News just came through that Brian Lumley left us at the start of the month. Orrin Grey offers what strikes me as an even-handed obit here:
Like most of the rest of the horror community, it would seem, I learned last night that Brian Lumley passed away earlier this month at the age of 86. Lumley’s is a name that never quite attained the same sheen as certain other writers who were his predecessors or contemporaries, but he is nonetheless one who was an important stepping stone for many of us, myself included. […]
I’m not sure how many of the Necroscope books I actually read, but it certainly wasn’t all of them. Reading that first one at a formative age, though, had a big impact on me. Here was pulp horror in a vein I had, at that time, rarely encountered, told with scope and ambition to spare, and crammed with big (and sometimes goofy) ideas. […]
Lumley did have many standout stories, though. He wasn’t one of the best writers we’ve ever had. His stories were pulp throwbacks through and through but, like the best of the pulp writers, they were usually entertaining, quick to read, and full of ideas, even when the execution was sometimes lacking. And even then, it wasn’t always. Lumley could do atmosphere, when he set his mind to it, and he could describe monsters with the best of them.
That seems about right. Not exactly the greatest writer—I’ve mostly read his Cthulhu Mythos stuff, and it’s a bit… oof at times; he clearly took more cues from August Derleth than from Lovecraft—but I must concede he was perfectly readable in a somewhat pulp way, and I recall really liking House of Doors when I read that a long time ago… plus I suppose Necroscope was a sort of stepping stone for me, too, it would’ve been one of the first modern (only a few years old at that point) horror books I read while making my first inroads in that genre back at the start of the 90s… I’ve been giving some thought for quite a while to going back to that series, just the bewildering number of books he wound up writing in that series has daunted me, especially given the length of most of them; we’re not quite talking Wheel of Time proportions, but still pretty big. Still, it might be nice to see how well they hold up, so maybe this year I’ll finally do it…