HP Lovecraft?

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Cold Open: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

This is what H. P. Lovecraft wrote in his essay “Supernatural Horror In Literature,” ﬁrst published in 1927.

And if there was one thing H. P. Lovecraft knew about — it was fear.

The man lived in fear. Afraid of his neighbors. Afraid of the world changing around him. Afraid of losing his sanity… maybe even afraid of the mysterious monsters he wrote about.

He sure knew how to write about monsters that scared others.

He knew how to create monsters that were so terrifying they’d become the basis for monsters in ﬁlm and TV nearly a century after he wrote about them. He know how to blend details about the normal world we know with the details of a ﬁctional world just beyond our comprehension that he made seem all to real.

He knew how to make us doubt our own perception of reality and our ability to use words to describe things.

H. P. Lovecraft was a master at mysterious, deeply unsettling horror.

All of his ﬁctional works would orbit one vital premise: we are all doomed if whatever is out there in space discovers us.

Or, as Lovecraft said: "All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or signiﬁcance in the cosmos-at-large."

And one of those things out there in the cosmos-at-large would be the mythic monster Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]

In his short story “The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] ,” he described it as:

“A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

A frightening creature.

Not only scary because it’s massive and destructive, but also because seeing it basically ensures that you’ll go insane, get killed by Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] ’s worshippers, or worse.

We’ll learn about Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] today and some of Lovecraft’s other gods and strange intergalactic creatures. And the inﬂuence they’d have on the imaginations of later creators.

Stephen King has said the best of Lovecraft's works are "uniquely terrible in all of American literature, and survive with all their power intact.”

Lovecraft paved the way for people like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman [gay mun].

We have Lovecraft to thank - in part for so much. Stranger Things, the Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, the X-Files, and so much more - all touched of inﬂuenced in some way by Lovecraft’s cosmic horror.

Odds are you are familiar with - and possibly deeply love - the work of someone Lovecraft inﬂuenced. But do you really know anything about HP Lovecraft?

Who is H. P. Lovecraft? What is Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] and why is it so uniquely terrifying?

Let’s ﬁnd out on this week’s eldritch, tentacle monster, cosmic terror, weird tales edition of Timesuck.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome! A.Happy Monday:

Happy Monday, Meatsack!

Welcome to a strange and horrible, Weird Tales edition of Timesuck.

I’m Dan Cummins, horror lover, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] tamer, Weird Tales tour guide, the Master Sucker, and you are listening to Timesuck.

Hail Nimrod, Get in that cosplay outﬁt Luciﬁna, Praise Bojangles, and save us from an unimaginable fate Triple M.

B.Merch:

A whole bunch of strange, we’ve been Zucked, Real Boy Tiago shut down our original Facebook Cult of the Curious Group merch in the store now at Bad Magic Merch dot com.

We have a Tiago Facebook AI robot tee shirt in the store. We have a whole cool “Timezucked” collection with tees, tanktops, and phone cases. Diﬀerent designs.

Tiago - if you missed me talking about Tiago or don’t remember - Tiago’s the AI bot who sent me weekly updates for a few months about our private Facebook Cult of the Curious private group.

Week after week I got this message letting my know our at that time suspended group MIGHT come back:

Hi Dan,

I hope to ﬁnd you well.

Please allow me to update you and let you know that we haven't forgotten about your Group's review request, as it is still under review by the relevant team. Nevertheless, please allow me to mention that we have chased this matter and we'll inform you once we can provide more details.

Thank you for your patience and wishing you a lovely day.

Kind regards,

Tiago Facebook Groups Admin Support Analyst

At ﬁrst I thought Tiago was real. I replied. Never got a message back.

Then, my last message from Tiago said:

Hi Dan,

I would like to follow-up with you, as we've now heard back from the relevant team and this time we have new details to share with you.

Thank you for your patience. Please allow me to inform you that after reviewing the 'Cult of the Curious' Group, we can conﬁrm that the Group has been taken down and will not be restored as the Group violations applied to it were deemed to be accurate. As such, it is not possible to further appeal and our team is unfortunately unable to further assist in this regard.

I know that this can be disappointing news and that this wasn't the outcome you were looking for, but please do keep in mind that we are unable to submit another appeal as this decision is ﬁnal.

Thank you once again for contacting Facebook Groups Support. Should you have any new questions or concerns, I'd kindly ask that you please create a new support request by clicking on "Groups Support" in the Support section.

Although we could not restore your Group, your feedback will allow us to continue to improve for the future and I would invite you to answer a short survey that you'll receive.

Kind regards,

Tiago Facebook Groups Admin Support Analyst

Finally, I was like - That can’t be a real person, can it?

The tone is all over the place and the verbiage is so weird. “Please do keep in mind that we won’t do fuck all to help you.”

“Thanks for patience! Now beat it. We don’t want your ﬁlthy business.”

Thanks, Tiago. You real boy you.

Now of course we have Cult of the Curious 2, at least as I write this, and so many cool subgroups where meatsacks have downloaded the free subgroup social pack.

Unoﬃcial Cult of the Curious groups like the Cult of the Curious Investors groups for meatsack investors and stock traders, and Luciﬁna’s Galleria - Cult of the Curious Art subgroup.

I love seeing so many people ﬁnd friends with similar interests.

Hail Nimrod!

C.Segue to Topic:

That took longer than I thought to get out so fuck the other announcements.

Oﬀ to a topic very unlike what we normally do.

Comparable episodes would be the Edgar Allen Poe episode from June 1st, 2019. And maybe Dante’s Inferno from February 1st of this year.

But this is still pretty diﬀerent than even those episodes.

Which is ﬁtting.

Lovecraft was just, well… a very diﬀerent kind of dude.

Also, this episode is different because it’s less about Lovecraft the man - although we will dig into his life for sure - and more about his most famous monster, the sub-genre of literature he essentially created, and the influence he’s had on the much of the fantasy, sci-fi and horror fiction we enjoy today.

This week, we’re exploring how H. P. Lovecraft and one of the most fascinating worlds in the history of creative world-building.

Let us call upon the great and terrible Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] - rise from the ocean depths and face us great, mysterious monstrous god - and we accept any madness that comes from your awakening….

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE

II. Intro/Establish Premiss:

A. Set up show here:

Who was Lovecraft and who published his early works so that now we know of him?

That’s where we’re starting today.

Gotta talk about Weird Tales - a pulp sci-ﬁ and horror magazine that was Lovecraft’s main employer. A magazine very inﬂuential to a lot of much more modern shows I love, like the X-Files and, I’d argue - the BBC’s Black Mirror.

Holy SHIT I love that show. Smart scares.

Weird Tales was a magazine very inﬂuential to The Twilight Zone which in turn for SURE inﬂuenced Black Mirror.

Next I’ll lay out what deﬁnes Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror - cosmic horror also known as Lovecraftian horror - a type of fantasy/ sci-ﬁ horror common now that Lovecraft pioneered.

You might be more familiar with this subgenre than you think.

Ever watch Stranger Things?

Lynze the kids and I love that show.

VERY inﬂuenced by Lovecraft. I’d place Stranger Things ﬁrmly in the world of cosmic horror.

Matt Duﬀer, one of the Duﬀer Brothers who created Stranger Things, said they took a “an H.P. Lovecraft sort of approach” to the series when creating the monsters that inhabit the “upside down.”

He said, “This inter-dimensional being that is sort of beyond human comprehension. We purposely don’t want to go too much into what it is or what it wants.”

Very Lovecraftian approach as you shall soon see. That Demogorgon is SO Lovecraft.

The imagination of Lovecraft is all around us.

After going over the tenets of what defines Lovecraftian or “cosmic” horror, we’ll discuss some 20th century world building and world builders that set forth the kind of immersive fiction that now dominates film, television, gaming, and more. And Lovecraft’s place amongst epic world builders like JRR Tolkien and George Lucas.

Then, we’ll jump into a timeline of Lovecraft the man’s life, before hopping out to dissect his most inﬂuential work - the beginning of his now famous Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] mythos [mi thos] - the Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

Next we’ll meet some of the gods and monsters from that mythos [mi thos] , before looking at his second most famous work, “At the Mountains of Madness” - SO much madness today - and before we recap, we’ll look at some Lovecraft controversies.

He was very early 20th century in some of the worst ways. He was a weird and troubled dude.

I hope you ﬁnd all this as interesting as I do. And I hope it ﬁres up your imagination as it has mine.

Hail Nimrod - protect us great god of Timesuck from the horrors that await…

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/duﬀer-brother-stranger-things-is- entering-lovecraft-country

B. Terminology:

We’ll meet him more in depth later, but, who are we talking about today?

H.P. Lovecraft - Howard Phillips Lovecraft - was born in Providence, Rhode Island on August 20th, 1890.

He became the author of fantastic and macabre short novels and shorter stories that would bring him a lot more fame in death than they ever did in life.

Since his death at the age of just 46 back in 1937, he’s become regarded as one of the 20th-century masters of the Gothic tale of terror. Seen by many as the American successor to fellow New Englander Edgar Allen Poe, who died a little over forty years before his birth.

