Born 2nd December, 1937, Brian Lumley came into the world just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears — meaning of course a "literary" forebear, namely, H.P. Lovecraft — had departed from it.
By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was Science Fiction. Then, in his early teens "as a result of reading Robert Bloch's Lovecraft pastiche Notebook Found in a Deserted House in a British SF magazine" he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime.
Later still, in his early twenties while serving with the Corps of Royal Military Police in Germany, on finding a collection of stories by Lovecraft himself, Lumley began searching for every available item of the author's work. This culminated in his contacting HPL's publisher August Derleth in Sauk City, Wisconsin, in order to purchase the one or two volumes still missing from his collection. Then, after Derleth had read various "extracts" from the Necronomicon and other fictional "Black Books" of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, which Lumley had included in his letters, he asked if the aspiring author had anything solid he could use in a book he was preparing for publication, to be entitled Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Thus Lumley began writing in earnest. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Derleth included stories by Lumley in a number of Arkham House anthologies and went on to publish three of the author's books. One was a short novel with the title Beneath the Moors; the others were collections of short stories and novellas: The Caller of The Black and The Horror at Oakdeene. These stories, set mainly in Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos milieu, echoed HPL's literary style: a somewhat archaic, adjectival mode of writing which, during the course of Lumley's military career, he would gradually eschew in favour of his own very distinctive style.
Recently, both Subterranean Press in the USA and Solaris in the UK have undertaken to publish two companion volumes of Lumley's previously uncollected Cthulhu Mythos tales. In fact the first of these books, under the main title: The Taint and Other Novellas, is already available from Subterranean in a beautiful hardcover edition, with a marvellous jacket and interior illustrations by Bob Eggleton, and Haggopian and Other Mythos Tales will follow early in 2008.
As for the future: "Well, the future is always uncertain." But with several books from an extensive backlist awaiting reissue“ and Necroscope The Touch recently published by TOR in America, and several new novellas and new short stories awaiting publication" "Well it certainly isn't over yet!"
When they're not travelling, the Lumleys keep house in Torquay, Devon, England