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The Shadow Out of Time & The Haunter of the Dark
When I was yet a youth, in those dim hinterlands of memory where the shadows of bygone Octobers still coil and whisper, I first enacted the eldritch rite of reading one tale of Howard Phillips Lovecraft for each night of that haunted month. Long did that custom lie dormant, like some buried thing beneath alien stars, until last October when I dared again to unseal the tomb of that tradition.
In earlier years, I confined myself to the Del Rey volumes, those civilized and curated relics fit for mortal libraries. Yet some deep and spectral prompting compelled me, in the most recent season of falling leaves, to plunge into The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, an abyssal ledger of tales both known and unguessed. I discovered, to my mingled dread and delight, that the corpus was vaster than mortal arithmetic had led me to believe, filled with nameless narratives lurking beyond familiar catalogues. A single October proved insufficient to exhaust them, and so I marked the remainder for the following year, as one might schedule the exhumation of long-interred bones.
Thus we arrive at the present hour, when the final offerings awaited me: The Shadow Out of Time—that chronicle of mind-shattering temporal exile—and “The Haunter of the Dark”, wherein the abyss itself peers back with light-devouring eyes. Two tales, aye, lest one be banished to the limbo of next October, and so I vowed to complete the cycle upon Halloween itself, an alignment too perfect to resist.
The day was not void of earthly burdens. I rose before dawn to confront The Shadow Out of Time, then surrendered myself to the banal servitude of labor at my infernal machine (the laptop, that modern grimoire of blinking sigils). From morning until gloaming I toiled, unbroken. Only when the last task was laid to rest did I consume “The Haunter of the Dark”, and with a strange, almost blasphemous satisfaction, I marked the final checkbox in OmniFocus, as if the sanity one loses in Lovecraft’s cosmos might be offset by tidy digital lists.
Yet even as I completed one ritual, another demanded my presence: the sacred family procession of Halloween night. With but forty-five mortal minutes at my disposal, I anointed my flesh with the gray and livid tones of the walking dead, that I might roam beside my grandson beneath the lamplight. The disguise succeeded too well; for in the aftermath, the unholy pigments clung to my skin like the residue of some corpse-dream, and even now my face bears a texture reminiscent of a schoolroom eraser, an object both innocent and ghostly, worn down by unseen pressures. I suspect it may take several days before the last trace of the grave relinquishes its hold.
So ends not only Halloween, but the full circuit of my Lovecraftian pilgrimage. Shall I resume this eldritch devotion next year? The angles of time are uncertain. Perhaps another author of cosmic anxiety, one Thomas Ligotti, shall whisper to me from the void. We shall see what shapes form in the darkness.
For now, dear reader, I thank you for accompanying me on this strange itinerary of ink, madness, and tradition. May your dreams be haunted, in the gentlest possible way.
The Shadow Out of Time
Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University recounts a span of years steeped in mystery and dread, stretching from 1908 to 1935. On the morning of May 14, 1908, as he lectured upon the dry certainties of economics, an unseen force seized his mind, casting him into a coma from which he awoke a stranger to his own flesh. His words, gestures, and desires were no longer his own. Those who had loved him recoiled in fear, for they sensed a presence not of this world. Only his youngest son, Wingate, clung to the fragile hope that the father he knew might one day return.
For five years the alien intelligence that ruled his body wandered across the earth in pursuit of ancient knowledge and secret places forbidden to men. Then, in September of 1913, Peaslee’s rightful self reawakened, bewildered and haunted by dreams of impossible cities beneath strange suns. He sought to dismiss these visions as madness, yet the shadow of truth grew darker as he uncovered chronicles of others who had suffered the same fate across the ages.
His memories, once recovered, revealed that his mind had been seized by the Great Race of Yith, beings of vast intellect who lived two hundred million years in the past. They had mastered the frightful art of casting their consciousness across time, exchanging minds with creatures of other epochs to gather the sum of all knowledge. Within their mighty stone cities, the captive minds of alien hosts were treated with courtesy, allowed to study, to write, to wander the echoing libraries of their inhuman masters. When the Yithians’ purpose was fulfilled, the minds were returned, purged of memory, so that the delicate threads of time might remain unbroken. Yet their dominion had not endured, for the Great Race fell to the ravening “flying polyps,” and their brightest intellects escaped into the future, to dwell within the forms of beetles that shall inherit the earth when mankind is dust.
In later years Peaslee received word of strange excavations in the Australian desert that mirrored the visions of his dreams. With Wingate beside him, he crossed that barren waste and beheld the blackened ruins of the Yithian city. Down into the labyrinth he descended, recognizing the titanic halls and shadowed passages of his long-lost captivity. The trapdoors that had once confined the polyps now yawned open, and in the depths he found a metal case that confirmed his every memory. Yet when a clamor of his own making echoed through those ancient corridors, a stirring answered from below. In terror he fled, abandoning the case and the proof it contained.
When dawn came, the desert had swallowed the ruins. No trace of the city or the horrors beneath remained. Peaslee returned home, burdened by the final, ineffable truth, for within the lost case had rested a book written entirely in his own hand—a relic not of his past, but of another age, and another body, beneath the monstrous sun of a forgotten world.
S. T. Joshi has observed that the spectral beauty of the 1933 film Berkeley Square awakened in Lovecraft a strange recognition of self, shaping the conception of “The Shadow Out of Time”. The author beheld the picture four times, entranced by its vision of a man whose spirit drifts backward to mingle with that of an ancestor long dead. To Lovecraft, it seemed “the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods and pseudo-memories,” a work that spoke to his lifelong sense of existing out of time, as though his true consciousness belonged to an earlier century. Yet the film’s handling of temporal exchange left him dissatisfied, and in his novella he sought to perfect what the cinema had only dimly perceived.
