Donald A. Wollheim is to blame. He started me on Lovecraft. It was 1959. I was just a kid, a mere thirteen years old when he slipped me my first fix. I was a good kid up till then, reading Ace Doubles and clean, wholesome science fiction stories by the likes of Heinlein, E. E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, and the rest. But he brought me down with one anthology. He knew what he was doing. He called it The Macabre Reader and slapped this lurid neato cool Ed Emshwiller cover on it. I couldn't resist. I bought it. I read it. And that was it. The beginning of my end.

The Macabre Reader is an excellent collection—Bloch, Wandrei, Smith, Bishop, Howard. Good stories—dark, eerie, intense, the emotions jumping right off the page—like nothing I'd ever read before. But the one that grabbed me by the throat was "The Thing on the Doorstep" by somebody named H. P. Lovecraft. I was dragged into the story by the opening line ("It is true I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer."), captivated by the setting (". .. witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic."), blown away by the dense prose that tossed off words like eldritch and foetor and Cyclopean and nacreous, that spoke of poets who die screaming in madhouses, that casually mentioned strange, forbidden books and towns like Innsmouth (where even Arkhamites fear to go) as if I should be familiar with them.

But it was the heart of the tale that lingered in my mind long after I'd finished it—the concept of another reality impinging on ours, knowledge of which could drive you stark raving mad; a dimension of perverse logic and bizarre geometry, full of godlike creatures with unpronounceable names, aloof and yet decidedly inimical.

My thirteen-year-old world did not seem quite so safe and sane, my reality seemed a tad less real.

"The Thing on the Doorstep" delivered on the up-close, breath- clogging horror that The Macabre Reader cover had promised, but it also served as my Cthulhu Mythos primer, my introduction to what is known as Cosmic Horror.

After that first fix, I started mainlining Lovecraft. The local pushers— excuse me, book dealers—introduced me to Arkham House books and I nearly died of an overdose. Eventually I went cold turkey and kicked the habit. (Well, not completely. Occasionally I'll reread a favorite story. I can handle it now. Really.) But the Cosmic Horror concept still fascinates me. I used it in The Keep and I've used it here in "The Barrens." I'll no doubt use it again.

So here's my official tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. I purposely avoided rereading any of his fiction before writing "The Barrens." I wasn't out to do a slavish pastiche; I wanted to capture the Lovecraft gestalt as I remembered it. The Jersey Pine Barrens, by the way, are real, a truly Lovecrafitian setting; all the Piney history and lore in the story are true, every locale except Razorback Hill is real. (In fact, I liked Razorback Hill so much I returned there for the backstory of Freak Show.) The style is mine, but the Cosmic Horror is Lovecraft's.

The following year it wound up as a finalist for the World Fantasy Award for best novella. It lost (of course) but John Betancourt did get his chance to publish it through his own Wildside Press in a signed, limited hardcover edition in 1991. More recently it was revived for Arkham House's Cthulhu 2000.

I'm happy with "The Barrens," but it's nothing like "The Thing on the Doorstep." That's the real thing. Read it (or reread it) when you get a chance.