Okay, now I’m way behind.   My wife lost her father a few weeks back and we’ve been very busy.  While you’re never really back to business after such a thing, business goes on — and so does the blog.  With that in mind, what a great way to start but with a heavy dose of some free HP Lovecraft.  Now if you dig horror and haven’t read Lovecraft, well, do.  You can start so right here.

This jump will take you to an ebook of Lovecraft’s, part of the Project Gutenberg in Australia (free ebooks, texts, at no cost to read or download).  The book offered back at the jump is Lovecraft’s seminal Supernatural Horror in Literature.  It’s a must read for horror writers, and lovers of all things that go bump in the night.   Here is what Amazon.com has to say about the book:

This is a lively and opinionated historical essay on supernatural literature written during 1924 through 1927. Indispensable to horror fans (even for those uninterested in H. P. Lovecraft‘s fiction) for its superb plot summaries and subjective assessments, the book is a short history of horror from folk tales, ballads and myths of the Middle Ages, through the Gothic novel, Victorian ghost story, and American “pulp” writers. It is especially good on Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Machen, and William Hope Hodgson, and includes Lovecraft’s views on what makes a good horror story. E. F. Bleiler, renowned scholar of supernatural fiction, provides the introduction.

If you want a better understanding of speculative fiction of the horror bent, go read the ebook.  Or, buy it from Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, your neighborhood store, or wherever you buy books.  And keep reading, and reading, and reading…