Other influences whispered through his imagination: H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing, Henri Beraud’s Lazarus, and Walter de la Mare’s The Return, each touching upon the dread mystery of mind and body undone. Critics would later call the tale his summit of achievement. Lin Carter saw in it a grandeur of time and cosmos unmatched in his other works, while Martin Andersson named it his magnum opus, the true measure of Lovecraft’s cosmic vision. Yet the author himself regarded the story with cold detachment, sending the single manuscript to August Derleth without retaining a copy, as though weary of his own creation.
In later years, new voices would awaken its reputation. Cinescape placed it among the finest works of speculative art, and Publishers Weekly hailed its return to print. Scholars Edward Guimont and Horace A. Smith have discerned within it, and within At the Mountains of Madness, the birth of that haunting archetype of science fiction: the vast, incomprehensible structure whose very silence proclaims the smallness of man before the infinite.
“The Haunter of the Dark”
In the city of Providence, beneath the brooding shadow of Federal Hill, there stood a church long abandoned to dust and dread. Robert Blake, a young writer steeped in occult studies, felt an unwholesome fascination for that decaying edifice, once the lair of the accursed Church of Starry Wisdom. The foreign folk of the hill whispered of monstrous rites and a presence older than mankind, yet their warnings only deepened his curiosity.
Within the darkened nave, Blake discovered the mouldering skeleton of the lost reporter Edwin Lillibridge, and upon a pedestal of alien workmanship, a strange crystal of unearthly sheen known as the Shining Trapezohedron. The stone pulsed with an inner life, its depths shifting like a window into the gulfs between the stars. In touching it, Blake awakened that which no mortal should stir, and fled into the night, haunted by the sense that eyes beyond time had turned upon him.
The horror imprisoned in the church could stir only in darkness, restrained by the ceaseless lights of the city. Yet when thunder rolled and the storm broke, the power faltered and prayers rose from terrified throats. Blake, in his high room, pleaded for the light to endure, but the lamps flickered and went out. What came then was not of this earth. When dawn returned, he was found lifeless before his window, his face twisted in unspeakable fear, and his dying words spoke of black wings and the burning eye that sees all worlds. Later, a trembling doctor cast the blighted stone into the waters of Narragansett Bay, though none can say if the thing it summoned sleeps once more or waits beneath the depths for the turning of the next dark age.
Lovecraft conceived “The Haunter of the Dark” in response to Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars”, in which a writer much like Lovecraft perishes by forces he cannot name. With grim mirth, Lovecraft answered by crafting the fate of Robert Harrison Blake, a figure molded in Bloch’s likeness, whose curiosity drew him into the shadows of an ancient church. Years later, Bloch would close their dark correspondence with “The Shadow from the Steeple”, binding the three tales in a cycle of mutual dread.
Some threads of the story reach back to Hanns Heinz Ewers’ “The Spider”, a tale of unseen horror and mounting fascination that Lovecraft had studied with care. In Blake’s final writings, he invokes the specter of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, for like that haunted trinity of brother, sister, and house, Blake, the church, and the spectral Haunter seem bound by a single, corrupted soul. Scholars have read the climax as the moment when the avatar of Nyarlathotep merges with Blake’s mind and is struck by lightning, annihilating both mortal and immortal essence in a single flash of blasphemous light.
Fritz Leiber called it among Lovecraft’s finest and final creations, and R. S. Hadji placed it among the most terrifying works ever to issue from a human pen, for in it one feels the last tremor of a mind gazing too long into the gulf that lies beyond the stars.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN from KEITH and JOE from THE CREATURE DOUBLE FEATURE SHOW! 🎃 👻
The Book
This day, my colleagues and I shall partake in a curious masquerade, an act of homage, perhaps tinged with the faintest echo of sympathetic magic. In honor of our esteemed compatriot D, whose mortal labors shall cease with her retirement come the dawning of 2026, we have resolved to assume her likeness for our office’s Halloween observance. Thus shall we adorn ourselves in black, curling wigs, each lock a mimicry of her own luxuriant tresses, and array our forms in her customary vestments: the crimson polo, the sable jeans, and the black sneakers that have long marked her earthly passage through the sterile corridors of our shared toil.
I admit, this guise is not one I would have chosen willingly, for its familiarity borders upon the uncanny; yet in the shadow of her departure, there is an unspoken reverence in donning another’s semblance, as though we flirt with the boundary between the self and the other.
And so, in this spirit of imitation and impending absence, let us turn our gaze upon today’s dreadful reading, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Book.”
“The Book” is a fragment born in the twilight of H. P. Lovecraft’s creative years, written in the waning months of 1933 and brought to light only after his passing in the pages of Leaves. Within its few surviving lines, a nameless seeker receives from a furtive bookseller a volume of ancient and baleful aspect. Upon studying its cryptic pages, he awakens forces that slumbered beyond mortal reckoning, and the shadow of an unseen presence begins to stir.
In a letter from that same year, Lovecraft lamented a paralysis of the imagination and spoke of countless experiments destroyed in dissatisfaction. Scholars whisper that “The Book” escaped the pyre of his self-judgment, perhaps serving as his attempt to transmute the verse of Fungi from Yuggoth into the darker music of prose, mirroring its first three sonnets.
Years later, Martin S. Warnes sought to complete the fragment beneath the title “The Black Tome of Alsophocus”, in which the dread messenger Nyarlathotep takes possession of a doomed soul. This vision returned to mortal sight in a short film of 2019, later shown at the 2020 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival and preserved among its Best of 2020 collection, where the echo of that blasphemous tome still seems to whisper through the reel’s faint crackle and shadowed light.
The Evil Clergyman
One of the more insidious difficulties in my renewed October rite, the nightly immersion in a tale by H. P. Lovecraft, is the creeping infection of his voice upon my own. I had not foreseen how the cadences of that Providence scribe might insinuate themselves into the sinews of my prose, nor how his brooding vision of cosmic dread would shadow my own meditations upon the Gnostic abyss. My current labor, a serialized chronicle steeped in aeonic revelation and spiritual decay, differs in nature from Lovecraft’s monstrous immensities, yet his spectral influence looms ever near, an unseen hand guiding my pen toward forbidden harmonies not wholly mine.
