I discovered H.P. Lovecraft the summer I turned 14 or 15. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s not quite right. My elder siblings\u2014excuse me, I should capitalize that ominously\u2014my Elder Siblings had a couple of books of Lovecraftian tales around the house, and I\u2019d dipped into them once or twice. But the summer I first really got into Lovecraft was the summer I turned 14 or 15. I remember golden afternoons sitting in my room at the top of the house, with windows open on both sides of the room and a fan going to keep the air flowing, reading and reading and reading.<\/p>\n
And the whole time I was reading, I was listening to the radio. Now, this was around 1976 or 1977; and certain songs were in heavy rotation. I mean heavy<\/strong> rotation. They were repeated so many times during those days of golden horror and delight that to this day I cannot hear them without thinking of H.P. Lovecraft; and when I think of H.P. Lovecraft then as often as not I hear them distantly in the background.<\/p>\n The funny thing is, there\u2019s nothing particularly outr\u00e9 or macabre about either of these songs; they were just in the air at the right time and the right place, and there was a certain portentous gravity about them that resonated with shoggoths and shantaks and Pickman\u2019s Model in my teenage head.<\/p>\n The first (and lesser of the two, IMHO) is this one: \u201cDream On\u201d, by Aerosmith:<\/p>\n