Richard Louis Tierney (August 7, 1936 – February 1, 2022) was an American writer, poet and scholar of H. P. Lovecraft, probably best known for his heroic fantasy, including his series co-authored (with David C. Smith) of Red Sonja novels, featuring cover art by Boris Vallejo. He lived the latter part of his life in Mason City in the great Corn Steppes of Iowa. Some of his standalone novels utilize the mythology of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. He is also known for his Simon of Gitta series (which cross historical Gnosticism with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos) and his Robert E. Howard completions and utilisation of such Howard-invented characters as Cormac Mac Art, Bran Mak Morn and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey.
Tierney is especially renowned for his weird and fantastic verse, which has been acclaimed by such critics, writers, and poets as S. T. Joshi, Don Herron, Ramsey Campbell, Robert M. Price, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Frank Belknap Long. In 1993, Tierney was presented with the annual Minnesota Fantasy Award. He was nominated for Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master in 2010.
Ancestry and Youth Tierney was of Irish origin on his paternal side. His great-grandfather emigrated from Dublin with his family to the United States. His maternal parentage traces its lineage to the Mayflower and the first Quaker settlement at Nantucket Island, Mass via the line of Thomas Macy (1608–1682), an early settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and of Nantucket Island.
Tierney was born in Spencer, Iowa. His family moved to Mason City in 1942 when Tierney was six years old. He went through the public school system, attending Madison grade school, Roosevelt Junior High and a high school he referred to as "Old Bastille" since it was built of old dark brick and always felt like a prison to him. Tierney read two of H. P. Lovecraft's stories ("The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror") in the anthology Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural edited by Wise and Fraser (1949) at about age thirteen, but was not especially impressed by them since they contained no conventional ghosts. At age 14, he read "Colossus' by Donald Wandrei in August Derleth's 1950 anthology Beyond Time and Space. Tierney has referred to this tale as "one of the most fascinating stories I had ever encountered, largely because of [its] poetic mood evoking a setting of trans-cosmic vastness.Richard L. Tierney. "Introduction" in Phillip J. Rahman and Dennis Weiler, eds. Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. Minneapolis, MN: Fedogan and Bremer, 1999, p. xi He would many years later become a neighbor and friend of Wandrei's in Minneapolis. Aged 15, and reading heavily in science fiction, Tierney read Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" in Donald A. Wollheim's Viking Portable Novels of Science and was 'hooked'. "Shadow" and At the Mountains of Madness became his two favourite Lovecraft tales.Robert M. Price, "An Interview With Richard L. Tierney," Crypt of Cthulhu, Vol 3, No 8 (Whole number 24)(Lammas 1984):48-50.
Tierney was also influenced by the work of Tarzan creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs.Buehner At around the same age (15 or 16), he was inspired to write poetry by August Derleth's fantasy verse anthology Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre which he read several times in the Mason City Public Library. While he had previously been a devotee of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, he was especially inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft poems in the anthology (particularly the "Fungi from Yuggoth" and also those of Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long and others).
1950s: Early writing (fiction and poetry)
Tierney began writing fantastic stories in the early 1950s, aged around fifteen and came into his writing stride in his early twenties. His first attempt at a tale was a Lovecraftian story titled "Countdown for Kalara." Tierney destroyed its first draft but rewrote it; the rewritten version was later published in Space and Time 56 (July 1980) as well as being reprinted in Robert M. Price's anthology The Yith Cycle (Chaosium, 2010). He continued writing through the 1950s, producing numerous tales, some of which did not see print until the 1970s or later. For instance, "Life of the Party" (written in 1956) first appeared in Antithesis No 3 (1974). "The Dream" (written Nov 1956), was first printed in Crypt of Cthulhu No 86 (Eastertide 1994). "The Wrath of Tupan" (written April 1957) first appeared in Fantasy Crossroads (March 1977). "The Eggs of Pawa," which features Ralph Duncan, the protagonist of the novel The House of the Toad, was penned in May 1957 but did not see print until Eldritch Tales No 2 (1981). "From Beyond the Stars," another product of 1957, first appeared in Kirby McCauley's anthology Night Chills (Avon, 1975). "The Creatures" comes from the same productive year and first saw print in Eldritch Tales No 3 (1978; the dating is correct. Issue 2 of this magazine was printed three years later than No 3). Again, "The Howler in the Dark" was written in 1957 but did not see print until it appeared in Crypt of Cthulhu 24 (Vol 3, No 8, Lammas 1984); this appearance was minus a few lines of text which were restored in the printing in Robert M. Price's anthology" The Necronomicon (Chaosium, 1996).
