What would you get if you mixed Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King? The answer might be something resembling Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft (1890-1937), an extremely influential poet and author who mixed science fiction, horror and fantasy into a subgenre known as weird fiction. Perhaps none encapsulates weird fiction like his creation of the monster Cthulhu, which has been used by other writers to spawn a fictional universe and mythology centered around Cthulhu.
