatment of the Lovecraft theme that it has been dubbed the ' Clark Ashton Smythos '.

A modern grimoire is the Simon Necronomicon, named after a fictional book of magic in the stories of author H. P. Lovecraft, and inspired by Babylonian mythology and the Ars Goetia, a section in the Lesser Key of Solomon which concerns the summoning of demons.

The most famous fictional grimoire is the Necronomicon, a creation of the author H. P. Lovecraft.

Non-Euclidean geometry is the mathematical language and background of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and Lovecraft references it repeatedly in exploring alien archaeology.

Lovecraft was also influenced by authors such as Gertrude Barrows Bennett ( who, writing as Francis Stevens, impressed Lovecraft enough that he publicly praised her stories and eventually " emulated Bennett's earlier style and themes "), Oswald Spengler, Robert W. Chambers ( writer of The King in Yellow, of whom Lovecraft wrote in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith: " Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans — equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them ").

H. P. Lovecraft is now noted as a significant figure in 20th-century horror fiction.

An early version of Ray Bradbury's " The Exiles " uses Lovecraft as a character, who makes a brief, 600-word appearance eating ice cream in front of a fire and complaining about how cold he is.

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 ).

According to Lovecraft there is a copy of the Necronomicon here, but the University of Buenos Aires never had a central library.

* 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.