The Winds of Zarr, Tertiary Education, Amerind exploration
Tierney's first novel, The Winds of Zarr, which combined H. P. Lovecraft (including a Lovecraft-style deity named Zathog - see List of Great Old Ones), Robert E. Howard, time travel and ancient astronauts, and is set in Egypt during the New Kingdom, was penned in 1959 when Tierney was aged 23 but did not see print until 1975. Harry O. Morris, who published the work through his Silver Scarab Press, would later illustrate Tierney's novel The House of the Toad. The Winds of Zarr has cover art by Stephen Fabian and interior art by Randall Spurgin.
Tierney wrote his first Simon of Gitta tale, "The Ring of Set," in 1960; it lay around in manuscript for about 16 years until his friend Kirby McCauley submitted it to Andrew J. Offutt for his first Swords Against Darkness anthology, which appeared in 1977.
Tierney attended Iowa State College in Ames, studying forestry, his idea being to work in the wilderness and live a solitary existence - a plan which did not work out, since he made more friends than ever when he began his employment. During his first year at College, he wrote to August Derleth at Arkham House and started collecting their publications. Inspired by the poetry of Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft, he began to pen his own verse, but not knowing where to submit it, sent out none of his efforts until much later. He switched his major to Wildlife Management and graduated in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in entomology. Thereafter he worked for upwards of thirteen years (1958–71) for the U.S. Forest Service, firstly in Northwest Oregon for two seasons, then in Alaska collecting insects with a different field assistant each season for seven seasons, and eventually in a laboratory in Berkeley, CA for three years full-time.Buehner Tierney's earliest work to see print was some letters-of-comment in the pages of George H. Scithers' sword-and-sorcery fanzine Amra in 1961.
Tierney has written widely on a variety of esoteric topics, such as the legends concerning Mount Shasta and Amne Machin. One of his fellow Alaskan workers went to the University of Mexico and Tierney visited him. Well-versed in Meso-American archaeology, during his time working for the Forest Service he spent four winters on his own time in Mexico, Central and South America visiting ancient Amerind ruins (1962–66). While occupying cheap lodgings such as hotels in the cities or posadas in the villages, Tierney gave himself a crash course in Spanish and became fascinated with the Nahuatl people and culture. He spent much time in Yucatan and other areas photographing many of the most remote mountain and jungle sites — a background he uses in his later Peru-inspired Cthulhu Mythos novel The House of the Toad (1993).Author info, rear jacket flap, The Drums of Chaos, 2008
In the Winter/Spring of 1964, Tierney took a five-month postgraduate course in Entomology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His main purpose in going there was to visit Lovecraftian sites. He spent all of his Easter vacation in Providence, walking the streets of Lovecraft's neighborhood by day and night. He often talked with H. Douglass Dana, the proprietor of a Providence bookstore whom Lovecraft had known personally. At another bookstore he purchased Lovecraft's own copy of Keats' Endymion (poem) which was twice signed by Lovecraft. The volume was in poor condition, lacking the covers, but Tierney had it rebound by a bookbinder near Brown University. Around this time Tierney also took bus trips to Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and Brattleboro, Vermont - the setting of Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness.
1960s and 1970s: Bay Area, Published Poetry, Minneapolis Years, Lovecraft studies, Art, Fictional Collaborations
Tierney lived in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the height of the hippie rebellion. Tierney found the phone number of pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price, worked up the nerve to call him and tell him he was a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and was invited to Price's residence for a visit. Thereafter, they got together frequently, often over a meal cooked by Price - usually an Indian curry or a Mexican chilli. Both writers were interested in Buddhism. Price often discussed with Tierney pulp writers he had known, such as Clark Ashton Smith. Price also lent him some paperback books he had published.
Between 1966 and 1973, Tierney published a number of fantastic poems in small press journals including Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre; August Derleth's The Arkham Collector; Glenn Lord's The Howard Collector; Stuart David Schiff's Whispers (magazine); and The United Co-operative. During the 1970s, Tierney also began to submit verse to fantasy/horror markets such as Harry O. Morris's Nyctalops. His first collection of weird verse appeared under the title Dreams and Damnations, a slim volume of eight poems issued by R. Alain Everts' The Strange Company (of Madison, WI) in 1975 as a limited edition of 100 copies; this included a few of his translations for Charles Baudelaire. The collection was reviewed by Donald Sidney-Fryer in The Diversifier, 14 (May 1976); however an unfortunate law-suit brought by Everts in an attempt to prevent the publication of the Arkham House Collected Poems (Tierney)(1981) resulted in the Strange Company volume, though reprinted, being scarcely distributed.