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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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).
Harry O. Morris, who published the work through his Silver Scarab Press, would later illustrate Tierney's novel The House of the Toad.
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).
Around this time Tierney also took bus trips to Boston, Salem, Marblehead, and Brattleboro, Vermont - the setting of Lovecraft's The Whisperer in Darkness.
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.
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.
He lived for nearly nine years in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis–Saint Paul), which brought him in frequent contact with old-time horror/fantasy writers such as Carl Jacobi and Donald Wandrei.
He had made Wandrei's acquaintance the year before through several telephone conversations while gathering copyright information for him on some Carl Jacobi stories that were soon to be published by Arkham House.
In the 1970s, Tierney devoted himself as well to casting more artistically serious ceramic figurines in a fantastic style similar to Clark Ashton Smith's famous rock carvings.
In the seventies, Tierney edited two volumes of Howard's works, published in hardcover by Donald M. Grant - Tigers of the Sea (1973) (reprinted in paperback, Zebra Books, 1975) and Hawks of Outremer (1979).
Tierney has revealed that "in the Zebra [paperback] edition of Tigers of the Sea, Howard's portion ends in the second paragraph of page 209 with 'Cormac smiled fiercely.".
Tierney has also collaborated on short fiction with authors including Laurence J. Cornford and Robert M. Price (see Simon of Gitta series below).
Literary historian Don Herron has stated that the collection presents Tierney as "one of the most technically accomplished sonneteers of his generation, able to bring rhyming forms to bear on his own concerns, such as the especially nihilistic concluding poem "To the Hydrogen Bomb".
[9] Tierney found this period of living rent-free with his mother highly productive for his writing, and it was during this time he wrote his novels The House of the Toad, Drums of Chaos and many of the Simon of Gitta stories.
A few years later, also for Ace Books, with his frequent collaborator David C. Smith, Tierney co-authored a series of seven novels loosely based on another Robert E. Howard character.
Thomas also somewhat based Red Sonja on another Howard character, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, a swordswoman of 16th-century France who wars against the Turks in Eastern Europe.
For the Red Sonja series, Tierney and Smith were paid $1,000 per book and set the stories in the Hyborian Age, 15,000 years ago.
A meticulous researcher, Tierney studied the Roman era and Gnosticism for this series featuring the magician-warrior as a sword-and-sorcery hero.
Simon is a Samaritan ex-gladiator whose sorcerous abilities allow him to survive encounters with an array of evil priests, emperors, and hideous creatures.
Tierney has commented: "All these tales combine Gnosticism and other first-century elements with overtones of the Hyborian Age and the Cthulhu Mythos.
"[12] The Drums of Chaos (2008) is the author's magnum opus: an epic alternate history dark fantasy Cthulhu Mythos novel featuring Tierney's best-known characters, Simon of Gitta and John Taggart.
As he travels the Holy Lands with his mentor Dositheus, and their student Menander, they become entangled in a complex plot designed to call down a monstrous alien entity to herald a new aeon on Earth.
John Taggart, the time traveler from Tierney's The Winds of Zarr becomes involved with Simon of Gitta, as their separate quests converge toward a common goal of saving the very Earth.
The character is loosely based on Red Sonya created by Robert E. Howard, via the recreation for comics penned by Roy Thomas.