The Temple of Dagon

I am curious about going about asking this question but I wanted to ask it for a long time. How did some of you involved on the site get into writing the Cthulhu Mythos? What story did the most to create an impact for you as a horror writer? For me it would be Shadow Out Of Time and Call of Cthulhu. It had to be from listening to Metallica early on when they did the instrumental CAll OF KTULU and The Thing That Should Not Be.

I have been writing short stories since before I read Lovecraft. I just found myself writing mythos tales eventually and since they seemed alright I went with it.

Al got me into Loveraft, and the mythos stuff is still virginal to me, but growing more by day :D

By reading "Rats In The Walls". It appealed to me and I sought more HPL stories until I catched up with the Myth Cycle.

I think the stories that really got me hooked on Lovecraft were "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "The Dunwich Horror".

It took me a bit to make the connection to Lovecraft and when I saw The Re-Aminator at age ten, I didn't realize that it was a story by Lovecraft until the age of 19 -- I thought it was a very sick take on Frankenstein; but when I went to read the story Herbert West -- Reaminator, it dawned on me on how sick Lovecraft was. I read Stephen King and Benchley first but it was reading Lovecraft that made me want to be more serious with the genre. The other one that got me in the style was Edgar Allan Poe.

The Mythos to me when I started writing in it was something that seemed right for some reason. I didn't know where I saw the connection to what I did was Cthulhu Mythos until the age of 20 -- when I went back into writing the Mythos it was very recent as of 2002. Some of the entries on my journal will have a mythos vibe to them then I was trying my hand at other aspects of horror namely a shark story that appears on shoggoth.net and in TABLOID PURPOSES. I wanted to do something to the Mythos by giving the story a Rod Serling vibe to them because he was an early influence.

I got into the mythos through playing the CoC table top roleplaying game by Chaosium actually :D

It's a long story. An old issue of White Dwarf I had featured an article on the Call of Cthulhu game, and it seemed pretty fucking atmospheric. So, I went looking into it, and discovered Lovecraft. I left it at that until I actually read 'The Call of Cthulhu', and almost immediatly jumped into writing a series of texts that I eventually merged to form 'The Lure of the Kraken' (in the public archives, if you're interested). From then, I've been peppering my already Poe- and Stoker- inspired fiction with Myhtos refernces. By the way, I have a habit of writing in the first person for horror tales, and for using severial media and diary entries in doing so - this is not a Lovecraftian thing, but due to my immense appreciation for 'Dracula', which is, contrary to all those stupid Joyce-fellators out there the best book ever written by an Irish author.

Hey, first post...

When I was in 15 or 16 I found a copy of the Necronomicon for a dollar at the flea market, Simon - Avon book edition. I read it and I thought it was real. After researching it, I discovered Lovecraft and read everything he wrote.