At age five he moved with his parents and two brothers to America, settling near Boston, Massachusetts. His parents met while both were in service in South Africa during the Boer War.

Cave, whose career spans more than 70 yearsĬave was born in Winsford, Cheshire, England. Although many of Cave’s stories were peddled to now-forgotten publications with titles like Nickel Western, The Feds, and Speed Adventure Stories, he was also a valued contributor to the two most honored magazines of the pulp era, Weird Tales and Black Mask (a distinction in itself, as most noted contributors to those two magazines wrote only for one or the other). And unlike Williamson, who specialized in a single genre (science fiction), Cave wrote it all, from tough-private-eye stories to jungle adventures, bizarre fantasy, westerns, sadistic “weird menace,” ghost stories, and “spicy” erotica. More astounding still was that Cave could write good stuff with the rapidity of the speed demons who often sacrificed quality in favor of stratospheric word count. From almost the start of his storytelling career Cave determined to maintain a high level of quality in his work-to give it ingenuity, lucidity, solid construction-and stuck to plan for more than 70 years. But Cave can claim much more than a continuing steady hand and an ageless imagination. Among his peers, only Jack williamson’s resume contains such a span. For longevity alone Hugh Cave would rank among the legends of 20th (and 21st)-century popular fiction: he was a published writer by 1929, a star in the pulp magazines by 1932, a popular horror novelist in the 1980s, and still successfully plying his trade at this writing in 2001.

The Nebulon Horror by Hugh B. Cave