Lovecraft the science ﬁction author was more interested in science than ﬁction as a young child - but lifelong health issues, a combination of both physical and mental heath issues it seems - prevented him from attending college and pursuing a more… traditional career.

He made his living - when he was able to make a living, he actually never made a true living - primarily as a ghostwriter and rewrite man. Despite being born into aﬄuence, he ended up spending half his childhood and most of his adulthood in seclusion and poverty.

Deﬁnitely was one of those “tortured genius" types. Not a fun fate. Poor bastard - so many fans today, so few in his lifetime. What a terrible thing, to become so successful as an artist - but never live to see it.

From 1923 on, when he was able to get published, most of Lovecraft’s short stories would be published in the fantastic old magazine - Weird Tales. The first issue of Weird Tales was published in March of 1923 - Lovecraft would get one of his short stories, Dagon [ dey-gon ], published in the October 1923 edition. Issue #8. His first Weird Tales publication was also the first of Lovecraft's stories to introduce a Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] element — the sea deity Dagon [ dey-gon ] - also the name of an ancient god of the Phoenicians and the Philistines associated with agriculture.

Oh “Weird Tales” - god I love their covers!

Basically a mashup of pinup models and monsters. Hail Luciﬁna!

The kind of shit I was doodling when I was in grade school and junior high - though not nearly as well as their illustrators.

I’m pretty certain I’ve talked about this Weird Tales somewhere before here on Timesuck, but I just can’t ﬁgure out where. I thought it was brought up in the Men in Black or the Mothman episodes, but can’t ﬁnd it in the notes.

Oh well.

Weird Tales is technically still around - but it hasn’t existed in wide circulation since the original magazine operation folded in 1954.

There were some reprint anthologies in the ’60s, four new magazine issues in the ’70s, four original paperbacks in the early ’80s, and then publication picked up for the next few decades with semi- regular monthly issues.

A collection of new tales, issue 364, was just published in December of 2020.

An American fantasy and horror ﬁction pulp magazine, it was never extremely popular - it peaked during the mid-1930s when Lovecraft was a steady contributor - but it’s revered by many horror and fantasy fans today.

When it came out, it was so unique. There was just nothing like it.

It had cult classic written all over it from the outset.

Initially, it was the only monthly magazine in the US publishing science ﬁction stories. So if that was the kind of shit you were into, you fucking LOVED Weird Tales. Oh my Heck you fucking ﬂipping did!

It was the only place you get your ﬁll of new, strange science ﬁction short stories every month.

I picture a couple of twelve year old boys in 1923 racing their bikes down to the local ﬁve and dime that carries a few comic books and pulp magazines like this. Running in the store, grabbing the new copy the day it comes out, and seeing story titles on the cover like, “The Phantom Wolfhound,” “The Moon Terror Part 2,” “The Gray Death,” and “The Blade of Vengeance.”

All real titles from the 4th issue of Weird Tales.

I picture those kids being so pumped. (1920s lingo) “Whoa! Ain’t this the Bees Knees, Marty! Look at this broad caught in that tentacle. Doesn’t she look just like Gloria Swanson?? Why I just think she’s the cat’s pajamas. What a sheba! And look at all these monsters! Who thinks of this stuﬀ? All this for less than two bits. MAN, I love Weird Tales! Let’s dust out!”

Seriously - I bet so many kids loved this magazine. And some of them would later become sci-ﬁ authors themselves. Weird Tales was imagination fuel in cheap paper form.

What a beautiful thing - to nourish creativity. Thank Nimrod for publications like Weird Tales.

I never travelled much at all growing up.

Other than camping trips to places we could drive to in a few hours, and shopping for clothes within a few hours drive - I went on one traditional vacation before graduating high school - to Disneyland. Other than that, I stayed wherever we lived. Physically. But in my mind, I went all over the place in my mind thanks to my imagination. And my imagination was fueled by strange stories like those published in Weird Tales.

From a weird dude who used to be a weird kid - thank you Weird Tales. Even though I didn’t read your stories, I did read stories written by authors your stories inﬂuenced and loved them.

The magazine peaked in the 1930s, billing itself as the “number one magazine of strange and unusual stories.”

And there were many other pulp magazines. Amazing Stories came out a few years after Weird Tales in 1926 and also featured odd, science ﬁction tales. That old pulp magazine is also still around - also just barely.

We ﬁrst talked about early 20th century American pulp magazines here on Timesuck back on March 31st, 2017, the Bonus Scientology episode.

L Ron Hubbard, the beady-eyed, weasel-y con artist founder of Scientology, worked for years as a pulp ﬁction author cranking out story after story for magazines like, “Unknown”, that came out in 1938, before giving up on Westerns, detective stories, war stories, tales of exotic adventure, and even romance, and realizing there was more money in writing a new religion.

No JK there.

L Ron’s pivot from proliﬁc pulp ﬁction writer to religion founder is the most blatant, I’m clearly full of shit founding of a religion in history thanks to all the documentation and exactly how he did it.

Oh Scientology, so sad that you exist.

Anyway - pulp magazines - often referred to as "the pulps” - were inexpensive ﬁction magazines published from 1896 to the late 1950s.

They were precursors to a lot of the sci-ﬁ comic books and graphic novels that would come later.

If I was a kid, I have no doubt I would have LOVED them.

Pulp magazines were they successor to 19th century “dime novels” - popular ﬁction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions.

American dime novels tended to feature crime noir detective tales, and over the top stories of wild west heroism. Train robbers and ﬁghts between cowboys and tribes. There were also romance and war stories. The stories were considered cheap, low-brow, quickly cranked out tales.

In England, these stories were known as “Penny Dreadfuls.”

And in Victorian England, with their penchant for ghost tales, gothic horror tales became popular by the end of the 19th century.

Lovecraft was a huge fan of British horror tales.

Publishers geared these books toward the uneducated lower class, producing stories with simple, formulaic plots that opened "new worlds" to their readers. Storylines were straight forward and told in physical language that brought to mind concrete pictures and people for the readers.

Sounds a bit insulting - like they were stories for dumb also - BUT ALSO - I bet I would’ve loved them!

Easy on the symbolism and metaphors and kick up the action, motherfuckers! Sometimes I’m just here to be ENTERTAINED, not enriched.

(Fish) Showbiz!

Stories were shorter than most novels and brightly illustrated - basically, a kind of precursor to graphic novels.

Back to Weird Tales now.

Weird tales focused not on romance or true crime - but primarily on horror. And, speciﬁcally - “strange” horror. Weird shit, as the name implies. Tales of odd monsters from other worlds. Tales of ghosts and dread. Tales of madness!

One of Weird Tales young fans was Rod Sterling, born in 1924.

He enjoyed the hey day of Weird Tales when he was a young teen and pre-teen in the 1930s and undoubtably read a lot of Lovecraft.

And if you don’t recognize his name…. well then… FUCK you.

GET OUTTA HERE!!! Turn it oﬀ!!! I’m SICK of it. I’m fucking SICK of you not liking exactly what I like.

JK.

Of course jk.

But I do love Rod Sterling. HUGE inﬂuence on my imagination and the imaginations of so many other fellow weirdos.

Rod Sterling would create and then host the original Twilight Zone series that began in 1959.

The Twilight Zone is VERY much inﬂuenced by the kinds of stories found in Weird Tales. The Twilight Zone would later inﬂuence another show I loved - the X Files. And also, Black Mirror.

Weird Tales inﬂuences Rod Sterling who creates the Twilight Zone, and then the Twilight Zone inﬂuences Chris Carter, who watched the Twilight Zone and then later created the X-Files.

And Lovecraft was a major Weird Tales presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine https://www.history.org.uk/student/resource/4512/american-dime- novels-1860-1915 https://www.weirdtales.com/about

Before really refocusing on Lovecraft, let me read you one of the shorter short stories published in Weird Tales by someone else - a few months before Lovecraft’s ﬁrst story would be published in the magazine - to get a taste of the world of Weird Tales world Lovecraft was a part of.

Get a feel for his weird literary peers and competition.

This comes from issue # 3, May of 1923. Later selected in 1997 as one of the best stories of 1923’s Weird Tales.

THE PURPLE HEART by Herman Sisk.

PLAY FROM BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- iiiwZ9OLT8

“I was weary of the fog that hung over me like a pall, fatigued to the point of exhaustion. Since early afternoon the chill wind had forced it through my clothing like rain. It depressed me. The country through which I had traveled alone was desolate and unpeopled, save here and there where some bush assumed fantastic form.

The very air was oppressive.

As far as I could see, were hills—nothing but hills and those bushes.

Occasionally I could hear the uncanny cry of some hidden animal. As I pushed on, a dread of impending disaster fastened itself upon me. I thought of my home, of my mother and sister, and wondered if all was well with them.

I tried to rid myself of this morbid state of mind; but try as I would, I could not. It grew as I progressed, until as length it became a part of me. I had walked some ﬁfteen miles, and was so weary I could scarcely stand, when I came suddenly upon a log cabin.