Still, though the struggle for sovereignty of voice is wearying, I find a grim satisfaction in the ordeal, for what apprentice of horror would not be both humbled and exalted to learn at the feet of so dreadful a master?
And now, with the proper reverence and unease, let us turn to this evening’s study, “The Evil Clergyman.”
In the dim loft of a time-eaten house, theournarrator is cautioned by his uneasy companion not to remain after nightfall nor to lay a hand upon the small and sinister object resting upon a table. When solitude enfolds him, he surveys the chamber’s grim array of theological and forbidden volumes, feeling the stealthy pull of that accursed relic. From his pocket he draws a queer device like a flashlight, whose beam is a sickly violet hue composed of infinitesimal motes that drift like living dust. When he turns this radiance upon the object, it crackles with a sound like ruptured air and begins to blush with a dreadful pink light, within which a pale form slowly takes shape.
Before him stands a spectral clergyman, garbed in the vestments of the Anglican Church, his face drawn with knowledge no mortal should possess. In silence he seizes books of occult lore and casts them into the fire. Presently other clergymen appear, pallid and trembling, and confront the apparition before fleeing in unspeakable fear. The lone phantom smiles in hideous triumph, fetches a coil of rope, and sets about fashioning a noose.
When the narrator rushes forward, the figure turns with menace in its eyes. Desperation guides the narrator’s hand, and he raises the violet light as one might a weapon. The beam strikes the revenant, which reels backward and vanishes down a dark stair.
Descending, the narrator finds no corpse, only three men bearing lanterns. Two cry out and flee, leaving the original companion to whisper that he should never have meddled. The narrator is led to a mirror and beholds not his own visage, but that of the blasphemous clergyman, whose soul has taken his place within the flesh of the living.
“The Evil Clergyman” was born of a letter penned in the year 1933, wherein H. P. Lovecraft recounted to his friend Bernard Austin Dwyer a dream of unearthly vividness and dreadful import. After the author’s passing, this fragment of nocturnal vision found its way into the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, taking on the guise of a story that seemed half dream, half invocation. Many years later it was shaped anew for the ill-fated film Pulse Pounders, which itself never emerged from the shadows of oblivion. What shape the tale might have taken under Lovecraft’s living hand no mortal can say, for its final purpose remains veiled, like the lingering echo of a nightmare glimpsed upon awakening.
The Thing on the Doorstep
As the waning days of October cast their lengthening shadows across my weary mind, I must confess that my self-imposed ritual, the perusal of one tale each eve from the dread canon of H. P. Lovecraft, has begun to weigh upon my spirit. What once commenced as a reverent communion with the ineffable has grown into a grim observance, as though some unseen watcher demands my continued devotion beneath a pitiless moon. Though I have gleaned strange meditations upon the vast, indifferent gulfs that yawn beyond mortal comprehension, I shall not mourn the passing of this haunted month.
And now, with trembling hand and quickened pulse, I turn the page to that abominable narrative known as “The Thing on the Doorstep”.
Daniel Upton, burdened by unspeakable guilt, sets down this account to prove that madness, not malice, guided his hand when he slew his dearest friend, Edward Derby. From boyhood, Derby had been drawn to the forbidden, his mind ever fixed upon the black vistas of the unseen cosmos. A child of indulgence and fragile constitution, he leaned upon his mother as upon a pillar of light; when death took her, the light guttered, and he wandered long in shadow.
At Miskatonic University his path crossed that of Asenath Waite, pale daughter of Innsmouth, whose gaze bore the cold weight of the abyss. Whispers told of her father, Ephraim Waite, whose sorceries had not died with his flesh. Derby, bewitched by her intellect and by darker charms, wedded her and took up residence in the mouldering Crowninshield House, attended by servants whose eyes held the sheen of the sea’s depths.
Soon, he perceived the slow corrosion of my friend’s soul. He would depart in the dead of night, though he had never learned to drive, and return huddled in his own car like a man escaped from hell. His speech wavered between terror and confession: Asenath, he claimed, could bend his will; could even take his body as her own. Once he whispered that her father yet lived within her. His eyes, in those moments, were no longer human things.
Later, found raving in the wilds of Maine, Derby spoke of an unholy exchange, his flesh no longer his, his mind a host to Ephraim’s immortal blasphemy. Thereafter, his reason crumbled. I placed him in the Arkham sanitarium, though what stared from his eyes was not Edward Derby.
Then came that dreadful knocking: three and two, his old familiar signal. He opened the door to behold a stunted, corpse-like messenger beneath Derby’s greatcoat, bearing a letter sealed with dread. In trembling script, Derby confessed to slaying Asenath, ignorant that her accursed soul lingered. She had claimed his body, leaving her rotting shell to shamble to my door. The thing on the doorstep was he, trapped, inverted, damned. His plea was clear: destroy the abomination in the asylum before it could find another vessel.
He obeyed. He fired the shot that stilled his form: but even now, in quiet hours, he feel the unseen eyes of Ephraim Waite upon me, and I dread the moment when he, too, shall hear that infernal knocking at my door.
Lovecraft conceived “The Thing on the Doorstep” from a 1928 dream he recorded: a man kills his wizard friend to save his soul, walls up the body, but the sorcerer’s spirit swaps bodies, leaving the man a conscious corpse. The tale weaves together Lovecraft’s wider mythos, invoking Arkham, Innsmouth, Miskatonic University, the Necronomicon, and entities like Azathoth and Shub-Niggurath. It revisits his recurring theme of mind-transference, later refined in The Shadow Out of Time.
Possible inspirations include Barry Pain’s An Exchange of Souls and H. B. Drake’s The Remedy, both exploring body-swapping and posthumous possession. The story inspired sequels by Peter Cannon (“The Revenge of Azathoth” and “The House of Azathoth”), and was referenced in Dark Adventure Radio Theatre and Alan Moore’s Providence.
