The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants
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When I Was Ten Years Old I Discovered H. P. Lovecraft In The Color out of Space, and was profoundly excited and disturbed by his work, and some years later, after I had read considerably more of Lovecraft’s fiction, I turned a bent for writing which began when I was seven toward the Cthulhu Mythos. I wrote five stories in nine months; they were little more than amateurish pastiches of Lovecraft’s tales, but I had courage enough to show some of them to August Derleth, and, had he not considered them promising and encouraged me to carry on, those tales might have remained in the original draft.
Perhaps even more important, he persuaded me to agree that the Arkham country had been saturated as setting for stories in the Mythos, and that a new milieu for a series of tales might well be originated in Great Britain. He felt certain that even H. P. Lovecraft would approve of such a new setting, and of a sequence of stories taking place there. I considered the Severn Valley a likely milieu. As a Roman-occupied area, it might retain influences of the decadent Roman practises; and some years ago, in the Cotswolds, a supposed witch was executed by persons unknown. With cautious enthusiasm, I set about creating my own towns. Some research was, of course, necessary, and the various towns were not conceived as a whole; their details were added to in each story and so the towns came into being.