This quote is from my Jagged orbit site:
http://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com
"Logically as one gets older the writers and entertainers you enjoyed over the years begin to pass away. Since January I learned that two of my favourites, Brian Lumley and Brian Stableford had died. I will address Brian Lumley on my HPL site, actually I will make note of Brian Stableford's death there as well as he was not stranger to the mythos. "
I learned of both deaths on the excellent site;
Adventures Fantastic
https://adventuresfantastic.com/
Since this blog is dedicated to the Lovecraft Mythos I wanted to discuss Brian Lumley here. Lumley himself provides a wonderful glimpse of his mythos journey in the preface to his novel Beneath the Moors. He notes that the first mythos tale he encountered was Robert Bloch's "Notebook found in a deserted house". While he was intrigued it was not until some ten years later that he encountered Lovecraft's collection Cry Horror and decided to look for more of his work. He contacted August Derleth to buy some Arkham House titles. I will note that some years later I wrote August Derleth's daughter April with the same goal, she was a kind and helpful correspondent. Lumley included some paragraphs based on Lovecraft's work. To his surprise Derleth commented critically on the work, explained where he had gone wrong and mentioned that he was putting together a collection, Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Eventually Lumley would have two stories in this collection, "The Sister City "and "Cement Surroundings."
I have read some critical comments about Lumley's work, the main points seem to have been that his work shared some of the same problems as Derleth's. Lovecraft's great aliens Cthulhu etc. became elementals and some of Lovecraft's cosmic vision was lost. Certainly I found that as the adventures of Titus Crow and De Marigny, which appeared in a succession of DAW yellow spines, started to read more like the adventures of action heroes and I did not keep these books. Boy do I regret that now. However over the years I have read and enjoyed much of Lumley's work. I found he developed his own unique voice and his characters and settings often enthralled me. When hardcovers began to appear containing both older and more recent work and with beautiful covers by Bob Eggleton I snapped them up. I have only read one volume of his immensely popular Necroscope series and it was quite good. But my heart belongs to the mythos. Yesterday I read three Lumley stories, "The Night the Sea Maid went down", the wonderfully pulpy "The Fairground Horror" and the brilliantly Fortean The Nonesuch and Others. I cannot wait to reread more of his work.
I did want to take a minute to acknowledge Brian Stableford's contribution to the mythos, ( he is one of my favourite writers). I touched on it in my Jagged Orbit post, but I hope in the coming days that I can discuss some of his stores here as well.