Critical reception remains divided. Peter Cannon, S. T. Joshi, and Robert Weinberg call it among Lovecraft’s weakest works, faulting its melodramatic plot and lack of cosmic depth. Lin Carter dismissed it as a “sordid domestic tragedy” devoid of grandeur. L. Sprague de Camp, however, judged it “middle-rank Lovecraft”—stronger in character than most Weird Tales fiction. Despite mixed opinions, it endures in literary recognition as the sole Lovecraft story included in the Library of America’s 2009 American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.
The Dreams in the Witch House
I must confess, when I rekindled my October ritual of reading one tale each eve from the dread canon of H. P. Lovecraft, I did not foresee how the practice might at times curdle into an uncanny toil. Yet duty, once pledged to the eldritch, must be upheld. And so we descend once more into the abyssal lattice of nightmare and geometry, today’s accursed chronicle, “The Dreams in the Witch House”.
“The Dreams in the Witch House”
Walter Gilman, a student of forbidden mathematics and eldritch folklore at that ill-starred institution, Miskatonic University, took lodging in a crooked attic chamber of Arkham’s infamous Witch House, once the lair of Keziah Mason, who had fled mortal justice in the Salem days through secrets no human mind should grasp. The room itself seemed subtly wrong, its angles violating Euclid, hinting at gulfs of space unseen by earthly eyes.
In his fevered nights, Gilman beheld vistas of alien immensities where geometry dissolved into madness, and he walked beside Keziah and her abhorrent familiar, the loathsome Brown Jenkin. Drawn into rites of blasphemy, he bent his trembling will to the commands of Keziah, Jenkin, and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, signing the dread Book of Azathoth and aiding in a nameless sacrifice. Blood and revelation commingled, and Gilman’s end came beneath the gnawing fangs of his inhuman tormentor.
When at last the Witch House fell, its shattered beams yielded relics of horror:grim tomes, infant bones, and the long-hidden skeletons of witch and familiar, sealed testimony to terrors beyond all sane conjecture.
In the dim twilight of his creative years, Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House” emerged—a tale fraught with strange geometries and spectral dread, only to meet the chill disdain of mortal critics. August Derleth, discerning in its tortured angles some promise of commerce, yet named it a “poor story,” a pronouncement that struck the author’s spirit with mortal gravity. In despair, Lovecraft confessed that his “fictional days are probably over,” and withdrew the work into the abyss of neglect. Yet Derleth, impelled by unseen designs, dispatched it to Weird Tales, where it was accepted by those who traffic in the eldritch and the macabre. When a request came to breathe it into the vulgar airwaves of radio, Lovecraft recoiled, declaring that such “weirdness” would become a lifeless pantomime: “flat, hackneyed, atmosphereless.”
Later generations, as if cursed to echo Derleth’s verdict, called it “a minor effort,” “a magnificent failure,” and “one of his poorest later works.” They spoke of plots without compass, of visions unbound by logic, of imagery more vivid than the reason that should have tethered it. Yet in the turning of cosmic cycles, new voices arose to sanctify the tale. Kenneth Hite beheld within it the purest strain of Lovecraftian cosmicism, the dreadful music of From Beyond made manifest. And Michel Houellebecq, in dark reverence, placed it among the “definitive circle”—those dread scriptures which form the pulsing heart of the Mythos, wherein humanity glimpses, for an instant, the cold geometry of eternity.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
While perusing once more that accursed narrative, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, I found myself seized by a queer and troubling illumination. Though I have wandered its blighted pages oft before, this time the tale unfolded as though through a glass of alien tint. As I traced the narrator’s doomed passage toward that forsaken port, my mind’s eye conjured not the words alone but the dreadful imaginings born of later interpreters. Alan Moore in his grand and blasphemous Providence, and Charles Stross in the eldritch labyrinth of his Laundry Files.
When Moore’s protagonist boards the bus bound for Innsmouth’s rotting wharves, I beheld, in my inward sight, Jacen Burrows’ stark delineations: the weary passengers rendered with the precise horror of Moore’s scholarship, each face betraying the secret ancestry of the sea. Moore, delving deep into the lore and time of H. P. Lovecraft himself, had painted a vision both authentic and damned; thus his Robert Black, riding amidst those ill-omened travelers, has become for me the very image of that doomed town’s breed.
Yet it was Stross who deepened my unease. For I could not read of the Deep Ones’ dominion without pondering, with cold wonder, the consequences of a shared world—ours and theirs—teeming with secret treaties and abysmal politics. What judgments must these primeval beings pass upon our kind, who foul their ancestral waters with the detritus of our brief dominion? And, more dreadful still, how might they answer when the seas they claim as sacred begin to die beneath the weight of human corruption?
Thus, what began as a familiar reading became a revelation, as though some ancient gate within Lovecraft’s prose had creaked open anew, whispering that the boundary between fiction and forbidden truth is thinner than we dare admit.
Our narrator who would one day bring the doom of Innsmouth first came upon that blighted town by mere chance, in the summer of 1927, while wandering the age-worn highways of New England. At that time, he was a student of tender years, a seeker after the quaint and the curious, knowing nothing of the malignant antiquity that slept behind the mists and salt marshes of Massachusetts’ northern coast. Yet some dread instinct, or perhaps the unseen hand of fate, guided him thither to gaze upon horrors that no mortal mind might safely apprehend.
It was long afterward, when the nightmares would no longer loose their grip, that he confessed his role in provoking the secret federal investigation—the raids and torpedo blasts upon Devil Reef that newspapers falsely attributed to Prohibition zeal. Few who read those pallid accounts guessed the true nature of the blasphemies uprooted there, or of the malformed beings carried away in chains to nameless camps.
Our narrator had first heard of Innsmouth in the neighboring town of Newburyport, whose sober citizens whispered of its decay and abominations with furtive glances. Once, they said, it had been a thriving port until the War of 1812 and a mysterious contagion reduced it to ruin. And always there was the name of Obed Marsh—merchant, sea-captain, and founder of a strange religion known as the Esoteric Order of Dagon. The tales told of riots, of vanished townsfolk, and of a pestilence that had spared only those loyal to Marsh’s creed.
