JB's Concise Autobiography:

THE BRIEF, BLASPHEMOUS BIOGRAPHY OF J (ames) B (rian) LEE

Born February 6th, 1956, in Charleston, West Virginia. Father unknown; mother listed only as "Jane Doe." Adopted by Lee family. No wonder I feel a certain kinship to Wilbur Whateley.

Encountered first monster at the age of 6 in a comic book, SHOWCASE #39, written by the legendary Robert Kanigher: the Metal Men, a band of heroic robots, versus CHEMO, THE DEATHLESS DOOM -- a mindless horror, created by an accidental mixing of chemical formulae, that sprayed lethal chemicals at anything that came within arm’s reach. This literally traumatized me -- I would hide the book, then run back and look at it, then get scared and hide it again, ad infinitum. Unto this day I still collect any comic with Chemo in it; he has a place in my private pantheon right beside Great CTHULHU and the motion pictures’ “Brancusi robot,” KRONOS. However, Chemo has never again been as mindlessly, monstrously Lovecraftian as he was in that first glorious story.

The next year THE OUTER LIMITS premiered, bringing both Lovecraftian horror and Lovecraftian-style speech into our living room every Monday on WHTN-13: “We were sired by the coming together of sick, nameless nuclei that had waited a billion billion years for that precise, ungodly moment. We fell to earth, and the velocity of that fall quickened the seed of intellect, at the same time it stunted the evolution of our primitive forms,” --- body-stealing alien from OL ep “The Invisibles.” Destiny was priming the pump, so to speak.

It wasn’t until 1969 that I ran afoul of Lovecraft; I had owned a book containing THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE for many years, but never read the story, because the title sounded dumb. Of course there’s no colour in space, it’s BLACK! However, one day I had little to read or do, and I realized I’d never read that boring and bad thing about colourless space, so “West of Arkham the hills rise wild...” This encounter, and the discovery of THE RATS IN THE WALLS and THE DUNWICH HORROR mere days later, shattered the little sanity I had left and set me, at the age of 13, tearing around looking for the Necronomicon in my Jr. High library.

Thank -- or blame -- Jim Ambuehl for my Mythos stories; I had quit writing years ago, but was fired to try it again when Jim dared me to give it a shot, after reading one of my gripes about formula Mythos fiction. So now I’m writing formula Mythos fiction. I just hope it’s the RIGHT formula...or we might wind up with some sort of literary Chemo on our hands. Wait a minute, there’s an idea -- back to the word processor ---!

A tale by JB Lee can be found here at: For Here Shall They Reign Again...

Some of his other work can be found at: A Reader's Guide to the Cthulhu Mythos and elsewhere.

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