By Pete Rawlik.

From 2012 through 2013 I sold three stories to the Lovecraft eZine, and somehow or another lost my soul in the process. It sucks you in slowly, quietly, gently. One minute you’re a special guest on the group chat and the next you’re a regular panelist, with all that entails.

Which means there are books to read, movies to watch, authors to research, late night chats to drop in on, and the regular Sunday night podcast to prepare for. It consumes my time – cuts into my writing and my fishing and my cooking. On weekends I must cut my Sunday adventures short to make the show on time. The Lovecraft eZine takes more time out of my life than it should, and every once in a while I have to explain to someone why I can’t do what they want me to do, and they look at me like I am more than just a little insane. Not to mention the pay, which by the way is non-existent.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I really don’t know what Mike Davis was thinking when he started this. I suspect even he didn’t know what he was thinking when he started this. And honestly, its blown up so much bigger than I think he ever suspected it would. He may have started publishing short fiction but now, all these years later what he has really created is a community. A community not just focused on Lovecraft or the Cthulhu Mythos, but Weird Fiction in general, and loosely defined at that. We are just as likely to talk about Cosmic Horror as we are to talk about comic books, or games, or Star Trek, or well, anything, really.

And all of this is interlaced with a whole bunch of commentary and tidbits about everyone’s personal lives and projects. Not to mention regular updates on who is publishing what and when and where.

I’ve watched quite a few podcasts in my time, and honestly, the eZine Podcast is one of the most unfocused, meandering, mélanges of unfocused nonsense out there. It’s less a podcast than a bunch of really smart/stupid/ADHD suffering geeks getting together every week to chat about whatever and then broadcasting it to the world. By all rights it shouldn’t have an audience, it should just leave the playing field quietly and let better looking, smarter, more engaging people do more crafted presentations.

But the thing is, it does have an audience, an audience that continues to grow and suffer, and laugh, and cry, and share joys and sorrows.

I am a huge fan of conventions like Necronomicon-Providence because I get to meet with like-minded people whose interests overlap mine, and talk with them, eat with them, and yes drink into the wee hours with them. Cons are some of my favorite things. But I also know they are fleeting things, wholly unsustainable for more than three or four days. They aren’t real life and can’t be. Real life gets in the way. But the podcast takes just a little bit of what is best about cons and keeps it alive, keeps those connections going, keeps the community talking to one another.

Ultimately, that may be Mike’s greatest accomplishment: the construction of a community. One that caters to what once was thought of as a sub-sub-sub-genre of SF/F/H but has turned out to be much bigger than anyone ever thought. In some ways it’s like stone soup. It’s an amazing thing, a beautiful conglomeration that started with an absolutely insane idea from one person and then grew beyond that idea as other people brought their own ideas in.

It shouldn’t work, but it does.

And Mike Davis is the madman that keeps the water boiling, and the new ingredients coming in.

And for that I am grateful.

Pete Rawlik
author of Reanimators

The Lovecraft eZine Podcast
The Lovecraft eZine Patreon