What would you get if you mixed Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King? The answer might be something resembling Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft (1890–1937), an extremely influential poet and author who mixed science fiction, horror and fantasy into a subgenre known as weird fiction. Perhaps none encapsulates weird fiction like his creation of the monster Cthulhu, which has been used by other writers to spawn a fictional universe and mythology centered around Cthulhu.