It was a crude aﬀair, quite small, and stood back some distance from the little-used road in a clump of trees. A tiny window and a door faced the direction from which I approached. No paint had ever covered the roughly-hewn logs from which it was made, and the sun and the wind and the fog had turned the virgin wood to a drab brown.

I felt it was useless to knock, for the cabin had every appearance of being deserted. However, rap I did. No voice bade me enter, and with an eﬀort I pushed open the door and staggered into the house.

Almost immediately my weary legs crumpled under me, and I toppled and struck heavily on my face. When I regained consciousness, a rough room, scantily furnished, greeted my eye. There was an ill-looking table, the top of which was warped and rectangular in shape, standing in the center. To one side was a rustic chair. Beyond the table was a bunk built into the wall; and on this lay a man with shining eyes and a long, white beard. A heavy gray blanket covered all of him but his head.

(Albert Fish) “Showbiz!” he said. “You’re just in time for some peanut butt butter. Now take of your pants and show me that fat bare bottom. I got the cat o’ nine tails already warmed up!”

No - that’s not what happened next. That was serial killer Albert Fish popping in for no reason. Apologies.

Here’s what happened next.

(high pitched - Woody) “You’re right on time,” he said in a high- pitched voice.

I looked at him closely. “I don't know you,” I said.

“Nor I you; but I knew you would come."

“You are ill and need help?” I asked.

“No,” he replied in his strange monotone. “But on this day some one always visits here. None has ever returned. But I have yet to be alone on the night of this anniversary."

There was something so weird in the way he looked at me out of those big, watery eyes that I involuntarily shuddered.

“What anniversary?” I asked.

“The murder of my father,” he answered. “It happened many years ago. A strange man came to this cabin just as you have done."

He paused. And then he said, “Wheeeeeeee I’m Woody! Need any paranormal rape repellant! Might as well try and sell something while I wait for Charles to get back with the hooch. He has a moonshine contact somewhere around here!”

Sorry. Not sure why these strange puppet has appeared in my mind. Woody is also not part of Herman’s original Weird tale. Back to 1923.

I said nothing.

“You wish to stay all night?” he asked.

“Yes, if I may,” I replied.

A moment later, I regretted it.

"Quite so,” said he, with a slight nod of his white head. “Those were the very words he addressed to us. We took him in. When morning came I found my father dead in there,” rolling his eyes and raising his head to indicate some point behind him, “with a dagger in his heart. You can see the room if you open the door behind me."

I looked at him a moment, hesitating.

Then I went to the door and pushed it open. Cautiously glancing into the other room, I saw there was nothing there but a bunk similar to the one the old man occupied.

“Don't be afraid,” he said, evidently sensing my fear. “Nothing will hurt you now. It's after midnight when it happens."

“What happens?” I asked.

“I don't know. No two men have the same experience. It all depends on one's state of mind."

“You mean—” I began.

“Yes,” he interrupted. “One man saw hands reaching toward him and ropes in the air. He was escaping the gallows. Another saw faces of beautiful girls. He was on his way to a large church wedding. A third saw pools of blood and the white snow stained by human life. He was again living through a massacre in Russia."

“Do you live here?"

“No. No one does. The cabin is quite deserted. I come each year to welcome the evening's guest."

“Is there no other place to stay?” I asked, a sudden fear seizing me.

“None. Besides, it is growing dark without, and you would lose your way even if you could leave."

There was something ominous in the way he uttered these last ﬁve words.

“Yes,” he went on, as if I had asked the unuttered question in my mind, “you may think you can go, but you cannot. That is the curse my father placed on this cabin. And I come each year to see that his word is obeyed. Whoever enters that door yonder on this date must stay until morning, and endure the agonies that only the rising sun can dispel."

I looked about me to make sure that he and I were the only living things in the room.

“What is to prevent my leaving?” I asked.

“Try to,” he replied, an eerie note of glee in his queer voice. I walked to the door and gave a mighty pull. To my utter amazement, it was locked!

I tried again, this time with greater determination; but the door remained unyielding. A sudden terror seized me. I turned to beseech the old man to let me go, but he was not there! I looked quickly about me. He was nowhere to be seen. I ran into the other room.

(Chikatilo) “What is big deal!?!”

I turned around to see a strange Ukranian stroking his ﬂaccid shame penis in the corner beneath his sweat pants. “I bother no one. I jerk for bit than leave you back to ghost story.”

Sorry - me again. 20th century serial killer Andrei Chikatilo is not a part of this tale. No more inside joke interruptions I swear!

It was as empty as before. I rushed to the door there and pulled vigorously, but my eﬀorts were in vain. Returning to his bunk, I examined it closely. To my great astonishment, the heavy gray blanket was gone. In desperation I tried once more the door through which I had entered the cabin. It was still as inﬂexible as concrete. Darkness fell fast and the room became very dim.

I groped about and discovered some matches and a candle on a shelf under the table. I struck a match and lighted the candle. Letting some of the tallow drip onto the table, I made a stick for it. I then sat down on the edge of the bunk and anxiously awaited developments. But nothing occurred to mar the somber silence of my prison. Thus I remained until my watch pointed to the hour of nine. My journey had greatly fatigued me, but my fears counterbalanced my weariness, so that I kept awake in spite of it.

At length, however, my eyelids grew heavy; my eyes became bleary, so that the candle multiplied, and my head drooped until my chin rested on my chest.

Letting the candle burn, I lay back on the hard bunk. I was cold and very nervous, and greatly felt the need of food and dry clothing. But my fatigue soon overcame me and I fell asleep. When I awakened, a sense of suﬀocation and bewilderment hung over me. Whereas the room had been cold when I lay down, it now seemed close and hot. I pulled myself to a sitting posture. The room was dark. The candle was out. I jumped to my feet and started toward the table. But in another moment I stood frozen to the spot, my eyes arrested and my body palsied by what I saw before me.

At the far end of the room was a purple glow in the shape of a human heart. It was stationary when I saw it, but almost immediately it began to move about the room. Now it was at the window. Then beside the table. Again it moved quickly but silently into the other room. I pulled my frightened senses together and groped my way to the table. I found a match. With trembling hands, I struck it and lit the candle. To my surprise, it was almost as tall as when I had fallen asleep. I looked at my watch. It was one o'clock.

A moment later the ﬂame was snuﬀed out and I was again in total darkness. I looked wildly about me. Horrors! The purple heart was beside me! I shrank back in terror. It came closer. Suddenly I acquired superhuman courage. I grasped for the specter.

I touched nothing.

I placed my left hand before me at arm's length. Lo! it was between me and my hand! Presently it moved away.

A great calm settled over me and I began to sense a presence in the room. Now, without any fear and with steady hand, I again struck a match and lighted the candle. It was promptly extinguished. I struck another with similar results. And now something brushed my lips and an arm was passed lightly about my shoulders, but I was no longer afraid. The room continued cozily warm, and a greater sense of peace came over me.

Presently I lay down again and watched the purple heart as it came toward me and took its place at the edge of the bunk, like some loved one sitting beside me. I must have fallen asleep again, for I knew no more until broad daylight awakened me, and I found myself lying in the middle of the room. There was no fog. The sun was shining brightly, and a broad beam was streaming through the dusty window pane. The candle and the matched were no longer visible.

Suddenly I thought of the locked door.

Springing to it, I gave a mighty pull. It opened easily!

I snatched my cap from the rough ﬂoor and hurried into the warm sunlight. A short distance from me a man came trudging along. He was a powerful looking fellow of middle age and was dressed in coarse working clothes. “Do you know anything about that cabin?” I shouted, as we drew closer. “Sure. It's haunted,” he replied. He looked hard at me. “Were you in there last night?"

I related my experience. “That's queer!” he muttered. “But I ain't surprised. Last night was the night."

“What night?” I demanded.

“Ten years ago an old man was murdered in that cabin, and his son swore on his deathbed he'd come back every anniversary and lure somebody into the cabin for the night and torture him."

He shuddered, his white face staring at the cabin. “Come away!” he whispered. “Come away! It's haunted! It’s haunted!”

FINIS - PRESS STOP

So um, yeah.

That was a weird tale. A little weirded with my bullshit - but still weird on its own.

And also something that scared people back in 1923.

That is the kind of story Lovecraft was competing with. And the kinds of stories that would inﬂuence later horror, fantasy, and sci-ﬁ writers.

I liked the tone of that story, but um - “glowing purple heart?”

A hand would have been better, right? A head? Maybe a head with no eyes or no mouth or something. Or a glowing spider that crawled onto him.

Maybe those weren’t WEIRD enough.

Lovecraft would write a lot of stories that ended up in Weird Tales. I counted twenty-ﬁve.

The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] would ﬁrst be published in the February 1928 issue. The Horror at Redhook was ﬁrst published in the January 1927 issue. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward - a short novel written in 1927 - would be published after Lovecraft died across the May through July 1941 issues of Weird Tales.

If not for Weird Tales, who published him by far more than any other monthly pulp publication, we probably wouldn’t know of Lovecraft today.

In death, thanks to this exposure that helped him introduce him to other writers and critics, Lovecraft ended up being recognized as being so good at telling his own brand of weird tales, that critics basically named a whole genre of horror after him called Lovecraftian horror aka “cosmic horror,” a genre of horror/weird ﬁction that emphasizes the terror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or shock.

