Henry J. Vester III spent his larval stage in the southern California city of Riverside, and cut his little fangs first on the works of ERB, Lin Carter, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Arthur Conan Doyle. He discovered the unholy joys of HPL around 1968 in the two fabled Lancer paperbacks, and was soon sending in his hard-earned pazoors for the Arkham House volumes. Subsequent discoveries—and lasting fascinations—have included the works of REH, Lord Dunsany, Sax Rohmer, and particularly Clark Ashton Smith. He met and interviewed certain friends of Klarkash-Ton in Auburn, California, one of which interviews appeared in FUNGI. In the company of the FUNGI editorial staff he was privileged to interview both Fritz Leiber and one of the Great Old Ones, E. Hoffman Price, in the mid-to-late 1980's. (The Price interview, translated into human glyphs by Gregorio Montejo, is housed between the covers of THE BOOK OF THE DEAD from Arkham House.) Vester has contributed several slavishly derivative poems and short stories to both FUNGI and to its sister publication, CHRONICLES OF THE CTHULHU CODEX. Two of those short stories have had the undeserved good fortune to have been reprinted in Robert M. Price's THE TSATHOGGUA CYCLE and THE INNSMOUTH CYCLE. Both tales, while perhaps momentarily amusing, are eminently forgettable. One of his Klarkash-Ton-related tales was reprinted in a British trade paperback, LOST WORLDS OF SPACE AND TIME (Vol. 2). That tale may be slightly better, although not by much. Some examples of his poetry also found homes in the magazines TEKILI-LI! and TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR, but this should not detract from the reputations of these otherwise fine publications. He has also contributed material to the ELDRITCH DARK website, which honors the life and work of Clark Ashton Smith.Vester makes his living (one hesitates to say "works") as a family therapist in a Klamath Falls community mental health center. He lives in a ruinous shack on five acres of rocks, pines, and junipers, in the wilds of southern Oregon's high desert country. He grudgingly shares his house and environs with his wife (slowly driven mad after almost three decades of his weird mumblings), three dogs, three cats, an evil parrot, two horses, eleven tarantulas (yes, in terraria), and one African scorpion. He attributes his fascination with large venomous arachnids to his early devotion to His Excellency Dr. Fu Manchu. Vester is usually heavily sedated, and is usually harmless unless approached unexpectedly.