Your First Experience with Weird Fiction?

[Michael]

Loved the Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Tales From the Darkside, ALL that stuff. Literary, I was 12 and I had worked my way through all of Stephen King's short stories. My brother recommended Lovecraft and when I found a copy in the bookstore it had a quote by King (that one saying that HPL is THE Master). I carried a dictionary with me as a habit so I could look up words (pre-iPhone). Reading HPL was like archaeology. Digging up and unearthing secrets with that dictionary, translating the prose, a TON of words I didn't understand. But when I got it, man I GOT it; it hit me. It was a view of the world that made sense given my life experiences and the bad, bad things in my world. Some people I know in my region of the country describe their experience reading the Bible that way, like it made the world click. That was my experience reading HPL, true weird fiction. And it was my first. Ligotti is the only one that has surpassed that first experience.