It’s the kind of horror that tries to shake you to your core existentially - no jump scares and not a bunch of gruesome dismembering.

The core themes and atmosphere of cosmic horror was laid out by Lovecraft himself in his Essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.

A number of characteristics have been identiﬁed as being associated with Lovecraftian horror. Here are what seem to be the seven most important:

1. One. Fear of the unknown and unknowable.

2. Two. The "fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance".

Here horror derives from the realization that human interests, desires, laws and morality have no meaning or signiﬁcance in the universe-at-large.

Consequently it has been noted that the entities in Lovecraft's books were not evil, because they were far beyond human conceptions of morality.

Interesting horror concept here.

What if you were being threatened, about to be gruesomely tortured and likely killed by an entity that didn’t see what it was doing to you - or about to do to you - as morally wrong? Your life and hopes and dreams meant nothing more to it than a gnat or houseﬂy’s life likely mean to you.

Your life is viewed as meaningless.

If this viewpoint is ﬁxed, than no amount of begging for your life - no amount of reasoning - will spare you from any horrors coming your way.

This is why ﬁctional monsters can often be scarier than real- life ones.

With some serial killer, for example - you could likely at least entertain the possibility that MAYBE you might be released alive. It has happened here and there - like with the Truck Stop Killer and the Nightstalker Richard Ramirez. Every once in awhile those psychos release someone. Or someone escapes their clutches. They’re monsters who you can at least speak to.

TRY and reason with.

But not with certain monsters. Certain monsters, if they get ahold of you, you’re just going to die. Your destruction is inevitable.

Lovecraft continues in his description:

3. Three. A "contemplation of mankind's place in the vast, comfortless universe revealed by modern science" in which the horror springs from "the discovery of appalling truth".

Reminds me of the Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].. The narrator discovers that numerous men have died - not at the hands, or rather claws and tentacles of Cthulhu - but rather at the realization that the fate of humanity is tied to this monstrous god - and that when the stars are aligned just so - Cthulhu [koo thoo loo] destroying humanity is inevitable.

The discovery of this truth drives men unbearably mad.

4. Four. A naturalistic fusion of horror and science ﬁction in which presumptions about the nature of reality are "eroded"

5. Five. That "technological and social progress since Classical times have facilitated the repression of an awareness of the magnitude and malignity of the macrocosm in which the human microcosm is contained" a calculated repression of the horrifying nature of the cosmos as a reaction to its "essential awfulness."

Basically- we’ve become so detached from nature and spirituality thanks to technological advances that we’ve forgotten the reality of ancient monsters we’ve come to falsely think are nothing more than folklore and superstition.

Lovecraft makes us wonder if monsters of old - monsters we’d forgotten all about - are very real.

6. Six. Having protagonists who are helpless in the face of unfathomable and inescapable powers, which reduce humans from a privileged position to insigniﬁcance and incompetence.

Your weapons and instincts are meaningless in the face of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]. Man is no match for this ancient monster.

7. Seven. Preoccupation with visceral textures, protean semi- gelatinous substances and slime, as opposed to other more traditional horror elements such as blood, bones, or corpses.

This is the “weird” part.

Monsters don’t always take human shape - or even a shape that can really be described. They don’t have muscled bodies or sometimes even a solid state. They are… something else. Something our feeble human minds can’t fully understand or articulate. Pushing horror mystery here - fear of the unknown.

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] — arguably Lovecraft’s most famous horror creation by far— would ﬁt almost all of these categories to a tee.

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is a fictional entity first introduced in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] ,” first published, as I said, Weird Tales in 1928.

Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] as Khlûl′-hloo, and said, "the ﬁrst syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The 'u' is about like that in 'full', and the ﬁrst syllable is not unlike 'klul' in sound, hence the 'h' represents the guttural thickness."

No thanks, Lovecraft, ya dickhead!

Modern pronunciation of this made up word has seemed to clearly settle on Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

Easy to write about how it’s essentially impossible to say when you didn’t live in the age of TV, ﬁlm, podcasts, and audiobooks and never had to really say that shit aloud for any story telling gigs.

According to Lovecraft, this pronunciation is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] has also been spelled in many other ways, including Tulu, Katulu, and Kutulu.

The creature is described as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

Basically— Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is said to resemble an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, hundreds of meters tall, with webbed, human-looking arms and legs and a pair of rudimentary wings on its back.

Its head is depicted as similar to the entirety of a gigantic octopus with an unknown number of tentacles surrounding its supposed mouth.

It is said to be so terrible to behold that it destroys the sanity of those who see it.

I still think Nimrod, with his enormous size advantage - would kick the shit out of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]!

Nimrod’s a giant space Sasquatch the size - roughly - of an entire galaxy with the head of Chupacabra. AND he rides a giant black unicorn so big it has ﬂaming suns for eyes.

Still - Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is pretty scary in Lovecraft’s world.

And he spent a lot more time revealing his monstrousness than I have with Nimrod.

Hail Nimrod! The great god of the suck would rip Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] watery balls oﬀ.

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is characterized as the leader of the Old Ones, a species that came to Earth from the stars before human life arose. The Old Ones went dormant, and their city slipped under Earth’s crust beneath the Paciﬁc Ocean.

They communicated with humans by telepathy, and, in hidden corners of the world, uncivilized people remembered and worshipped Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] in cultic rites.

These groups had statues of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] that seemed to be made of materials not found on Earth and chanted the phrase “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”

Translated into a language people actually speak - “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] waits dreaming.”

When conditions are right, the city will rise, and, with the help of the eternal Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] cult, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] will awaken and again rule the world.

The imprisoned Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is apparently the source of constant subconscious anxiety for all mankind. https://www.britannica.com/biography/H-P-Lovecraft https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]

Does any of this sound familiar in any way?

Remember Madame Helena Blavatsky?

We met her and talked about her at length in the Lost City of Atlantis Suck back on July 10th of 2017.

The main originator or theosophy [ thee-os-uh-fee ] - she founded The Theosophical [ thee-uh-soph-ical ] Society in 1875.

As presented by Blavatsky, Theosophy [ thee-os-uh-fee ] teaches that there is an ancient and secretive brotherhood of spiritual adepts known as the Masters, who—although found across the world—are centered in Tibet.

All kinds of wackadoodles now reference these ancients all over the web, present themselves as channels for them, and try and sell you their secret knowledge. I wish I was kidding.

According to Blavatsky’s teachings, these Masters were alive LONG before archaeological evidence points to human civilization existing.

They had futuristic and magical cities like Atlantis 4.5 million years ago. They were a diﬀerent kind of human - far more magical and full of supernatural abilities - than exists today.

As were the Lemurians, believed my some to still live inside Mt Shasta! Thought of by some as an alien race - thought of by others like Blavatsky as an ancient form of human, existing in an advanced state long before the Altlanteans. Another “root race” as Blavatsky would teach ﬁrst lived about 35 million years ago.

They had all sorts of magical powers - like the ability to astral project, and speak through telepathy. And there were great monsters in their time that they fought against that also had magical powers.

Bummer that we’ve been apparently devolving instead of evolving and are getting less cool as a species as time goes on. It’s almost like Blavatsky was crazy and full of shit and almost literally nothing that manipulative lunatic ever wrote down was true.

Huh! She was INCREDIBLY full of shit if you’re not familiar. Pathological liar who didn’t even try and make her lies believable - and yet so many believe her.

Sigh.

In addition to maybe helping fuel the imagination of Lovecraft - which is speculation on my part - she deﬁnitely has fueled the unfortunate imaginations of many a wackadoodle who don’t understand that she was making all that shit up.

Anyway, these ancient races she spoke of- they lived in long forgotten cities, AND - ancient cities that might still exist but are hidden. Either not visible thanks to some parallel dimension-like trickery, or they’re deep under the earth’s surface in the hollow earth, like we talked about in the Hollow Earth Theory suck.

There’s a long and rich mythology in theosophy - and Lovecraft actually references the Theosophists by name in the Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

And I HAVE to think he was VERY familiar with the written works of Blavatsky and other noted theosophists - his entire Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] mythos feels very, VERY much inspired by the wackadoodle world-building of the theosophists.

He just didn’t - like they did - pretend all that shit was real when he wrote of ancients, hidden cities, magical powers, and all the same stuﬀ Blavatsky and her sycophants [ sik-uh-fuhnts ] wrote about.

I guess she was a world builder too.

Just in the religious, not ﬁctional, sense. Too bad she didn’t have Weird Tales to write for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_race

III. Worldbuilding:

Now that I’ve brought up world-building again, let’s dig into Lovecraft’s importance to the history of world building here.

Lovecraft’s contribution to world building comes in the form of “The Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] ” - which refers to the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft that reference Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] - sort of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Eldritch monsters.

Eldritch monsters being creatures who are uncanny, unearthly, and weird in a supernatural way.

The Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] is a series of tales that describe ordinary New Englanders’ encounters with horriﬁc beings of extraterrestrial origin.

