Some of my beloved Sideshow monster toys!
A stack of horror movie books. You cannot go wrong with The Overlook Horror Encyclopedia, The Book of the Dead, Nightmare Movies, or Immoral Tales! Get your Netflix queue ready.
And Clive Barker's demonic ladies guard over his works below.
H.P. Lovecraft was a lifelong resident and antiquarian from Providence, Rhode Island, who supported himself by writing the most vivid star-flung nightmare fantasies of the early 20th century. His shadow over the field of horror entertainment since his death in 1937 is unparalleled and unmistakable. To say something is Lovecraftian is to intimate its awesome alien strangeness, as in, "The early scenes of Ridley Scott's Alien are truly Lovecraftian."
In Lovecraft's tales, gone were the dank castles of Count Dracula, the Gothic laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, the cross and the silver bullet to destroy the beast, the pure of heart and the Lord's Prayer. He wrote for the new scientific age of Darwin, Einstein, and Freud, when our fears were no longer blasphemous monsters of superstitious Old World folklore, but of the vastness of the universe and humanity’s lowly place within it; terrors not of the soul, but of the mind.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927
Lovecraft's infamous Great Old Ones are not, as some have insisted, simply evil alien creatures, as Arkham House founder August Derleth posited and promulgated in his own stories; no, they represent the inability of humans to comprehend anything outside their own earth-bound experience. From deep space and other dimensions, these beings are not the saucer-eyed, woman-hungry Martians of science fiction; these entities are vast, incorporeal, protean, inconceivable. Degenerate cults worship them as gods, and Lovecraft at once parodies and mocks notions of religion, spirituality, and transcendent knowledge.
An atheist who, as he said, "hated and despised religion," Lovecraft saw no real qualitative difference between, say, "Shub Nigurath, the Goat with a Thousand Young" or "Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth," and "Transubstantion of the Eucharist" or "There is no God but God." The dread Necronomicon is their bible; the acolyte's cry of "Iä! Iä!" is Cthulhu speak for "Hallelujah!"
"They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."
"The Call of Cthulhu," 1927
The final lines of "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (used so well in Stuart Gordon's film Dagon) can be seen as a nightmarish twist on the Lord's Prayer: "And in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever." Compare: "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen."
"Man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it."
"The Shadow out of Time," 1935
"There is no delight the equal of dread," wrote Liverpudlian Clive Barker in the first lines of his 1984 short story "Dread," collected in Books of Blood Vol. 2. I believed him back then and I believe him now. Also, from the title story: "The dead have highways... Their thrum and throb can be heard in the broken places of the world, through cracks made by acts of cruelty, violence and depravity." Who could resist the promise of such a glimpse?
I picked up Vol. 3 first (can't remember why I chose number three) for one reason only: the infamous quote on the cover from Stephen King. At the time (1986 or '87) that meant a lot to me; it was before King could be counted on to whore up a blurb for any writer (Bentley Little? Really?). "I have seen the future of horror," it went, "and its name is Clive Barker." (For you non-classic rock fans, that's a take on something said early in Bruce Springsteen's career). That was plenty good enough for me. King was right in some ways (the Hellraiser movies, Books of Blood) but wrong in others.
Barker proved to be a world-class talent as a novelist too, with ambitious, layered, magic-realist works like Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1990), and my absolute favorite, Imajica (1991). These books were long, ambitious, mythic, darkly fantastic, erotic, and metaphysical, evoking not just horror fiction like King, Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell or Poe, but also William Blake, Tolkien, kitchen-sink realism, surrealism, Peter Pan, Melville, Joseph Campbell, Jorge Luis Borges; a whole host of influences that most horror fans would (unfortunately) have little familiarity with. I can't recall Dean Koontz ever talking about the impact Les yeux sans visage, The Story of the Eye, or The Holy Mountain had on his fiction. Reading Barker improved my cultural literacy when I was just a teenager in a way no AP literature class could have.
He is also a wonderful and quite accomplished artist. You can see his dense, colorfully macabre paintings in Clive Barker: Illustrator I and II. And before he started his career as a published writer, he had written and produced crazy-quilt Grand Guignol plays, collected in Forms of Heaven (1995) and Incarnations (1996). And then children's books like The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (ongoing); and latter-day more mainstream, yet still visionary, novels like Sacrament (1996) and Galilee (1998). Whew. 
I have a print of Vol. III's cover framed and hanging in my bedroom, it looks awesome!
And this is a seriously Gothed-out me meeting Mr. Barker in January 1991 at a Fangoria Weekend of Horrors convention in New York City. Here he's signing my Nightbreed (his 1990 "epic" monster movie) poster. Seems pretty excited to meet me, doesn't he? 
When I was a teenager in the mid- to late-1980s, two of the biggest stars in my personal universe were punk rock kings the Ramones and bestselling horror writer Stephen King. I couldn't get enough of either one, and spent plenty of time and money getting my hands on everything related to them. Didn't matter that I had to be at school in the morning; I'd be up until 2 a.m. with Night Shift or 'Salem's Lot or Different Seasons listening to Rocket to Russia or Pleasant Dreams or Animal Boy. Weren't those the days?
King had referenced the Ramones in several of his books, and King is name-checked in a Ramones song or two, but it wasn't until 1989 that these two mighty heroes of mine joined forces in what at first seemed improbable: the Ramones would perform the title track for the movie adaptation of King's gruesome 1983 novel, Pet Sematary.
But the Ramones, who should have been the most popular punk rock band of all time, performing one of their greatest songs on behalf of Stephen King, pop-horror's greatest practitioner? That seems most right of all. And yet...
Often considered the Edgar Allan Poe of France, Charles Baudelaire wrote some of the greatest French literature of all time. His magnum opus, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), is one of the world'smost lauded books of poetry. Indeed, recognizing a fellow genius in Poe, Baudelaire was responsible for translating the American writer into French and securing Poe's reputation for the world. Baudelaire's decadent, daring fusion of the erotic and the macabre can be seen everywhere in the modern horror genre, whether one knows his name or not. One should.
Packed tight, like hives of maggots, thickly seething,
Like angels who have bestial eyes
Do you come from deep heaven or do you come from hell,
Remember, my love, the object we saw 
“First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”
So in lieu of an actual book review, I will just post some of the wonderful covers of various editions of the book from over the years.
This 1970s' Bantam edition is the copy I'm reading now.
The always-weird JK Potter cover was part of a series of reprints in the late '80s.
A UK edition not quite as fantastical as the others.
I remember seeing the Disney adaptation of it about 20 years ago and, of course, can recall nothing of it!
A 1999 hardcover edition.
Something Wicked still, happily, turns up on school reading lists, as do several of his other major works. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some reading of my own to do.
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