This palatial movie theater featured on the Home page was in the neighborhood where I grew up. Psychopath was actually The Psychopath, a 1966 Amicus film written by the great Robert Bloch. I was too young to see it, but this sort of bleak landscape became a blank canvas for my imagination, helped push me into the worlds of fantasy and horror. (Actually, looks pretty much like the town I live in now. Full circle!)

My first encounter with club tales was in the second issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction I had ever read. December 1976, Sterling Lanier’s fine Brigadier Ffellowes story, “Ghost of a Crown,” featured on the cover. The neighborhood I grew up in was a model of banality, so the notion that if I rode my bike far enough I would come upon a club devoted to imagination and adventure was enthralling.

“And, of course, there he was. Leaning against the end bookcase in the alcove, just as if he’d been there all evening, and none of us, as usual, had even seen him come in!”

First book I ever purchased. So many big names that Robert E. Howard, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood didn’t make it onto the cover! Contains the cracking Carnacki tale, “The Gateway of the Monster.”