And what made these series so good, and made H. P. Lovecraft such an inﬂuential horror writer, was how Lovecraft blended his intimate knowledge of New England’s geography and culture with his elaborate and original mythology.

He had extremely abnormal and mystifying monsters invade the lives and dreams of very normal and mundane New Englanders. He made it feel like you too, as his reader, could easily see your reality destroyed and watch your mind descend into madness.

He created a world so fantastical and tangible that it drew people in and kept them contributing to his Mythos [mi thos] - the extended universe - after Lovecraft’s death.

The term “Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] ” was coined by the writer August Derleth, who was a frequent contributor to the Mythos [mi thos] for many years after Lovecraft died.

August Derleth, a correspondent and great admirer of Lovecraft's, used the creature's name to identify the system of lore employed by Lovecraft and his literary successors. In 1937, Derleth wrote the short story "The Return of Hastur", and proposed two groups of opposed cosmic entities:

“The Old or Ancient Ones, the Elder Gods, of cosmic good, and those of cosmic evil, bearing many names, and themselves of diﬀerent groups, as if associated with the elements and yet transcending them: for there are the Water Beings, hidden in the depths; those of Air that are the primal lurkers beyond time; those of Earth, horrible animate survivors of distant eons.”

Derleth was an early sci-ﬁ and horror and fantasy “world builder.” But he and his contemporaries didn’t call it that then.

The term “world building” as it applies to fiction, can be traced back to the 1960s. Richard A. Lupoff - sci-fi author and literary expert - he first used it in the way we think of it today in his 1965 book, Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Lupoﬀ, who actually just passed away last year in 2020 in Berkeley at the age of 85, he published a book in 1965 titled, “Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs.”

Burroughs, active from 1911–1950, is mostly famous for his Tarzan series of books, the John Carter of Mars sci-ﬁ series, and the Land that Time Forgot - the ﬁrst book set in a literary universe centered around the island of Caprona, also known as Caspak.

Burroughs was a pioneer of world building. A titan in the field of sci fi and fantasy fiction.

And Richard Lupoﬀ was a fellow sci-ﬁ writer and fan of and expert regarding him and another world builder he held in equally high regard - HP Lovecraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Master_of_Adventure:_The_Worlds_of_Edgar_Rice_Burroughs

J. R. R. Tolkien of Lord of the Rings fame is also often referenced as a pioneer of world building - as is CS Lewis, creator of Narnia.

And - there are other far older world-building authors in some sense - like those French and British writers who wrote stories of Arthurian legends such as the 12th century British Cleric, Geoﬀrey of Monmouth whom we talked about in the May 2019 Legend of King Arthur Suck - BUT - they didn’t invent new worlds and all new creatures the way 20th century world builders did. They drew inspiration more directly from folklore and legend and existing worlds of old stories told long before they were born.

The mythology, like with the Norse Sagas before Snorri Sturluson or the Greek Gods before Homer, developed through an oral storytelling tradition for centuries, in all likelihood, before pen was put to paper.

Tolkien, Lewis, and Burroughs took thinks further and build out worlds without linking their worlds to old legends. They had inspirations of course and inﬂuences that include old legends - but their stories were more…. original. And they never claimed their worlds to be anything other than ﬁctional and because of that, they were able to take more creative license to build their worlds however they pleased.

And their worlds would inspire others later, like George Lucas, to build worlds like the Star Wars universe.

To bring all this back to Lovecraft - Burroughs build his worlds before Lovecraft. The Land that Time Forgot was published in 1918. John Carter of Mars ﬁrst showed up in 1912.

Tarzan also showed up initially in 1912.

And while Lovecraft did not likely influence him - he likely influenced Lovecraft - he could’ve influenced both Tolkien and Lewis.

They created their worlds after Lovecraft began creating his.

Tolkien published the Hobbit in 1937. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy would follow in 1954 and 1955. He said he began writing about Middle Earth in the early 1930s, and he began writing Lord of the Rings in 1937.

CS Lewis published the chronicles of Narnia between 1950 and 1956.

Lewis said he ﬁrst conceived Narnia in 1939.

The Call of Cthulhu was ﬁrst published in 1928. Nine years before the Hobbit.

And then, in the early 1930s, other contemporary writers including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Henry S. Whitehead, and Fritz Leiber—a group referred to as the "Lovecraft Circle,” added to the lore of Cthulhu and the many other "Great Old Ones": Lovecraft’s loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep.

Lovecraft didn’t write an amazing long-form novels like Tolkien. He didn’t create the beautiful and imaginative seven-book world of Narnia like Lewis.

But he did create a mythos [mi thos] that drew in other lovers of weird and dark and horrifying ﬁction - he created a pantheon of fake gods and monsters - Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is just one of many - powerful enough to capture the imaginations of his peers, and together they built a world before Tolkien and Lewis and other great world builders like Stephen King.

His world may have been the first of its kind in the horror space specifically - and his creative world ended up influencing my imagination long before I’d ever heard of him or read his work.

He inﬂuenced my favorite childhood author, Stephen King.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, over 1.3 million words long, is HEAVILY inﬂuenced by Lovecraft. King build a huge world centered around Roland the Gunslinger and his quest to reach the Dark Tower - nexus of all universes.

In addition to the seven sequential novels of the series - plus The Little Sisters of Eluria - many of King's other books give nods to the same world and feature the same characters under diﬀerent names.

King’s most frequent villain - and the Dark Tower villain - is the necromancer/sorcerer known by many names, but most consistently Randall Flagg. He’s described as “an accomplished sorcerer and a devoted servant of the Outer Dark” and generally aims to bring down civilization through destruction or sewing discontent and conﬂict in humanity. He’s the The Man in Black–in The Dark Tower and is the nemesis of all that is good and pure.

And this ﬁgure directly mirror’s Lovecraft’s Outer God, Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep], who is likewise the most frequently featured entity in the Cthulhu Mythos [mi thos].

Unlike most of the Outer Gods or Great Old Ones who rarely take a form fathomable by the human mind, Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] often takes human form in order to collect devotees and spread chaos. He’s deceptive and manipulative, and even uses propaganda to achieve his goals. He inﬂuences the deeds of men, and carries out the evil of larger Outer Gods as their messenger, as well as the wishes of cults devoted to him.

King has all but said Randall Flagg–especially in The Stand and The Dark Tower series–is one of the many guises of Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] .

It, which King wrote in 1986, is seen as by far the author’s most Lovecraftian work to some, setting up the idea of a Macroverse - later called the “Todash Darkness” of The Dark Tower series - and ancient, otherworldly beings from outer space/a diﬀerent plane of existence. Of these entities, the most prominent is It itself, an ancient creature that feeds oﬀ of fear, and then ultimately people themselves. https://nerdist.com/article/stephen-king-lovecraft-gods-cthulhu-it- dark-tower/

And “It” is seen as King’s equivalent to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

And in addition to Lovecraft inﬂuencing many modern authors - many have also contributed directly to the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] — like British authors Neil Gaiman [gay mun] and Alan Moore.

Gaiman [gay mun] is known primarily for writing The Sandman graphic novel series, the novels American Gods and Coraline - and the young adult fantasy novel The Graveyard Book. He’s won a TON of ﬁction awards.

And he’s married to creative musical badass Amanda Palmer - a Patreon pioneer who helped inspire me to double down on niche content early in the formation of this podcast. Thank you, Amanda! Hail Amanda Palmer!

Gaiman [gay mun] wrote “A Study in Emerald,” a short story published in 2003 that sets a Sherlock Holmes-type detective story in the universe of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]. It won a Hugo award in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Emerald

He also wrote I, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo], a humorous short story published in 1987, where Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] dictates his autobiography to a human slave, telling him stuﬀ like the story of his birth on the planet - no one knows how the fuck this word is said - Khhaa'yngnaiih - saying, "No, of course I don't know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds.” - to a father who was eaten by his mother and a mother who was subsequently eaten by Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] himself. For a few thousand years, young Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo], "the color of a young trout and about four of your feet long,” slunk through the swamps of his home planet, eating and avoiding being eaten.

Gaiman [gay mun] introduced Lovecraft to many of his own fans as many of other contemporary authors have done.

Alan Moore has written the Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and more. Highly acclaimed graphic novel author who’s done some really cool runs with Batman and Swamp Thing.

I love his shit and have read a lot of it. Got From Hell sitting at home waiting for me to have time to dig in.

In his Neonomicon four issue run in 2010 and 2011, he sets an FBI investigation in the middle of the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] mythos [mi thos] .

In March 2012, this series became the ﬁrst recipient of the newly created "Graphic Novel" category at the Bram Stoker Awards for horror ﬁction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonomicon

And there are others I could mention if I wanted to turn this whole episode into a Lovecraft jerkoﬀ fest.

Which I guess it kind of is.

By the turn of the 21st century the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] had become a cultural phenomenon. In addition to metafiction, the mythos [mi thos] inspired music - much of it instrumental - I was amazed at home much “Lovecraftian Music” you can find on Youtube and Spotify right now - horror movies, and, perhaps most notably, games, including board games, card games - Magic the Gathering has all kinds of Lovecraft monsters as cards - tabletop role-playing games - Lovecraftian creatures have significantly influenced the world of Dungeons and Dragons and the only reason there aren’t a ton of Lovecraft editions of AD&D is because of some publishing rights battle-bullshit.

