Flame Tree Fiction

One of Lovecraft's classic creepy stories, written in the same year as the untimely, self-inflicted death of Robert E. Howard, this horrific tale is a follow-up to an early Robert Bloch story, The Shambler from the Stars, picking up the Cthulhu strands created by Lovecraft in his Call of the Cthulhu, eight years earlier. Bloch, whose Psycho inspired Hitchock’s famous film of 1960, later ended the cycle in 1950 with a third story, The Shadow from the Steeple.

H.P. Lovecraft, the master of the weird and macabre, the ultimate writer of creepy stories, set a fantastical world in motion with the publication of this short story in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. He stood on the shoulders of horror giants Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen; and a generation of pulp writers, including the muscular genius of Robert E. Howard (with his ultimate creation, Conan of Cimmeria) claim Lovecraft as their inspiration.

It seems incredible that some of Philip K. Dick's fiction is in the public domain. A superlative writer of science fiction and fantasy books Dick gave us so many powerful novels and films (Blade Runner, The Adjustment Bureau, Total Recall) but his first stories are available because their copyright was not renewed.