Back in early December 2024 I received a message on my Facebook author page ‘Passing Place’ quite out of the blue.

I will admit my first thought, not entirely unreasonably, was ‘Scam’. Not unreasonably because I get a lot of scammers messaging to my author page. However this time it wasn’t, as I determined after some careful enquiries. This was a genuine approach, with the offer of a genuine contract to write a book. A book on the strange worlds, creatures and gods that sprang from the imagination of old tentacle hugger himself HP Lovecraft.

I had some reservations about this all the same. I am primarily a writer of fiction after all. My one foray into non-fiction had been The Lexinomicon. A bluffers guide to HP Lovecraft’s stories, which came about after I wrote a long series of blogs over the course of four years. While writing and researching those blogs I read every story Lovecraft had written several times and when I put the book together I read several of them again, as what works in a blog post does not always translate to a book and in some cases it had been a while since I read the stories in question. In all I spent half a decade researching and reading Lovecraft, about whom I have definite opinions…

Did I really want to delve back into the mind of Howard Philips Lovecraft?

There was also the question of writing to a contract, something I’d never previously done. One of the joys of self-publishing is you set your own dead lines, then you can ignore them when something shiny appears. It was also not like I did not have other things in the works. Most notably but not solely the second draft of The Esoteric Cricket Ball was almost complete, and I had a self-imposed publishing deadline of the 15th of March* in order to have a new book ready for a bunch of events I was signed up for in the spring of 2025.

*yes my deadline was the id’s of March**, an auspicious date I tend to chose for deadlines as it appeals to me have a deadline on the date Julius Caesar was murdered, that and it happens to be my birthday. By coincidence it is also the date on which Howard Philips Lovecraft died.

**Yes that is pretentious as hell, what of it?

Having explained this to the publisher, I asked for more details and was told by Arcturus their deadline was the 1st of August 2025, and that they wanted 35000 words by then, could I put together a structure and plan for them first? And they were offering a flat fee no royalty deal…

Now, 35000 words is not as many as you might think. My novels range between 65 -100k, My previous book on Lovecraft’s stories was around 80k. But it was December, August was only nine months away and I had a novel to finish. I had no clue how to structure the book and a flat fee no royalty deal was a new one for me. So I went and asked for advice from a couple of fellow authors, one of which had written a number of non-fiction books in the past.

As ever this meeting took place in the pub, whence I was told in no uncertain terms to just do it. The flat fee was large enough to make the lack of royalties a none issue (for context, it was more than all my novels combined had made over the last three years, not that this is saying much) . The fact they were offering a 50% advance as well more or less sealed the deal as it showed they were serious.

So I put together a structure, and exchanged a few more emails while we ironed it out, then got to writing, once the novel was complete in March…

What the book became was in part a biography of Lovecraft, as well as a deep dive into the mythos, dreamlands, creatures and strangeness crated by Providence’s favourite son ( well favourite author at least). It ended up been enormous fun to write, not least because I had to do lots of research and I love research. I will not pretend the biography is as in-depth as some of those out there, my now well thumbed copy of Joshi’s ‘short’ biography is 108 pages long and the longer I Am Providence is a tomb of nearer 600 , but an in-depth biography was never the brief. I cover his life and works to the extent a more casual reader might find engaging, then move on to the worlds, deities and creatures he created as well as principal characters both human and not so human from his works.

I like to think I completed the brief and that the book I wrote is indeed as it is described on its amazon listed A….

‘fascinating reference guide, you will discover the secrets and mysteries of H. P. Lovecraft’s iconic worlds. From the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos to the shifting places of the Dreamlands, the settings of Lovecraft’s stories are replete with terrifying monsters, bizarre creations and cosmic mysteries.

Fully illustrated, the world of Cthulhu is brought to life as never before in this volume and you will soon become an expert in the characters and locations of Lovecraft’s tales. As well as descriptions and explanations of the key people, events and places, this book includes an exploration of Lovecraft’s legacy and examines how his writing has continued to enthral and influence people for nearly a century.’

I have barely mentioned this book previously. Not least because until it had a publishing date etc it did not seem entirely real. I have not mentioned it on social media at all, and eluded to it at most here. I deferred the advance for complex reasons, so it wasn’t until I had submitted the first manuscript, gone through the editing phases, and seen the full proofs, that I really believed the book would finally come about. I was far from sure I would see a penny for it until I did and even still it all seemed a little surreal, stemming as it did from a message on Facebook. Admittedly the Facebook page is a perfectly reasonable point of first contact. It just seemed odd.

Yet here it is, with a few glimpses of the inside…

It comes out in September this year and is available, well just about everywhere for per-order. It remains a bit of a strange thing to have been asked to write, but I look forward to holding a final copy in my hand at some point in the near future. It is an enormously pretty illustrated hardback, for a given quantity of pretty that involved tentacles, extra eyes and unimaginable horrors from beyond the realm of human experience