Followers and Imitators

Constructed as a serial medium in which the reader expects “strangeness” to obey familiar and repetitive codes, the pulps would sometimes be content to offer more or less successful imitations of their popular authors’ short stories. Lyon Sprague de Camp, author of the short story represented here, specialized in writing pastiches of Robert E. Howard's stories, often based on synopses left unfinished by the latter at the time of his death. Other authors, such as August Derleth, continued the work of Howard P. Lovecraft, thus feeding the pulps industry with a whole new series of stories.