With youthful boldness, he boarded the rickety bus that wound through the salt flats toward that forbidden place. What he found defied all natural order. The streets lay hushed and broken, the houses bowed as if sinking into the ooze, and the people—ah, the people!—walked with a hideous gait, their faces bloated, their eyes lidless and unclean, their very skin exuding the odor of the sea. Among them he felt a crawling revulsion, a sense of having trespassed upon some race not wholly of man. Only a pale grocery clerk from Arkham, newly stationed there, retained the aspect of humanity and directed him to seek the drunkard Zadok Allen, last of the old-time townsfolk.
In a back alley by the river, amid crumbling wharves, the old man spoke when the bottle had run low. Our narrator’s tale was a thing of terror and cosmic blasphemy. In the far reaches of the Pacific, Captain Marsh had encountered a degenerate island tribe who consorted with beings of the abyss, immortal Deep Ones who gave bountiful fish and golden relics in exchange for human blood. Marsh had brought their worship to Innsmouth, and when pious men sought to end it, the sea itself rose to avenge its chosen. Thereafter, the survivors interbred with those batrachian demigods, begetting hybrids who, when age came upon them, sloughed their human guise and sank forever into the city of Y’ha-nthlei beneath Devil Reef. The cult, now led by Marsh’s monstrous progeny, sought dominion of the earth through protoplasmic servitors called shoggoths.
As Zadok raved, the listener felt the gaze of unseen watchers and fled his company. The old man was never seen again. That night, when mechanical failure stranded him, he was forced to seek lodging in a pestilent inn whose warped timbers groaned beneath unseen weight. At midnight came a stealthy fumbling at his door and the wet susurrus of inhuman voices. Escaping by window, he crept through alleys where the moonlight revealed scales and gills glistening on figures that searched the streets. Beyond the town’s edge he witnessed a procession of the Deep Ones themselves—frog-headed, grey-green, and malignantly sentient—and swooned at the sight.
Our narrator awoke in Arkham, miraculously unscathed, and soon after brought his account to the authorities. The raids followed; Y’ha-nthlei was bombarded, and Innsmouth’s spawn were dragged screaming from their lairs. Yet triumph was hollow, for in the months that followed he uncovered a truth more dreadful than any he had exposed. His grandmother had been of Obed Marsh’s line, and her mother, a name never recorded, was the sea-demon Pth’thya-l’yi herself. His uncle, discovering this same lineage, had escaped the curse only by self-destruction.
By 1930, subtle changes had begun to manifest. His speech faltered into alien idioms, his eyes grew wider, his flesh took on that clammy sheen he once abhorred. Dreams of the deep assailed him nightly, of luminous temples and ancestral voices calling from the abyss. In time he knew the transformation was irrevocable.
Thus, on a night heavy with salt wind, he resolved upon his final act, not of resistance, but of surrender. Our narrator would free his cousin Lawrence, already far gone in the metamorphosis, from his sanitarium cell. Together they would descend to the sea, where their immortal kin waited in the black splendor of Y’ha-nthlei. There, in the endless twilight of the deep, they would take their rightful place among the children of Dagon and Mother Hydra, to chant forever the hymns that mortals were never meant to hear.
In The Shadow over Innsmouth, that most accursed of his sea-born imaginings, Howard Phillips Lovecraft distilled the hidden dreads that had haunted his lineage and his soul, the ancient fear of decay within the blood and the inevitable corrosion of the mind. Both his parents had perished in the sterile despair of asylums, and from that hereditary shadow he drew the black ichor of his art. As in the earlier chronicle of “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family,” he wove a tale of degeneracy and doomed inheritance, yet upon a far vaster and more blasphemous stage, where the mind recoils before the unveiled immensities of the cosmos. For in this story lies the essence of his philosophy: the revelation that knowledge itself is perilous, that to perceive the true order of the universe is to invite the dissolution of reason.
The town of Innsmouth—its mists, its reeking wharves, its furtive-eyed inhabitants—was born of his wanderings through Newburyport, Massachusetts, that quaint seaport whose ancient roofs lean toward the Atlantic’s gray horizon. Yet beneath that inspiration coiled another influence more malign: Lovecraft’s own revulsion toward miscegenation, a terror of mingled blood that found monstrous expression in the coupling of man and abyssal spawn. His biographers, most notably L. Sprague de Camp, discerned in this a dark allegory of racial defilement; others, such as Robert M. Price, traced the story’s literary ancestry to Robert W. Chambers’ “The Harbor-Master,” Irvin S. Cobb’s “Fishhead,” and H.G. Wells’ “In the Abyss”—each whispering of amphibious abominations that mock the boundaries of mankind. And from Lord Dunsany’s tranquil dream-deity Yoharneth-Lahai, Lovecraft drew a blasphemous inversion: Y’ha-nthlei, the jeweled city beneath the waves, where Cthulhu’s spawn chant hymns of madness in the deep.
Lovecraft himself regarded the tale with bitter distaste, lamenting its “hackneyed rhythm” and coarse style, calling it “one of the lousiest jobs I’ve ever seen.” Weird Tales spurned it, deeming it too long, until in the twilight of 1936 it crept into print through the obscure Visionary Publishing Company, his only bound volume in life, a thing of errata and disfigurement redeemed only by the shadowed artistry of Frank Utpatel.
After his death, when the seas had long reclaimed the year of his birth, Weird Tales would publish an abridged ghost of the work. Critics such as August Derleth and de Camp later hailed it as one of his finest invocations of dread, its oppressive atmosphere broken by the rare vigor of the Innsmouth chase—a sequence wherein his prose, normally still as ancient tombs, burst briefly into violent life.
