Lovecraft was well known in the world of “weird fiction,” a term that he popularized: it was an early-twentieth-century genre that encompassed supernatural horror stories as well as some of what would now be called science fiction. This particular letter was the beginning of a curious friendship, which changed the course of Barlow’s life, and Lovecraft’s, too-though almost no one who reads Lovecraft these days knows anything about it. It’s estimated that he wrote more than fifty thousand letters in his relatively short lifetime (he died at the age of forty-six). A week later, Lovecraft wrote back, as he nearly always did.
He wanted to know when Lovecraft had started writing, what he was working on now, and whether the Necronomicon-a tome of forbidden knowledge that appears in several Lovecraft tales-was a real book. Lovecraft’s stories about monstrous beings from beyond the stars were appearing regularly in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and Barlow was a fan. On June 18, 1931, a young man named Robert Barlow mailed a letter to the horror writer H. Photograph courtesy John Hay Library, Brown University Thus began a fertile and unusual relationship. In 1931, a young fan named Robert Barlow wrote to the weird-fiction writer.
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