Because HPL is special to me. Donald A. Wollheim is to blame. He started me on Lovecraft. It was 1959. I was just a kid, a mere thirteen years old when he slipped me my first fix. I was a good kid up till then, reading Ace Doubles and clean, wholesome science fiction stories by the likes of Heinlein, E. E. Smith, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, and the rest. But he brought me down with one anthology. He knew what he was doing. He called it The Macabre Reader and slapped this lurid neato cool Ed Emshwiller cover on it. I couldn't resist. I bought it. I read it. And that was it. The beginning of my end. In answer to a claim that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was an influence on The Keep, Wilson responded: First off, I'm not a fan of LOtR – I struggled through it once as a teen (skimming a lot) and never looked back. ... The influences on The Keep were Ludlum, R. E. Howard, and Lovecraft. Like other American science fiction writers directly or indirectly influenced by Campbell's view of the genre as a literature of ideas, Wilson makes use of his work to explore trends and technologies speculatively as they manifest. A prominent example is his novel An Enemy of the State (published in 1980), which was written during the 1970s, an era that saw stagflation develop in the U.S. economy. Throughout the book, Wilson runs chapter headings quoting from economic works such as Fiat Money Inflation in France and KYFHO, a kind of anarchic philosophy that he invented as model for a perfect society. The protagonist La Nague was born on Tolive, where the philosophy led to a government described in detail in "The Healer". The Keep was later made into a movie and there is much talk of a Repairman Jack film based on one of Wilson's novels. Hate to say it (being a devout believer in Murphy's law), but The Tomb looks like it's on its way to being filmed this year. Last October, after seven years of development, numerous options, five screenwriters, and eight scripts, Beacon Films (Air Force One, Thirteen Days, Spy Game, etc.) finally bought film rights. Disney/Touchstone/Buena Vista will be partnering and distributing the film here and abroad. The film will be called Repairman Jack (the idea is to make him a franchise