Summing-up Lovecraft

I’ve just been trying to write a few lines of background about HP Lovecraft and ‘The Haunting of Exham Priory’ for the show program. It wasn’t easy to put everything succinctly, but this is what I came up with…

Howard Philip Lovecraft was a 20th century American horror writer, most famous for his short stories The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness. ‘The Haunting of Exham Priory’ is based on Lovecraft’s story The Rats in the Walls. Written and set in 1923, it was first published in the March 1924 edition of the horror magazine ‘Weird Tales’.
Although Lovecraft only achieved real fame posthumously, The Rats in the Walls received much acclaim when it was published. Years later, Lovecraft wrote that the story was “suggested by a very commonplace incident — the cracking of wall-paper late at night, and the chain of imaginings resulting from it.”