Set your radios to Spooky. Then crank the dial all the way past that into full-on blood-soaked screaming horror.

Welcome to Suopod. Sudapod episode 725 for October 9th, 2020, the Lonesome Place by August Durleth.

I'm Alex, co-editor of Sudapod, your host this week.

It's my great honor to bring you a milestone episode from a Titan of the genre.

August William Durlith was born in

2009 in Sauk City, Wisconsin, where he spent most of his life.

He sold his first story to Weird Tales at the age of 17 in 1926 and contributed

prolifically to that Pulp magazine for much of its run. Also in 1926 he came

into contact with H.P. Lovecraft whose influence on his work would be decisive.

Corresponding prolifically with Lovecraft, he became acquainted with many of Lovecraft's colleagues,

including Donald Wandry, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E Howard.

After Lovecraft's death in 1937, Durleth and Wandry established the publishing firm of Arkham House to issue Lovecraft's tales and hardcover.

Arkham House would become the most prestigious small press publisher of supernatural fiction in the United States.

Durleth established a mainstream reputation with such works as a place of Hawks in 1935 and evening in spring in 1941,

which richly evoked the history, topography, and personalities

of his native Wisconsin.

Sinclair Lewis wrote a laudatory article on him in Esquire in 1945.

But Durleth failed to become a mainstream author recognized outside of his home state, largely because of his prodigious literary work in many different fields tended to dissipate his energies.

Aside from his publishing activities, he edited several important anthologies of horror

and science fiction, notably the Night Side in 1944 and Dark of the Moon poems of Fantasy in the Macabre in 1947.

He wrote many tales of the Kathulu mythos under Lovecraft's inspiration,

although he regularly failed to understand the philosophical direction of Lovecraft's invention

...