There are also Lovecraft video and online games.

From Software's 2015 video game Bloodborne borrows heavily from Lovecraft's ﬁction, pitting the player against hordes of eldritch beasts.

In October 2018, Focus Home Interactive released a role-playing survival horror video game called Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] . https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]

And currently, of course, there is the HBO series, Lovecraft Country based on the 2016 novel of the same name. Executive produced by JJ Abrams, Jordan Peele and others.

Jordan Peele being one of the reigning champions of cinematic horror between writing and directing both Us and Get Out. And JJ Abrams being pretty familiar with world building between his work on the cinematic universes of both Star Trek and Star Wars. And he’s created Lost, and Alias, and other shows.

It speaks the gravitational pull of Lovecraft to have two of the world’s biggest horror and sci-ﬁ heavyweights chose to spend their time in his mythos [mi thos] .

Season two of Lovecraft Country, as I record this, hasn’t been greenlit, but it looks like it probably will be.

So what is it about the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] that still pulls so many creative people into its orbit?

I think the way his universe has both a definite tone of dread and anxiety and fear with defined entities, but still lives so much room to play, is what makes it so fun. There’s both a definite tone, and also, enough questions that are unanswered to still have plenty of room to add your own voice to it.

Let’s talk about this mythos [mi thos] a bit more.

IV. Essence of the Mythos [mi thos] : The essence of the Mythos [mi thos] is that the human world and our role in it are an illusion.

Humanity is living inside a fragile bubble of perception, unaware of what lies behind the curtains or even of the curtains themselves, and our seeming dominance over the world is illusory and ephemeral.

According to these writers, humans are blessed in that we do not realize what lies dormant in the unknown lurking places on Earth and beyond.

As Lovecraft famously began The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] , "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

Now and then, individuals can, by accident or carelessness, catch a glimpse of, or even confront the ancient extraterrestrial entities which the mythology centers around, usually with fatal consequences. Because of the limitations of the human mind, these deities appearances are so overwhelming that they can often drive a person insane.

Other times, they encounter their non-human worshippers and servants, whose existence shatters the worldview of those who stumble across them. Human followers exist as well.

Lovecraft’s gods and creatures are portrayed as neither good or evil; within the Mythos [mi thos], these are concepts invented by our species as a way to explain what truly are inexplicable intentions and actions.

The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] was the premiere story in which Lovecraft realized and made full use of these themes, which is why his mythology would later be named after the creature in this story, as it deﬁned a new direction in both his authorship and in the horror ﬁction genre.

I had Kyler listen to an audiobook presentation of this story with me in the truck on the way to school, and - while horror is not really his thing - it REALLY had his attention.

It was cool to see.

No looking at his phone, no getting bored, and no talking. All very unlike him compared to a lot of other music or whatever I’ve shared with him.

There’s an X-factor with Lovecraft. On an analytical level, I don’t feel like I SHOULD like a lot of his stories. When it comes to a satisfying ending, or even the level of horror, I feel like I should be left pretty unimpressed.

But I’m not.

And I can’t stop thinking about them later.

They get better with each reading.

They stay with me. There’s something intangible - at least to me - about his stories that make them really special.

He really, really gets my imagination going.

I found myself writing seeds for a possible horror story of my own.

Don’t know if I’ll ever write it - but he just got my brain moving in a new way.

I get why so many are drawn to him.

The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is also the ﬁrst and only story by Lovecraft where humans and one of the cosmic entities called the Great Old Ones come face to face.

Alright, Meatsacks - now that we’ve learned a bit about ﬁctional world building, and Lovecraft’s contribution to it, let’s meet H. P. Lovecraft the man, and try and gain some insight into how he arrived at his unique understanding of what made horrifying things horrifying.

Let’s hop into today’s Timesuck Timeline….

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right after today’s sponsor break.

PAUSE

Thank you for listening! NOW let’s meet Mr. Lovecraft.

PAUSE

V. Timesuck Timeline: H. P. Lovecraft the Man

1. August 20th, 1890: Lovecraft was born Howard Phillips Lovecraft at 9AM, on August 20th, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, at his family home at 454 - then numbered 194- Angell [angel] Street.

His mother was Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, who could trace her ancestry to the arrival of George Phillips to Massachusetts way back in in 1630. According to wikipedia, software pioneer Bill Gates can also trace his lineage to Englishman George Phillips.

Dude apparently had good genes when it came to thinking up new shit.

Lovecraft’s father was Winﬁeld Scott Lovecraft - another descendant of English settlers - a traveling salesman for Gorham & Co., Silversmiths, of Providence.

Lovecraft LOVED that both of his parents were British. So much. Not sure anyone loved being of British heritage more than HP.

More about that at the end of the episode.

Lovecraft had an unusual childhood marked by tragedy - possibly sowing the seeds of what made him such a great horror writer later.

2. July 19th, 1898: His traveling salesman father developed a type of mental disorder caused by untreated syphilis when HP was around the age of three. In short - he lost his fucking mind and started talking to people who weren’t there and referenced things that had never happened - suﬀering from paranoid delusions and hallucinations for a few years before being committed to the mental ward of a local hospital in 1893 - Butler Hospital in Providence - where his mind would deteriorate further and where he would remain until his death on July 19th, 1898.

Terrible way to be introduced to the world - your earliest and only memories of your father are of a man who is completely out of his mind by the time you meet him.

Progressive syphilis really NOT pretty. We talked about it a long time in the Al Capone’s Valentine’s Day Massacre Suck back in February of 2017.

Treponema [ trep-uh-nee-muh ] pallidum is the bacterium that causes syphilis and, subsequently, it often used to develop into neurosyphilis, a bacterial infection of the brain or spinal cord.

Neurosyphilis tends to develop about 10 to 20 years after the initial infection with the bacterium. There are ﬁve diﬀerent forms of neurosyphilis, with the most common type being asymptomatic.

Papa Lovecraft wouldn’t luck out and get the no-symptom kind.

Another form - general paresis [ puh-ree-sis] is probably the type Papa Lovecraft had.

And this form often leads to numerous and severe health problems, including paranoia, mood swings, emotional troubles, personality changes, weakened muscles, a loss of the ability to use language, and dementia. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000703.htm https://www.healthline.com/health/neurosyphilis

Not a fun way to go out - to have both your mind and body deteriorate.

With the death of Lovecraft’s father, the upbringing of the boy fell to his mother, his two aunts who’d he remain close to for basically the rest of his life - Lillian and Annie - and especially his grandfather, the prominent industrialist Whipple Van Buren Phillips.

Holy shit is that a NAME.

Not a nickname. Birth name.

Who the fuck names their kid “Whipple”?

It’s not like his dad had some crazy name - his dad’s name was Jeremiah.

And Jeremiah named his son…. WHIPPLE!

Whipple sounds like a weird, highly caﬀeinated form of Snapple or something.

The taste of Snapple, with the kick of Redbull or Monster Energy!

“WHIPPLE! When you need to whip your day into shape and get shit done - pound a Whipple you lazy fuck!

I picture them having a very aggressive, verbally abusive marketing campaign.

PLAY FROM BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=vUg39QRrFzg

Stop sucking your momma’s dick you basement dwelling mouth breather and get out there and do something with your life! DRINK WHIPPLE!

Drowning in a sea of despair? Stuck in the mud of paralyzing depression? Well GET THE FUCK OVER IT! Wash your feelings down with some WHIPPLE!!!

Caught a bad case of the Monday’s? Fuck you! And fuck your family. WHIPPLE! Knock one back or throw yourself oﬀ a cliﬀ you piece of shit. WHIPPLEEEEEE!

New kickin’ Cranberry ﬂavor now available.

Press STOP

Thanks for letting me get all that Whipple nonsense out of my system.

Whipple the man actually sounds like he was a great dude.

At the age of fourteen, with his mom already deceased, his dad got accidentally crushed to death in his corn gristing mill.

Sounds absolutely terrible. Thank god being CRUSHED IN A MILL is not a common way to go out.

Whipple was now a penniless orphan.

After moving brieﬂy to Illinois, he returned home to western Rhode Island, started a grocery store, married into a banking family, parlayed some meager investments into lumber sales, dodged service in the Civil War, partnered into a railroad, became a postmaster, and later made a sum of money in coal. He even made some money oﬀ of some Idaho mining investments.

Then, at the height of his career in the early 1870's, a New England depression and some odd business deals pushed him to bankruptcy around 1874.

Whipple was done but not out!

He busted his ass and rebuilt his life. He started over and became a school teacher, a member of the Rhode Island legislature, began a sewing machine sales shop, and rebuilt his ﬁnances.

By 1878 he had met a sewing shop repairmen and inventor, Jesse Lincoln. Seizing on the novel invention of a hand operated, home silk fringer - Phillips catapulted the item to make a fortune. http://whipplevanburenphillips.blogspot.com/p/about-whipple- van-buren-phillips.html

Then he got "gold fever" in the early 1880's which led him to Idaho. His early mining interests led him to gold in the Snake River Valley of Idaho territory - we talked about the 19th century Idaho gold boom in the episode about Idaho and my grandpa - Ward Motherfuckin’ Hall.

