What got you in to Lovecraft?

[BookGwen]

This might hurt any Lovecraft cred I have but here it is.

It's the 1980s and a storm had knocked out power in our neighborhood.

My dad (who loathes heat and must have it cool and get at least 8 hours of sleep to function) has set up camp in the basement and is in such a mood you don't want to cross him. My mother is in the living room listening to the radio and staying out of the Dad Bear's way.

I can't sleep. My Walkman batteries are DEAD. My genius brain (hey could not have been older than 12) decides to read Stephen King's Night Shift for the very first time. Jerusalem's Lot blows my tiny little mind and I want more more MORE.

I find out Jerusalem's Lot was inspired by The Rats In The Walls by this H.P. Lovecraft guy. When my parents go to Grand Union for ice and the like in the morning, I'm across the Plaza in Waldenbooks trying to decide which two Lovecraft collections to buy...

So long story short...Stephen King. Not The Thing, not Poe, not CoC or anything cooler. Just little Stephie King cranking out Lovecraft pastiches...

[T. Kelly Lee]

Oh boy - nostalgia.  I grew up in a little house in the Texas Panhandle (Robert E. Howard country.)  My parents were poor folks who didn't read much and my grandpa was the only person I knew who read books for fun.  He liked horror stories and had sort of everyman's library-type copies of Dunsany and Blackwood and Poe.  He had one old Arkham House copy of the Outsider and Others and I fell in love with that thing as a kid.  When I was little my favorite stories were Innsmouth, Witch House, and Lurking Fear.  The whole thing just held my attention like nothing else could.

It fostered a probably unhealthy interest in magic, witchcraft, and the occult as well as the interest that became my career - history and archival studies.  Now I'm not an occultist (well, I AM a Freemason, so maybe) but I've always been fascinated by the esoteric.  And HPL's world just sucked me into that right away.  I've never been into the CoC roleplaying or the AD&D stuff.  But very early on I started getting my hands on as much Lovecraft stuff as I could...and I was lucky to be able to buy a lot of it when it was cheap.  I used to sit at the used book stores going through every single old pulp book or stack of comics or looking for mythos-related stuff.  This was in the day when you could get those pulps for about seven bucks.  (Some go for hundreds now, of course.)  I bought Arkham House books and paperbacks as much as possible.  I love the old art.  When the Del Rey books mentioned above and the CoC game came out all of this changed, of course.  But also, the internet has made it easier to track down. 

I consider myself to be rather like Professor Gregg from the Novel of the Black Seal.  A government archivist, businessman, and professor with a serious academic career who spends his weekends and vacations at his creepy old Victorian mansion hoarding up occult artifacts and weird old books.  It's a wholly unhealthy hobby and I rather love it.   

Lovecraft has been good to me: a career, a wife, and a passionate pastime. 

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

Worry not Gwen, for mine is even worse. As I said before, I was triggered by that South Park Episode. Yes, I know... but... see, if you have a twelve year old daughter at home you `ll like anything that kills the Beaver! So I wanted to check out Cthullu, read a German version and hated it. Tried the English one and loved it.
But in a way I had already been into Lovecraft for years because - without ever knowing it - I had seen so much Lovecraft related stuff in  movies, music, books etc. Be it Stephen King or Terry Pratchett or whatever. Lovecraft is widely unkown in Germany, but some things seem to filter through. Like The Book of course and some names. I was so surprised for example to see that Shub-Niggurath is not an actual Babylonian godess...  And that from a guy who worked with (European) archeologists for more than seven years! Where can I put my face?
In really hooking me, the podcast did at least part of the trick. Thanks to some of the episodes about more... hm... obscure stories, I saw how enjoyable bad literature can be. Sometimes Lovecraft did similar things in writing as Ed Wood did in filmmaking. Atrocious but heartfelt and simply adoreable when you look at it from the right perspective. And where else will you get a story about a three hundred years old mass murderer getting killed by Indian zombies?

[Yojimbo]

So long story short...Stephen King. Not The Thing, not Poe, not CoC or anything cooler. Just little Stephie King cranking out Lovecraft pastiches...

There's naught wrong with that. I'm sure my own awareness of Lovecraft was kickstarted by King. Plus King's a great writer, and Jerusalem's Lot is a great story.

