 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.