One prominent motif I drew upon in my first Voidpunk novel came from Lovecraft’s short-novel story “The Shunned House.” The story was first published in Weird Tales Vol.30 No.4, October 1937, with story illustrations by Virgil Finlay (1914–71) and cover art by “M. Brundage” aka Margaret Brundage (1900–76).

Brundage signed her cover art as “M. Brundage” for good reasons. At a later time, after Weird Tales’s editor had revealed “M.” to be a woman, Brundage promptly got into all kinds of trouble, and many writers—among them Clark Ashton Smith and Robert H. Barlow from the Lovecraft Circle—discovered their hitherto untapped talents as art critics.

But, almost a decade earlier in 1928, “The Shunned House”—written in 1924—had almost become Lovecraft’s very first published story. 300 copies were printed by W. Paul Cook’s The Recluse Press in Athol, Massachusetts, but then never bound, published, or sold. (Here’s an image of one of these copies, shamelessly ripped from a rare books dealer). Some of these unbound copies were distributed among friends, and another 150 went to Barlow after Lovecraft’s death, who then turned them over to August Derleth.

Derleth, in turn, distributed around 50 of these unbound copies in the 1950s. In 1961/62, he had the other 100 copies bound for distribution (here’s an image of a bound copy, again shamelessly ripped from a dealer), with “Arkham House” stickers pasted over W. Paul Cook’s original copyright notice.

Some copies of the stand-alone short-novel The Shunned House, the bound version from 1961/62 and even some copies of the unbound version from 1928, are still in circulation. So if you have about $8–10K to spare, which is what rare book dealers usually charge these days, one of them could be yours! (But beware of forgeries.)