ye House on Tempest Hill

Tom Brown, who has been selected by Jerad to be ye main illustrator for my forthcoming book from Centipede Press, has just completed ye magnificent drawing above, whut depicts ye haunted manse atop Tempest Hill in my story, "Ye Horror on Tempest Hill". The story has been previously publish'd under ye title "The Presence of the Past," a rather boring title that I decided to replace with a more traditionally Lovecraftian one. The story came about when I was invited to write a tale for Fungi, and editor Pierre Comtois requested the tale be 11,000 words in length and divided into chapters, with each chapter individually titled. This is what Lovecraft did when he wrote his sensational "The Lurking Fear," a story that saw its finest reprinting in ye hardcover edition of S. T. Joshi's A Mountain Walked, where ye tale was illustrated. My story is slightly longer than 11,000 words, and is my "Sesqua Valley version" of Lovecraft's originally story. I had a blast writing ye tale, partially because doing so felt slightly illicit: to write one's own version of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" seem'd a frightfully fanboy thing to do--something a professional writer shou'd resist. One attack level'd at my weird fiction is that it is little more than fan fiction--and I completely agree--fan fiction written as professionally as possible. I write my stuff with fannish fervor, with a sense of eldritch fun; but I also aim at writing that is artistic, influenced in this attitude by my passion for the works of Oscar Wilde and Henry James.