[Inner Prop]

I have no idea.  I have no memory of it at all.  I wonder if someone else was inhabiting my body at the time and maybe my brain was in a jar.  It could happen.

[Ming]

As I delved more and more into geekiness, I kept hearing about this "Cthulhu" guy.  Eventually, my curiosity was piqued, and I started to look into what it was, who HPL was, etc.  Then a few years ago, I finally decided to start reading it all, and picked up my first copy of "Bloodcurdling Tales...".  After that, I was hooked, and read through a good amount of the stories.  My interest waned after a while, simply due to other things going on in my life, until sometime last year when my best friend, and Lovecraft confidant, told me about the podcast.  I started listening, got back into HPL full force, and here I am today!

[Graf von Altenberg Ehrenstein]

And where else will you get a story about a three hundred years old mass murderer getting killed by Indian zombies?

Hear hear! Some of Lovecraft's stuff is among the best in literary history. The fascination with the man and his times came when I discovered the really awful stuff, which would rank among the worst. It makes me appreciate that he was making this up as he went along. Today Fantasy, Crime, Sci-Fi and Horror are genres with well-understood conventions. But these people were creating something new. Experimentation led to masterpieces and abhorrent failures. And with friends such as Chad and Chris to talk them over with, the failures can often be so much more entertaining than the masterpieces 

Another Trash-Lover I suppose? As a devotee of monster-craze movies I should have fallen in love at first sight, but the bad stories had to grow on me. Or I on them. Admittedly I lack the education to properly judge literature, but I can recognize a piece of silly writing when it hits me in the face. Still it can be enjoyable. For all the wrong reasons. 
You make a good point however. Sometimes one has to fire a few shots in the dark  Just to see what happens. And if there is something to be hit.   
Moreover it is the flaws in his writings, that make HPL easier to relate to than The Big Guys. He is „closer“ to the hobby writer and thus more accessible. I `ve been into fanfiction for a while and have an idea how hard it is sometimes to get a story together. You sit there, writing and re-writing, bleeding up your a... basically – you even know where the problem is and still those damn words just won `t be right. Eventually you settle for some second best solution unsatisfying as it may be... and then you come across a story by a well known author and realize „Hey! That guy had the same problem as I had. Maybe I `m not THAT awful after all!“
It just may be that is one more reason for his continued popularity. In any case a comparatively high percentage of Lovedraft fans seem to do some creative work themselves and there are clearly more 
 amateur writers creating lovecraftian stuff than say Poe stuff.
Just for the fun of it, I like to add that Muriel E. Eddy, (wife of weird fiction author Clifford Eddy) praised Red Hook as one of his best stories and also talked enthusiactically about the surprising twists in
Lovecraft `s work. So. Hm.

[ragnarhedin]

I've known about Cthulhu, mythos entities, and the name Lovecraft for what feels like forever, but my first real exposure to the writing and works of HPL were this very podcast.  It helped lead me into the texts and I'm completely head over heels now.

[ahtzib]

Like a lot of folks under 40 or so, the game Call of Cthulhu introduced it all to me. But it fell on very fertile soil with my youthful interests in history, archaeology, folklore, science, the occult, Forteana, and so on. I'm glad I ran into Lovecraft this way, as the alternative would have probably been running into it through his influences on paranormalia, and I probably would have thought it hokey and ridiculous.

I fell in love with the science fantasy aspect of Lovecraft's mythos as Petersen presented it in the Call of Cthulhu gamebook (4th edition) and set out to find the fiction (one other Petersen book, which I got my hands on early on and was a big influence, was "S. Petersen's Guide." I loved the pseudoacademic frame and tone, whilst simultaneously capturing both horror and mystery in what could easily have been a demystifier"). I think I first came across the Del Rey Lurking Fear collection, and I kind of liked it. But then I got my hands on "Bloodcurdling tales ..." and the combo of the awesome tales with Bloch's introductory essay was what really revved me up.

Because I got so into this stuff, I started to give up on gaming for the most part, as if I was going to game, it was going to be Call of Cthulhu. That early literary start almost immediately after the pop culture intro, and my disengagement to some degree from geekery, meant I've been a bit startled by the growth of a Cthulhu (I'd use that word instead of Lovecraft) fandom that has grown up around the various games and internet memes, without actually knowing the stories (never mind doing more proper research and reading).