Monday, July 7, 2014

Robert M. Price Born Today, 1954

Lovecraft scholar and editor Robert M. Price has contributed much to the study and appreciation of weird fiction both vintage and modern. With his fanzine in 1981, Crypt of Cthulhu, Price featured fiction from all the familiar names associated with the Lovecraftian circle, as well as nonfiction and reviews by himself and fellow writers. His background was in theology, so his approach to the Mythos was thorough and perceptive. Price kept Crypt going for 20 years, and you can get later issues from Necronomicon Press.

Dig these hand-drawn covers for Crypt! Really love the aesthetic, I daresay ol' HPL, amateur journalist that he was, would've too. You can find a lot of the articles included in these online, which I highly recommend reading, especially his early Stephen King reviews.
 
 
In the early-mid 1990s Price began editing Mythos anthologies for the RPG publisher Chaosium, and below are a few of the trade paperback anthologies, each which expanded on a particular entity or town in the Mythos. These titles  seemed ubiquitous while I was working in a chain bookstore then, but I never read any though. What am I missing?

 
 
 

2 comments:

Jonathan said...

I picked up a few Crypt of Cthulhus here and there back in the day. I appreciated the mix of seriousness, humor, and fiction. I remember seeing those anthologies but never purchased any, good to see them together.

Jonathan Stover said...

I quite enjoyed The Ithaqua Cycle. Some of the material is bad, but there's also some interesting material in there I hadn't read before, including a pre-HPL pulp story that riffs on both "The Wendigo" and "The Willows." And Price's notes are solid.