Politics & Power Quote by Brian Lumley

There is a sly humility baked into Lumley’s praise: he begins by shrinking himself to “every young writer,” then quietly reclaims authority by naming the rite of passage. Influence here isn’t framed as a personal quirk, but as almost occupational exposure. If you were an American writing the weird, you didn’t simply admire H.P. Lovecraft; you inhaled him. Lumley’s casual “I should think” performs a kind of modesty, yet it also functions as cultural bookkeeping: Lovecraft becomes the genre’s unavoidable baseline, the teacher you never enrolled with but still had to pass.

Calling Lovecraft “at the top of the class” is doing more than complimenting craft. It smuggles in a hierarchy, a canon, a sense of lineage. Lovecraft’s authority wasn’t earned through mainstream prestige in his lifetime; it was built posthumously through devoted readers, small-press circulation, and the contagious ambition of writers who wanted that same vastness: cosmic dread, baroque diction, the feeling that reality has weak seams. Lumley’s phrasing acknowledges how genre communities create their own institutions when the larger culture shrugs.

The subtext is also a negotiation. Lumley is a major horror writer in his own right, and in nodding to Lovecraft he signals membership in a tradition while implying difference: influence is admitted, not submission. The line reads like a credential and a disclaimer at once. Yes, Lovecraft is the summit; no, that doesn’t mean there’s only one mountain.