My first encounter with Lovecraft's work took place in a small bookshop in Hungary when I was about sixteen. I had never heard of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, but one look at the contents of that short story collection was enough to assure me that I had stumbled upon something truly special. With titles like "Rats in the Walls", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Evil Clergyman", "The Nameless City", or "The Thing on the Doorstep", the book seemed to exhale a suffocating miasma of terrors encountered in dark crypts, hideous nightmares, and in the touch of ancient evil.
To this day I cannot think of an author whose work is capable of casting a darker spell on the mind than Lovecraft's. In his world, the macabre lurks beneath the surface, malicious things slither in the dark, luring, tempting man with the promise of forbidden knowledge. This is a world in which the truth of existence remains hidden from the eyes of man, and those seeking it are doomed to fail in their quest, or lose their minds at the sight of what lies beyond the veil.
Lovecraft died in 1937 and left behind a body of work that influenced many of today's best horror writers. And yet, I know of no author whose work comes close to the suffocating atmosphere of malevolence and sheer creepiness found in Lovecraft's tales.
