Lovecraft is a resonating wave. He’s rock and roll.

I’m introducing a collection here that takes us through the dream-fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, weaving it into a huge tapestry that drives from Fantasy to Horror and back again. Here’s the tale of “Pickman’s Model”—pure horror, and vintage Lovecraft—and then there’s Richard Upton Pickman, creeping through “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” . . . The chronological arrangement of stories forms odd patterns. Dreams and nightmares, too. Vampires and cats.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT Lovecraft’s fiction, about his worlds, that is oddly alluring for a writer of fantasy or horror. I’ve written three Lovecraftian stories: one obliquely, in Sandman—a quiet, dreamlike story (it’s the first story in the Worlds’ End collection. You can tell it’s Lovecraftian, because I use the word cyclopian in it); one a hard-boiled “Maltese Falcon” variant with a werewolf as hero (in Steve Jones’s fine anthology Shadows over Innsmouth), and a third, when I was much younger, that was an awkward attempt at humor, an extract from Cthulhu’s autobiography. If I go back to Lovecraft again (and I’m sure I shall, before I die) it will probably be for something else entirely.

So what is it about Lovecraft that keeps me coming back? That keeps any of us coming back? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that we like the way he gives us monsters to draw with our minds.

If this is your first excursion into H. P. Lovecraft’s world, you may find the way a little bumpy at first. But keep going.

You’ll soon find yourself driving down a road that will take you through the twin cities, and off into the darkness beyond.

If literature’s the world.

And it is.

This was my introduction to The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death, 1995.

On The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

Something very much like nothing anyone had ever seen before came trotting down the stairs and crossed the room.

“What is that?” the Duke asked, palely.

“I don’t know what it is,” said Hark, “but it’s the only one there ever was.”

This book, the one you are holding, The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, is probably the best book in the world.

And if it’s not the best book, then it’s still very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before, and, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever really seen anything like it since.

I had a friend call me one evening in tears. She was fighting with her boyfriend and her family, her dog was sick and her life was a shambles. Furthermore anything I said—everything I said—only served to make matters worse. So I picked up a copy of The 13 Clocks and began to read it aloud. And soon enough my friend was laughing, baffled, and delighted, her problems forgotten. I had, finally, said the right thing.

It’s that sort of book. It’s unique. It makes people happier, like ice cream.

James Thurber, who wrote it, was a famed humorist (most of his stories and articles were for adults) and a cartoonist with a unique style of drawing (lumpy men and women who looked like they were made out of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved). He did not illustrate this book because his eyesight had got too bad. He got his friend Marc Simont to illustrate it instead. In England, it was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle, and that was the version I read when I was about eight. I was fairly certain it was the best book I had ever read. It was funny in strange ways. It was filled with words. And while all books are filled with words, this one was different. It was filled with magical, wonderful, tasty words. It slipped into poetry and out of it again, in a way that made you want to read it aloud, just to see how it sounded. I read it to my little sister. When I was old enough, I read it to my children.