Now, in the modern age, The Shadow over Innsmouth endures as one of Lovecraft’s most fateful utterances, a scripture of cosmic horror, sung in the voice of madness. Yet beneath its grandeur, the discerning ear may still detect the trembling of its author’s own racial fears and hereditary torments, the echoes of an inheritance he could neither escape nor wholly deny.
I just updated my Now page.
I still have a dozen or so books on my Kindle, so for now, my Kobo is where I read essays and longform articles saved to my Instagram account. I’m still working on what device will be my dedicated reader. Like some of you, I’m not a fan of being locked into a platform because that way leads to eventual enshittification. I’m also not thrilled that when I purchase an e-book, I’m actually buying the license that allows me to read it. For the time being, that may be a necessary evil of reading ebooks, but I’d at least like to choose which device I read that book on.
At the Mountains of Madness
Among the countless works of cosmic dread, few have inspired such awe as H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Even the visionary Guillermo del Toro has long sought to breathe its frozen terrors into living image. Yet I confess that this tale once left my own soul unmoved, its desolate immensities seeming only cold and remote.
It was not until I encountered Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams that I began to sense the secret pulse beneath Lovecraft’s ice-bound nightmare. Lopez writes of the polar realms with reverence and melancholy, of their pale immensities and hidden wonders, of how their silence has lured humankind toward both revelation and ruin. Through his meditations I glimpsed what Lovecraft must have felt: the trembling majesty of a world untouched by time, where the very light seems older than memory.
In that boundless whiteness, Lovecraft’s imagination found its truest stage. The Antarctic became to him not merely a continent but a threshold, the last portal between man’s fragile reason and the vast gulfs of cosmic antiquity. There, beneath the cold constellations, he peopled the endless ice with the spawn of elder aeons, for it was in such loneliness that his myth of Cthulhu’s kind could breathe, timeless and undying beneath the shroud of eternal snow.
Told by Professor William Dyer of the accursed Miskatonic University, At the Mountains of Madness stands as a dire confession and warning, a chronicle of things best left buried beneath the world’s white and merciless extremity. His words are not of adventure, but of revelation, revelation so abominable that reason itself recoils. In the uncharted Antarctic wastes, where the winds shriek like the cries of ancient spirits and the sun gleams upon deathless ice, Dyer’s doomed expedition sought knowledge that man was never meant to claim. Beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalayas there lay the relics of an age before the birth of mankind, and in that frozen desolation slept truths too monstrous for mortal comprehension.
Under Professor Lake, an advance party exhumed fourteen forms from the eternal ice, creatures of neither plant nor beast, yet possessed of both natures. Their star-shaped visages and ridged bodies bespoke aeons unrecorded, and a mind alien to all the Earth. Even the oldest Cambrian fossils bore upon them the marks of deliberate craft, as though some elder intellect had toyed with the shaping of life itself. When silence fell upon Lake’s camp, Dyer and his student Danforth ventured forth and found horror incarnate. Men and dogs lay mangled and strewn across the snow; two were missing, and six mounds of ice covered what once were the specimens. The rest had fled, leaving behind obscene traces of dissection, as though vivisection had been performed by a hand not human.
Ascending beyond the forbidden peaks, Dyer and Danforth looked upon a city that mocked all architecture of man, a nightmare skyline of black stone and impossible angles, born of mathematics unknown to reason. In those ancient halls they deciphered the saga of the Elder Things, who fell from the heavens before the dawn of life. From their formless arts they birthed the shoggoths, slaves of living protoplasm, shapeless yet obedient, until rebellion rose and empire fell. Upon the walls were carved their wars against the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-Go, and mention of a still deeper horror lurking beyond a mightier range, a Thing even they dared not name.
In the city’s cryptic depths, the explorers beheld pallid, eyeless penguins and the corpses of the Elder race, slain by their own creations. There, amid the black tunnels, they met the shoggoth itself, a vast, heaving, faceless slime that shrieked in voices not of this world. In terror they fled, escaping skyward into the cold air, but Danforth, turning once more to gaze upon the mountains, beheld a sight that shattered his reason forever.
Thus Dyer speaks his final plea: that mankind restrain its arrogance and curiosity, and never again disturb the haunted stillness of that polar tomb. For beneath the ancient ice lie powers and memories older than the Earth, brooding in silence, and dreaming still.
In the conception of At the Mountains of Madness, there stirred within Howard Phillips Lovecraft the ancient pulse of an obsession long possessed of his soul. From the dim corridors of his youth he had peered southward, toward that haunted and eternal whiteness men call the Antarctic, imagining within its untraveled immensities the remnants of civilizations predating all terrestrial memory. As the biographer S. T. Joshi has written, even in boyhood Lovecraft composed curious treatises upon those early polar voyagers, and, fired by W. Clark Russell’s The Frozen Pirate, he spun strange tales of icy desolation and frozen doom.
By the 1920s, that continent remained the last unmapped corner of the Earth, vast regions still untouched by human tread. To Lovecraft’s fevered mind these blank spaces on the charts were not voids, but veils, thin partitions concealing truths older than life itself. In them his imagination was free to erect the monstrous geometries of alien empires buried beneath the glacial crust. Though his tale preceded modern science in its acceptance of continental drift, he captured with uncanny precision the geography and mystery that then defined the polar unknown.
The ill-starred Miskatonic University expedition that ventured into those latitudes was shaped in the likeness of Richard E. Byrd’s heroic enterprise of 1928 to 1930, whose reports of fossilized tropic life Lovecraft seized upon as evidence of a deep and awful antiquity. Lin Carter, one of his later interpreters, would write that Lovecraft’s own mortal aversion to cold lent the story its almost physical chill, the oppressive dread of sub-zero air that gnaws through bone and reason alike.
Yet behind the factual scaffold rose the shadow of earlier dreamers. From Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym he drew the echoing cry “Tekeli-li” and that ineffable sense of cosmic approach, the terror of an end too vast to name. From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core came the vision of lost races, winged and scientific, who ruled man as chattel and experimented upon his flesh. The subterranean abyss of A. Merritt’s “The People of the Pit,” the grotesque resurrection of ancient life in Katharine Metcalf Roof’s “A Million Years After,” and the cold fates of explorers lost to the void—these too fed his terrible imagination.
