The Lovecraft Circle played a kind of game, one in which they shared manuscripts before publication, in-jokes, writing jams and putting little snippets from one another’s work into their own fiction. It was playing this game that created the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft never called it that, but the game was there all the same, whether he was mentioning the creations of writers he admired such as Robert W. Chambers, Ambrose Bierce, or Arthur Machen, or those of his correspondents and friends, such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and Frank Belknap Long. One of the best parts of the game was creating characters that were a thinly disguised portrait of another writer, not necessarily as they really were, but how they liked to imagine themselves.
“The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, December 1936) by H. P. Lovecraft features this version of Robert Bloch:
“For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city – a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he – had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.”
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