Hail Papa Ward!

Then he came back to Rhode Island, invested in some railroads, and was doing great when Lovecraft was little. He was doing well enough to pay for HP’s father’s medical bills and raise young Lovecraft in his home.

Lovecraft was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven.

And ol’ Whipple introduced him to unnamed early science ﬁction authors in addition to giving him the classics - they had quite the library in the Phillip’s home - and he fed young HP’s imagination.

He’d also read young Lovecraft gothic horror ﬁction and HP loved it. His grandpa apparently loved to tell a good story, and would ad lib stories of gods and ghosts and monsters.

Good ol’ Whipple. He was so much more than overly- caﬀeinated Snapple.

He passed a love of Literature and specifically - fiction - to his precocious grandson. Lovecraft would later recalled reading the Arabian Nights by the age of five.

3. 1896: In 1896, at the age of six, HP was reading Greek mythology. And then Roman mythology.

Planting early seeds for his invention of his own gods later.

Lovecraft later said that as a child he was enamored by the Roman pantheon of gods, accepting them as genuine expressions of divinity and foregoing his Christian upbringing.

He recalled, at ﬁve years old, being told Santa Claus did not exist and retorting by asking - "God is not equally a myth?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

Also at the age of six, his grandmother Robie [row bee] died. Whipple’s wife.

By his own account, her death sent his entire family into "a gloom from which it never fully recovered.”

His mother's and aunts' wearing of black mourning dresses "terriﬁed" him, and it is at this time that Lovecraft, approximately ﬁve-and-a-half years old, started having nightmares that would inform his later writing.

And he started writing his own weird ﬁction right around the time of his grandmother’s death.

The ﬁrst weird story he likely wrote reading was “The Noble Eavesdropper,” possibly dating to 1896. He later destroyed it unfortunately.

Like his father, Lovecraft himself was also sickly.

During the long period of his childhood and then early adulthood following his father’s death, Lovecraft was thrown into an unhealthily close relationship with his mother, who was still suﬀering from the trauma of her husband’s illness and death.

She developed a pathological love-hate relationship with her son.

She had to be around her only child - her sweet baby boy. And also could be cruel to him - lashing out and overly criticizing him - destroying his conﬁdence.

She had her own struggles with mental health that Lovecraft witnessed. She was a nervous person - a fearful person who comes across in descriptions as melodramatic - wild mood swings - and borderline agoraphobic. She was terriﬁed, apparently, of the world outside her home.

She was also very Puritanical, rigid, and not aﬀectionate.

She sounds like a fucking LOT to deal with.

And Lovecraft’s relationship with her may have factored into his later romantic problems with women. He was NOT a lady’s man. He was a weird loner.

(Kemper) MOTHER WHY!?! WHY must you put lady troubles into my feeble boy brain MOTHER!?!

Lovecraft would spend many of his school years at home, too ill to go to school. He suﬀered from bouts of crippling anxiety and depression.

At home, he became an avid reader, devouring works on a variety of texts. Lovecraft loved the works of Edgar Allan Poe and also developed a special interest in astronomy.

4. 1898: At about the age of eight, in 1898, he discovered science, ﬁrst chemistry, then astronomy. He began to produce hectograph journals, The Scientiﬁc Gazette and The Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, for distribution amongst his friends.

Industrious kid!

5. March 28th, 1904: Then, on March 28th, 1904, when Lovecraft is at the impressionable age of 13, Grandpa Whipple dies of a stroke at the age of 70.

And this would be devastating to HP. He had been born into aﬄuence - I’m sure developed certain expectations for how prosperous his future would be - and now those expectations were smashed to pieces.

Lovecraft and his mom and her sisters are shocked to discover that Whipple’s fortunes were even worse than they’d feared.

By 1900, Whipple's various business concerns had suﬀered a downturn and his wealth was fading.

He was forced to let his family's hired servants go, leaving Lovecraft, Whipple, and one of his aunts alone in the family home.

In the spring of 1904, a few months before he’d died, Whipple's largest business venture had suﬀered a catastrophic failure.

And then he ran out of time before he could try and rebuild again.

Lovecraft and his mother were forced to move out of their lavish Victorian home almost immediately after his funeral - some sources say the very next day - and into the comparatively cramped quarters of one-half of a duplex at 598 Angell [angel] Street.

Lovecraft later called this time one of the darkest of his life.

He said he thought about killing himself.

He said the only reason he didn’t, was because he still wanted to learn so much more about the world.

Curiosity kept him around.

Hail Nimrod! It’s good to be curious.

He thankfully kept writing.

6. 1906: Things got a little better by 1906. Lovecraft’s ﬁrst appearance in print occurred that year— at the age of sixteen— when he wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal.

Shortly thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet [pah tux it] Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The Providence Tribune, The Providence Evening News, as well as The Asheville Gazette-News. 7. 1908: Then, in 1908, just prior to his graduation from high school, Lovecraft’s troubles returned. Already suﬀering from sort of nervous tic for the past several months if not years - sudden spastic movements his classmates would later reference - he suﬀered a nervous breakdown that compelled him to leave school without a diploma.

The mental health of this family - so FRAGILE.

He now didn’t get into Brown University like he’d once hoped, and this fact, and his consequent failure to ever ﬁnish high school, were sources of great shame to Lovecraft in his later years.

He fell into a deep depression in 1908, later writing he "could hardly bear to see or speak to anyone, & liked to shut out the world by pulling down dark shades & using artiﬁcial light.”

Poor bastard. Dude was struggling. Stuck at home with momma whose mind was deteriorating, as you’ll soon see.

Lovecraft became a reclusive ﬁgure for several years, staying up late studying and reading and writing and then sleeping late into the day.

Living oﬀ a dwindling inheritance.

From 1908 to 1913 Lovecraft was a virtual hermit, doing little save pursuing his astronomical interests and some poetry writing.

8. 1914: In 1914, Lovecraft joins the United Amateur Press Association.

A decision that will save him from a becoming a life-long recluse, as he later said:

“In 1914, when the kindly hand of amateur-dom was first extended to me, I was as close to the state of vegetation as any animal well can be... With the advent of the United I obtained a renewal to live; a renewed sense of existence as other than a superfluous weight; and found a sphere in which I could feel that my efforts were not wholly futile. For the first time I could imagine that my clumsy gropings after art were a little more than faint cries lost in the un-listening world.”

He found his community! His own Cult of the Curious.

He found some like-minded folk and they saved him from oblivion!

Have you found your tribe, dear meatsack? If not, you better get to looking. Seems better than constantly feeling like the odd-one out doesn’t it? Lot of diﬀerent folks in the world. Whatever kind of person you are, your people are out there.

9. 1915: In 1915, the following year, Lovecraft launched his self- published magazine The Conservative for which he wrote several essays and other pieces.

10. 1916: In 1916, Lovecraft published his early short story "The Alchemist" in the main UAPA journal.

While he’d dabbled in ﬁction early on going back to early childhood, Lovecraft has now became more serious about writing stories.

11. 1917: In 1917, he tries to join the army but MOTHER says NO!

She interferes in some way that his letters don’t make exactly clear and he is not enlisted.

The fact that she interfered at all when he is twenty-seven years old speaks volumes about their dysfunctional relationship. No way my mom would be messing with my shit at twenty-seven.

If she showed up at the recruiting oﬃce, I’d be like, “GO HOME, MOM! Go on GIT! Skat! Skeedaddle!”

Or maybe I’d just pretend not to know her.“My mom??? No. I don’t know who the fuck this crazy lady is. You should call the police. I’ll press charges. (whisper) Go on GIT LADY! Skat!”

Lovecraft then attempts to enroll in the Rhode Island National Guard and is rejected for medical reasons.

12. 1918: In 1918, still living at home with MOTHER - Lovecraft witnesses Susie suﬀer a nervous breakdown and move out to live with her other sister, Lillian.

Neighbor and friend Clara Hess, interviewed thirty years later in 1948, recalled instances of Susie describing "weird and fantastic creatures that rushed out from behind buildings and from corners at dark".

Did these creatures inﬂuence his later works? Was he talking to her and fueling her imagination with creatures he was already thinking about? We don’t know.

In the same account, Hess describes a time when they crossed paths in downtown Providence and Susie "was excited and apparently did not know where she was.”

Damn.

BOTH parents suﬀered from mental illness - SEVERE mental illness - in addition to his own struggles.

Wonder if she also ended up with syphilis? That’s never said in sources, btw.

Both parents speaking of things no one else could see. His mom claiming to see actual monsters.

And he would later devote the bulk of his writing to characters being driven mad by mysterious entities - which most of the time could not be seen.

Not a coincidence I’m sure. Clearly all of this weighed heavily on his mind. How could it not?

Susie was admitted to Butler Hospital, same place her husband died.

Lovecraft would visit her often, walking the grounds with her.

He also spends more time writing now that he has a little BREATHING room away from mother.

