I found out recently H. P. Lovecraft was best pen pal buddies with Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. There’s two books floating out there with letters the two wrote back and forth to each other. I’ve gotten into Lovecraft’s stuff off and on and keep meaning to read those books to gain a better insight into the writer. You should definitely start there and I’m sure you’ll get some solid answers.

This doesn’t really fit here, but I started reading some of Baum’s other works because I got curious. There’s a story I started where two children are turned into birds and are trying to turn back with the help of their new avian caretakers.

The story is actually pretty dark in many parts. There’s a particularly haunting scene where this mother bird is desperate to have her eggs back and her mate, only to fly to a house and find they’d all been taxidermied. She flies to the window everyday to just sit and stare at them, unable to carry on until she gets killed herself and is put on display alongside her mate.

It’s one of the most haunting scenes I’ve ever read and that’s just one of the little side notes mentioned in the story. There are many more, but after that I decided not to read his stuff for a while.

I’m definitely gonna pic this up and give it a read. I can’t take to much extreme stuff, but I’m kind of curious about the extreme isolation stuff.

Edit; Looked the book up and found it for $3 online, immediately bought it and started reading it.