Beneath all, perhaps, lay the philosophy of Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West Lovecraft absorbed like scripture, seeing in it the destined decay of all civilizations, human or otherwise. He reached also toward M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud and his own early nightmares, “The Nameless City” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, wherein art itself serves as the hieroglyph of forgotten epochs. The story’s title he drew from the opium dream of Lord Dunsany, that whisper of “the ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness.”
And when at last he wrote, his vision of that deathly plateau was clothed in the spectral hues of Nicholas Roerich’s painted snows and the cathedral immensities of Gustave Doré’s engravings. Thus the Antarctic became, in Lovecraft’s trembling hand, not a place upon the map, but a mirror of the abyss, where the frozen winds of eternity blow across the ruins of creation, and the soul of man quails before the cosmic cold.
The Whisperer in Darkness
I had just concluded my reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness before venturing into the nocturnal chill to attend a screening of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein at the local arthouse theater. Del Toro’s creations never fail to lure me, for in his visions I sense a kinship with the same cosmic dread that haunted the Providence dreamer. Yet I cannot help but yearn for the day when he at last summons his long-desired adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness, that ultimate revelation of mankind’s insignificance beneath the polar wastes. Until that accursed miracle arrives, Hellboy must suffice, with its abominable Cthulhu-like hounds born of unearthly seas and the spectral conjuring of Rasputin amid the Himalayan frost.
And now, as the final echoes of the film dissolve into the night, I return to the tale that began this descent into wonder and horror: The Whisperer in Darkness, whose whisper still threads the wind beyond the stars.
Albert N. Wilmarth, instructor of literature at the ancient and brooding Miskatonic University, found himself drawn into a web of unholy revelations when word spread of uncanny shapes glimpsed amid the swollen rivers of Vermont. At first he mocked such rustic legends, attributing them to the fancies of backwoods minds. Yet the arrival of letters from one Henry Wentworth Akeley, a hermit dwelling in the shadowed hills near Townshend, began to erode his reasoned disbelief. Akeley wrote of voices in the night, of monstrous presences that crept from the forest, and of rituals whispered in the names of Cthulhu and the crawling Nyarlathotep.
Each message grew more dreadful than the last. Akeley spoke of the slaughter of his hounds, of nocturnal gunfire, and of grotesque forms that bled a sickly green fluid unfit for any earthly vein. Then, without warning, the tone altered. The terror gave way to awe. Akeley declared that the beings were not hostile but divine, their knowledge a gateway to the boundless gulfs of infinity. He begged Wilmarth to come at once, promising revelation beyond mortal ken.
When Wilmarth arrived, he found Akeley wasted and still, seated in shadow, his voice a strange, droning murmur that set the nerves on edge. The frail host spoke of cosmic voyages, of minds released from flesh and sealed within metal cylinders to traverse the black gulfs between worlds, bound for Yuggoth, the outer sphere men call Pluto. One of these imprisoned minds spoke to Wilmarth, extolling the glory of such a fate.
That night, haunted by whispers that no human throat could form, Wilmarth crept forth and made a discovery too hideous for sanity. The thing in the chair was gone, leaving only the robe and within it those ghastly remnants that mocked the shape of man. Fleeing in madness, he left the accursed place behind. When daylight came, the farmhouse was found desolate, the traces of battle erased. Only Wilmarth knew the unspeakable truth: that what had worn Akeley’s countenance was not a man at all, and that the true Akeley’s brain had already been borne away into the cold abyss.
In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” there stirs a shadowed homage to Arthur Machen’s The Novel of the Black Seal, for in its haunted pages Lovecraft walks once more the accursed hills where elder beings are said to brood beneath the soil of mankind’s ignorance. Scholar Robert M. Price has discerned in it not mere influence but transformation, a reawakening of Machen’s dreadful vision. As in that earlier chronicle, a seeker of forbidden lore ventures into the lonely uplands, drawn by relics of a prehuman race whose traces yet stain the stones of the Earth.
Lovecraft, ever the dissector of myth, divides Machen’s doomed Professor Gregg into two forms: Wilmarth, the hesitant chronicler of unspeakable truths, and Akeley, the scholar whose faith in reason dissolves before the inhuman reality that calls to him from the hills. Both tales murmur of grotesque shapes glimpsed beside the river’s flow, of those who vanish from the world to serve unseen masters.
Echoes of Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce drift through Lovecraft’s prose, their spectral dread woven into his tapestry of cosmic horror. Even the tale’s beginning, with its deluge upon the Vermont countryside, rises from earthly record, while the monstrous notion of brains encased in eternal machinery betrays a whisper from J. D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, a modern scripture of unholy possibility. Thus the story becomes a convergence of visions, a hymn to the old terrors reborn in the age of reason.
Every October, I find myself listening to bands like Rudimentary Peni (specifically their Cacophony album), Misfits, and Samhain. When I was a young punk, I listened to Samhain more out of obligation, but preferred Misfits to Samhain’s muffled audio. But decades later, I’d rather listen to Samhain over Misfits, preferring their death rock vibe.
The Dunwich Horror
“The Dunwich Horror,” among the most oft-whispered of H. P. Lovecraft’s abominable creations, stirred within me but a faint tremor of unease, as though its eldritch pulse had dimmed across the ages. Yet I read on with morbid delight, imagining how such a tale—of unseen spawn and profane rites—might unfold anew as an accursed adventure in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, whose genesis, I am certain, was sired by this very tale.
In the moldering hills of Dunwich, where decay clings to every roofbeam and the air reeks of ancient rot, there came into the world one Wilbur Whateley, the loathsome issue of Lavinia Whateley, an albino half-wit, and some father whose identity mortal tongues dare not name. His growth was an affront to nature, for within ten years he stood as a man, though no human mother could have claimed him. The folk of Dunwich avoided his gaze, and the beasts of field and forest shrank from his scent, which was not the odor of any creature born beneath the sun.
