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March 22 - March 23, 2022
After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth—and
Where does madness leave off and reality begin?
She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic.
This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming.
Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.
he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.
“The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the horrible abysses of radiance.
Lovecraft could look upon the “Puritan theocracy” of Massachusetts with suitably abstract horror and even a certain condescension;
“The Call of Cthulhu” was written probably in August or September 1926, some months after Lovecraft’s return to Providence from New York; but it had been plotted a full year earlier,
“The Call of Cthulhu” is manifestly an exhaustive rewriting of “Dagon,” and could be said to begin a tendency found frequently in Lovecraft’s later tales whereby he reworks (usually to much better advantage) themes and conceptions utilized in earlier stories.
Lovecraft’s great spate of fiction-writing of 1926-27 (during which he wrote two short novels, two novelettes, and several short stories),
Occluded gases are gases retained within certain substances, chiefly metals, and customarily released when the metal is heated to a sufficient temperature.
The character Henry Wentworth Akeley is based in part on the rustic Bert G. Akley whom Lovecraft met on his 1928 trip.
to my mind, Nyarlathotep never gains a coherent personality in the whole of Lovecraft’s work.
the fungi from Yuggoth are depicted as battling the Old Ones in Antarctica millions of years ago:
In the end, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is about the inexorable call of heredity.
Robert Bloch had written a story, “The Shambler from the Stars,” in the spring of 1935, in which a character—never named, but clearly meant to be Lovecraft—is killed off.
