Richard L. Tierney

Richard L. Tierney
Born	Richard Louis Tierney August 7, 1936 Spencer, Iowa
Occupation	poet, novelist, short story writer
Nationality	United States
Genre	poetry, fantasy, horror

Richard Louis Tierney (born August 7, 1936) is an American writer, poet and scholar of H. P. Lovecraft. He is the coauthor (with David C. Smith) of a series of Red Sonja novels, featuring cover art by Boris Vallejo. Some of his standalone novels utilize the mythology of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Tierney was born in Spencer, Iowa. His family moved to Mason City in 1942 where he went through the public school system until completing high school. Tierney read two of H.P. Lovecraft's stories ("The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror") in the anthology Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural edited by Wise and Frazer (1949) at the age of eleven, but was not especially impressed by them since there were no conventional ghosts in the stories. A few years later, aged 15, he read Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" in Donald A. Wollheim's Viking Portable Novels of Science and was hooked. 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 been a devotee of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe before that, he was especially inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft poems in the anthology (particularly the "Fungi from Yuggoth" and also the poems by Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long and others).

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