Tomorrow, August 20th, marks the 132nd birthday of the biggest name in cosmic horror, the man who made tentacles fashionable and non-Euclidian geometry scary, H.P. Lovecraft. And, by some wild twist of metaphysical synchronicity, it’s also our buddy Fletcher’s birthday, so naturally, he has a few things to say about Lovecraft. On the Occasion of Lovecraft’s Birthday by Fletcher Vredenburgh I can remember the exact day I first read an H.P. Lovecraft story: July 13th, 1977. I was just shy of turning eleven. I had taken out Scholastic Book’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror (1971) from the Stapleton Library, the place where I spent huge portions of my early life. My friend Jesse’s parents were out of town and he was staying over and I decided to read one of the stories out loud. It was a miserably hot and humid night and somehow it seemed perfectly appropriate. At random, I picked “The Transition of Juan Romero,” a workpiece that Lovecraft never intended to publish. We weren’t particularly scared. Then the great blackout of 1977 hit. By flashlight I then read “The Festival.” With its strange green flames and decayed ancestors, it did spook us – enough that it ensured I finished the book. It made me a Lovecraft reader for life. While the collection has some lesser works, it also includes two of his most important works – “The Colour Out of Space” (1927) and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936). The other stories are the fantastic “The Outsider,” a story ghost-written for Harry Houdini entitled “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs,” and the sci-fi tale, “In the Walls of Eryx.” Looking at this collection over fifty years after it was published and when Lovecraft’s fiction is everywhere, this remains a solid first introduction to the Old Gentleman from Providence’s work. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is a fantastic story that does much to establish and explore Lovecraft’s mythos, but “The Colour Out of Space” is perhaps the epitome of Lovecraft’s writing. His weakest stylistic tics are there – phonetic dialects, purple prose – but so are some of his best themes – the wonderfully creepy New England setting and the conflation of science fiction and horror. It concerns the arrival and effects of a meteor containing a strangely colored globule on a part of the Massachusetts countryside...