<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Brian Lumley (b. December 2, 1937) was born in the coal-mining town of Horden, County Durham, on England’s north-east coast. He joined the British Army when he was twenty-one and was assigned to the Corps of Royal Military Police, in which he served for twenty-two years, rising to the rank of Warrant Officer and spending three of his last four years as a Training Sergeant-Major and the fourth in administration.

After discovering the stories of H.P. Lovecraft while stationed in Berlin, West Germany, in the early 1960s, he decided to try his own hand at writing horror fiction, initially set in Lovecraft’s influential Cthulhu Mythos. He sent his early efforts to editor August Derleth (1909-71), who published them in The Arkham Collector and his anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1969). Derleth’s Arkham House published two collections of Lumley’s short stories, The Caller of the Black (1971) and The Horror at Oakdene and Others (1977), plus the short novel Beneath the Moors (1974). Lumley then continued Lovecraft’s themes in two series of paperback originals for DAW Books (The Burrowers Beneath (1974), The Transition of Titus Crow (1975)) and Jove/HBJ (The Clock of Dreams (1978), Spawn of the Winds (1978) and In the Moons of Borea (1979)).

Despite the early popularity of Lumley’s Cthulhu Mythos-inspired fiction, it was the author’s vampiric “Necroscope” series that made him a best-seller all over the world with such titles as Necroscope (1986), Necrocope II: Wamphyri! (aka Necroscope II: Vamphyri!, 1988), Necroscope III: The Source (1989), Necroscope IV: Deadspeak (1990) and Necroscope V: Deadspawn (1991); a follow-up trilogy: Vampire World I: Blood Brothers (1992), Vampire World II: The Last Aerie (1993) and Vampire World III: Bloodwars (1994); the two-volume Necroscope: The Lost Years Volume I (1995) and Necroscope: The Lost Years Volume II (aka Necroscope: Resurgence The Lost Years Volume Two, 1996), and the four-volume “E-Branch” series: Necroscope: Invaders (1999), Necroscope: Defilers (2000), Necroscope: Avengers (2001) and Necroscope: The Touch (2006). The success of the “Necroscope” books spawned a world-wide marketing industry of comic books, statuettes and a role-playing game based on the concepts. Lumley’s other novels include the ancient Egyptian fantasy Khai of Ancient Khem (aka Khai of Khem, 1981), the Psychomech (1984), Psychosphere (1984) and Psychamok (1985) trilogy, Demogorgon (1987), Elysia: The Coming of Cthulhu (1989), The House of Doors (1990) and The House of Doors: Second Visit (aka Maze of Worlds, 1998).

Hero of Dreams (1986), Ship of Dreams (1986), Mad Moon of Dreams (1987) and the collection Iced on Iran and Other Dreamquests (1990) are set in the author’s appropriation of Lovecraft’s parallel “Dreamworld” dimension. Sorcery in Shad (1991) is another heroic fantasy novel. It followed the collections The House of Cthulhu and Other Tales of the Primal Land (aka Tales of the Primal Land Volume 1, 1984) and The Compleat Khash Volume One: Never a Backward Glance (aka Hrossak! Tales of the Primal Land Volume 2,1991), which were all inspired by the fiction of Clark Ashton Smith(1893-1961) and the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope Road movies. Lumley’s short stories can be found in The Compleat Crow (1987), the chapbook The Last Rite (1992), Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (1993, which includes the British Fantasy Award-winning title story), Return of the Deep Ones and Other Mythos Tales (1994), Dagon's Bell and Other Discords (1994), The Second Wish and Other Exhalations (1995), A Coven of Vampires (1998), The Whisperer and Other Voices (2001), Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (2002), Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes! (2003), Brian Lumley's Freaks (2005), The House of the Temple (2005) and Screaming Science Fiction: Horrors from Out of Space (2006).

Synchronicity, or Something (1988) was a light-hearted story about Cthulhu Mythos gaming published as a chapbook, and the novelette was reprinted in another booklet, In His Own Write, Brian Lumley: Necroscribe (1997), along with two other previously-published tales. Ghoul Warning and Other Omens (1982) is a poetry collection illustrated by frequent collaborator Dave Carson. It was revised and expanded as Ghoul Warnings and Other Omens . . . and Other Omens (1999) with new illustrations by Donald W. Schank. Lumley’s 1986 vampire story "Necros" became the basis for one of the first episodes of the Canadian erotic anthology TV series The Hunger (1997). The Brian Lumley Companion (2002), edited by the author and Stanley Wiater, included various essays, bibliographies and concordances, and Brian Lumley was named Grand Master at the 1998 World Horror Convention.