NO AUTHOR WRITES in a vacuum, but this fantasia on a theme by H.P. Lovecraft depends, even more than most works of fiction, on the labors of others. The most important of these debts is of course to Lovecraft himself, whose stories and essays were a constant source of inspiration for me, as well as a well-stocked warehouse of props and scenery. Fans of the weird tale already know that I have also borrowed plenty of local color from stories by Robert E. Howard, Arthur Machen, and Clark Ashton Smith.
I also owe thanks to two modern scholars of Lovecraft's writings. S.T.Joshi's writings on the old gentleman of Providence were invaluable in helping me grasp the world of ideas that structured Lovecraft's fiction and gives it an enduring relevance. On a different plane, Daniel Harms' Encyclopedia Cthulhiana was a constant help in keeping the details straight, and more than once sent me chasing after some detail that turned out crucial to the unfolding story. I am also grateful to Donovan K. Loucks and Boyd Pearson, whose websites—The H.P. Lovecraft Archive (http://www.hplovecraft.com) and The Eldritch Dark (http://www.eldritchdark.com) respectively—made finding even the most obscure writings by Lovecraft and Clark both easy and enjoyable. In addition, I would like to thank Sara Greer and Dana Driscoll for reading the manuscript and offering an abundance of useful comments, and for Shaun Kilgore for making its journey into print a positive pleasure.
Finally, I don't think it's out of place to mention certain intellectual debts that reach well beyond the obvious boundaries of Cthulhudom. Though science fiction has been praised as a literature of ideas, it seems to me that the weird tale, as told by Lovecraft and his peers and successors, has at least as much right to the title, if not more. Where the ideas explored by science fiction stories too often amount to little more than extrapolating current trends in a conveniently straight line, the weird tale at its best poses questions of shattering profundity about the meaning of human existence, the nature of history, and the vexed relationship between reason and reality.
Mortimer Adler used to say that all the works of human learning and culture are part of one Great Conversation winding down through the centuries. H.P. Lovecraft listened closely to that conversation, and of course contributed to it as well; two of the voices that shaped his thinking and storytelling—Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche—have also had much to do with this tale. Of the writers since Lovecraft's time who have had a similar influence on this story, one who deserves mention here is Theodore Roszak, whose Where the Wasteland Ends whispered a word or two in a Great Old One’s ear. None of the above, it goes without saying, should be held responsible for anything in The Weird of Hall: Innsmouth.