Under the tutelage of his grandsire, the wizened sorcerer called Old Whateley, the boy delved into forbidden arts and the blackest rites of witchcraft. Together they tended an unseen horror within their farmhouse, a presence bound to the dread god Yog-Sothoth. The structure grew strange and swollen with secret additions, while neighbors whispered of missing cattle and nocturnal chanting among the hills. When Old Whateley went to his grave and Lavinia vanished into the shadows, the unseen thing swelled to fill the dwelling entire.
Driven by purpose foul and cosmic, Wilbur sought at Miskatonic University the accursed Necronomicon, that he might open a gate to the Old Ones. Thwarted by Dr. Henry Armitage, he crept by night into the library and met death at the jaws of a hound that knew him for what he was. His carcass melted away, leaving only the stench of alien corruption.
Soon after, the imprisoned horror broke free. Invisible and vast beyond comprehension, it trampled the land, slaughtering without mercy. Armitage and his learned companions came with arcane powders and sacred words, revealing for a dreadful instant a form no sane mind could endure. Its dying cries to Yog-Sothoth echoed through the hills as it perished, leaving only a scorched pit. Then the awful revelation came: the monster was Wilbur’s twin, yet more faithful in form to its cosmic sire, a spawn of blasphemy and the cold abysses beyond the stars.
Lovecraft himself deemed “The Dunwich Horror” a tale so infernal that the Weird Tales editor editor Farnsworth Wright might recoil in terror from its printing. Yet the pages of Weird Tales received it, and the author was granted the princely sum of two hundred and forty dollars, the greatest reward his dread imagination had ever drawn from the world of men. Critics have spoken of the tale’s memorable corruption and its creeping sense of doom that grows as a miasma over ancient hills. Some, such as S. T. Joshi, have named it flawed in its struggle between light and darkness, though even he concedes its atmosphere is thick with the essence of nightmare. Within this tale, the Outer God Yog-Sothoth first revealed its presence to mankind, while the Necronomicon uttered its longest blasphemous passage. It was here also that Lovecraft’s haunted geographies took form, for the accursed towns of Arkham and Dunwich, and the unhallowed halls of Miskatonic University, became fixed forever in the cartography of cosmic dread.
Ibid
Once more, in this haunted season of October, I have resumed my ancient rite of reading one tale each night from the dread hand of H. P. Lovecraft. In this ritual I have stumbled upon forgotten works, strange and faint in their power, yet still whispering of outer gulfs and nameless terrors. Even the curious jest of “Ibid” carries a shadow of that unearthly genius which once dreamt beyond the veil.
“Ibid” is that grotesque and mirthful chronicle concerning Ibidus of Rome (486–587), a scholar whose dread opus, Op. Cit., sought to distill all the hidden tides of Graeco-Roman thought into one blasphemous perfection. Yet even death could not bind his influence. His skull—an object accursed, passed from the coronets of Charlemagne and William the Conqueror through shadowed centuries—moved at last across the seas to the fevered shores of the New World. Through the witch-haunted lanes of Salem and the dream-corrupted streets of Providence it journeyed, guided by unseen wills, until the relic found its obscene repose within a prairie dog hole beneath the forsaken earth of Milwaukee. Thus the laughter of eternity echoes faintly through decay. First published in that unhallowed journal O-Wash-Ta-Nong, January, 1938.
The History of the Necronomicon
As I perused that most infamous of tales, H. P. Lovecraft’s dread account of “The History of the Necronomicon”, a hideous recognition seized my mind. For in its pages I discerned the very structure of that modern equivalent men call Wikipedia. Both stand as living grimoires, written and rewritten by unseen hands across the gulfs of time. Their countless links are runes of summoning; their citations, dire incantations binding thought to thought in a web too intricate for sanity. Each page opens into another abyss, a digital labyrinth where knowledge writhes and reason sickens beneath the weight of its own impossible infinity. Only one mark was lacking to complete the horror, those blasphemous words that whisper of uncertainty itself: Citation needed.
Let us review today’s tale, shall we?
The dread tome men name the Necronomicon was wrought in elder days by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, who set down his unhallowed visions beneath the title Al-Azif. Soon thereafter he perished hideously, torn asunder by invisible demons before a shrieking crowd. Though the primal Arabic script and its Greek translation have long been lost, five Latin renderings endure in hidden vaults—the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale, Buenos Aires, Harvard’s Widener Library, and the accursed archives of Miskatonic University—while certain furtive collectors whisper of rarer copies.
The figure of Alhazred sprang from Lovecraft’s youth, a phantasmal pseudonym born of One Thousand and One Nights, perhaps punning “all-has-read” or recalling Providence’s Hazard line. Yet the name itself jars against true Arabic, and later forms sought to render it “Abdullah Alhazred.” In 1927, Lovecraft cloaked this invention with his History of the Necronomicon, weaving real pontiffs and patriarchs with spectral scholars, a false chronicle that lent verisimilitude to his mythos. This artifice, pseudobiblia, became a weapon of dread realism, eagerly adopted by fellow dreamers such as Clark Ashton Smith.
But the snare of illusion caught more than readers: occultists mistook the jest for revelation, and counterfeit Necronomicons were soon pressed upon a credulous world. Critics discern in this device both Lovecraft’s orientalism and his loathing of the unfamiliar, for in casting the East as a land of mystery and terror, he mirrored his own prejudices. Others perceive a darker irony—that in conjuring the “Mad Arab,” he mocked the very academies that suppress and then commodify alien lore. Scholars now behold in his pages a divided mind, wherein fear of the foreign walked hand in hand with awe before its ancient splendor, and thus the shadowed figure of Abdul Alhazred stands at once as caricature and as veneration, a paradox born of the master’s own conflicted soul.