13. 1920: In 1920, Lovecraft began publishing the earliest stories that ﬁt into the Cthulhu Mythos [mi thos] .

The poem "Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] " and the short story "The Crawling Chaos" were written in late 1920. Following in early 1921 came "The Nameless City", the ﬁrst story that falls deﬁnitively within the Cthulhu Mythos [mi thos] .

In it is found one of Lovecraft's most enduring bits of writing, a couplet recited by his creation Abdul Alhazred, "That is not dead which can eternal lie; And with strange aeons [ee-ons] even death may die.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ H._P._Lovecraft#Early_life_and_family_tragedies

14. May 24th, 1921: On May 24th, 1921, when HP is thirty, Lovecraft’s mother dies where his father had died - in Butler Hospital.

She dies after a bungled gall bladder operation.

Lovecraft's initial reaction, expressed in a letter nine days after Susie's death, was that of an "extreme nervous shock" that crippled him physically and emotionally, again remarking that he found no reason he should continue living

But he thankfully does keep living.

And he keeps writing.

Just a few months afterwards, he meets the only known romantic interest of his life - Sonia Greene, a Russian Jewish woman seven years Lovecraft’s senior.

A pulp ﬁction author herself, and amateur publisher, she would later remark that Lovecraft was a perfectly capable lover, but that she taught him how to, well, pleasure a woman. Before her, if sounds as if he had not just never had sex, but never been romantic with another woman in any way.

He was SUCH a loner.

He was able to resist the temptations of Luciﬁna! That’s how he was able to write so many stories!

Begone Luciﬁna! I could probably have written ten or ﬁfteen VERY AWESOME novels by now if I was almost asexual you didn’t continually distract me.

15. 1923: 1923 - this was a big year for Lovecraft.

That’s when the new horror fiction magazine Weird Tales bought some of Lovecraft's stories, giving him his first taste of literary success. Previous publishing of his fiction had only occurred in amateur publications.

The following year - another big one - on March 3rd, 1924, he marries Sonia Green and moves into Sonia’s apartment in Brooklyn, and initial prospects for the couple seemed good: Lovecraft had gained a foothold as a professional writer and Sonia had a successful hat shop on Fifth Avenue in New York.

He even gets a job writing with previous Timesuck topic, famed escape artist and medium debunker - Harry Houdini. The two of them write Imprisoned with the Pharaohs - a short story commissioned by Weird Tales founder and owner, J. C. Henneberger.

Lovecraft was paid $100 - a little over $1500 in present-day dollars.

And that was the BIGGEST advance he’d ever received.

Tying this in to our recent Seven Wonders Suck, set in 1910, in Egypt, in this tale, Houdini ﬁnds himself kidnapped by a tour guide, who resembles an ancient pharaoh, and thrown down a deep hole near the Great Sphinx of Giza.

While attempting to ﬁnd his way out, he stumbles upon a gigantic ceremonial cavern and encounters the real-life deity that inspired the building of the Sphinx.

Facing ﬁnancial problems, Henneberger, wanted to associate the popular Harry Houdini with the magazine in order to boost its readership.

Houdini would hire Lovecraft for two more small jobs before dying in 1926. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprisoned_with_the_Pharaohs

Lovecraft’s bright fortunes didn’t last long in New York.

The hat shop soon went bankrupt, Lovecraft turned down the chance to edit a companion magazine to Weird Tales, and Sonia’s health took a downturn, forcing her to spend time in a New Jersey sanitarium.

Lovecraft attempted to secure work, but few were willing to hire a thirty-four-year-old-man with no job experience.

And the few that were - he got a job oﬀer in Chicago in 1924 but didn’t want to move - he turned down.

Stubborn dude.

And he was stubborn.

In an artistically admirable way.

He was so passionate about the stories he was writing now - and even though he was making very little money - his main source of income being occasional short story publishing - he refused to take any jobs that got in the way of him writing more stories.

16. January 1st, 1925: On January 1st, 1925, HP’s wife Sonia moves to Cleveland for a job….

…and now thirty-four year-old Lovecraft stays behind.

The two will never get legally divorced, but will separate and never spend time with one another again. The two actually agreed to an amicable divorce a few years later, and Sonia would later remarry not knowing the divorce was never ﬁnalized.

Lovecraft now moved into a single apartment near a run-down Brooklyn area called Red Hook. His estranged wife helped him pay his rent. He was so poor, according to one letter he wrote, he lived for three days on one loaf of bread, one can of cold beans, and a hunk of cheese.

Shortly after moving into this new apartment, his apartment was burglarized, leaving him with only the clothes he was wearing.

Over the next year, due to poverty and stress - he loses almost forty pounds.

He also writes the outline for the Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

A sad man - disillusioned with life - thinking of stories revolving around human insigniﬁcance and despair. 17. 1926: Finally, in early 1926, plans were made for Lovecraft to return to the Providence he missed so keenly.

He returned to live with his two aunts, Lillian and Annie - who had never approved of his marriage - and his uncle Ed - I think. Ed is really discussed but marriage records show they were married at this time and I assume the lived together.

Sources aren’t terribly clear.

Lillian was a widow and Annie was married to Ed.

Crazy how creatively successful this dude is viewed as now - but how ﬁnancially unsuccessful he was in life.

Nice reminder that money alone doesn’t dictate success. Just because something isn’t ﬁnancially rewarding you, that doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn't valuable.

Doesn’t mean it’s not great.

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/H._P._Lovecraft

When Lovecraft returned to Providence on April 17th, 1926, at the age of 35, settling at 10 Barnes Street north of Brown University, he started writing some of his most best-known pieces.

"The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] " came out, as I mentioned earlier, in 1928 in Weird Tales.

We’ll return to that ﬁrst story in a bit.

In his ﬁnal years, Lovecraft continued to remain barely able to support himself. He got numerous stories published in Weird Tales, and in other similar pulp magazines that had sprung up - but they never paid much, and they never led to anything more substantial in his lifetime. 18. 1933: In 1933, not long after Lillian dies, Lovecraft and his aunt Annie - and I assume Uncle Ed - move to a smaller house.

He continues to write prolifically, but now, his stories become increasingly lengthy and complex. We’ll go over one of these later - At the Mountains of Madness. They become more difficult to sell, and he’s forced to support himself - barely and never entirely - someone was always helping him - through ghost- writing stories, poetry, and nonfiction.

So sad he never found a sizable audience in his lifetime for his interesting and incredible work.

19. 1936: By 1936, time the illness that would cause his own death —cancer of the intestine—had already progressed so far that little could be done to treat it.

Lovecraft attempted to carry on in increasing pain - refusing to see a doctor because doctors and hospitals scared him - through the winter of 1936–37. I don’t blame him considering what happened with his parents.

20. June 11, 1936: On June 11th, Lovecraft good friend and fellow fantasy writer Robert E Howard takes his own life. Howard is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery fantasy subgenre. His most famous work is Conan the Barbarian - he built THAT universe. Thanks Robert - I love that one. Robert, like Lovecraft, was very close to his mom. And when his mom fell into a coma when he was just thirty years old, in a moment of extreme despair - he walked out to his car, grabbed his pistol, and shot himself in the head.

Lovecraft’s already very ill, and now he’s heartbroken. He and Robert had written numerous letters back and forth over the years and had become very close.

21. March 10th, 1937: He was ﬁnally forced to enter Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence on March 10th, 1937, where he died ﬁve days later at the age of 46.

He was buried on March 18th at the Phillips family plot at Swan Point Cemetery.

He’d die never having had a true book published in his lifetime.

But he left behind more than 60 short stories and a few novel and novellas, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Lovecraft's passing was mourned by a small but devoted following of colleagues and aspiring writers with whom he corresponded and collaborated.

Two of these friends, August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, formed a publishing company called Arkham House to promote and preserve Lovecraft's work. Eventually Lovecraft’s work became available in paperback and was translated into a dozen languages. So many more will hear of Lovecraft now.

Arkham - if it sounds familiar - was a ﬁctional Massachusetts city in Lovecraft Country - the New England Setting used by Lovecraft in his stories.

And Arkham Asylum, a ﬁctional institution in DC Comics’ Batman stories - part of the DC Comics’ universe - is named for after Lovecraft's Arkham.

A psychiatric hospital and prison - a ﬁtting nod to Lovecraft’s obsession with madness.

Let’s hop out of our timeline.

https://www.biography.com/writer/hp-lovecraft https://www.hplovecraft.com/life/biograph.aspx

VI. The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo]

A. Origins

Now that we know a little bit more about H. P. Lovecraft the man, let’s examine the short story that would introduce Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] to the world and build the beginning of his mythos [mi thos] .

He said he got the idea for the ﬁrst chapter of Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] from a dream.

The first seed of the story's first chapter The Horror in Clay came from a dream he had in 1919, when he was twenty-eight, which he described briefly in two different letters sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21st and December 14th, 1920.

In the dream, Lovecraft is visiting an antiquity museum in Providence, attempting to convince the aged curator there to buy an odd bas-relief Lovecraft himself had sculpted, who initially scoﬀs at him for trying to sell something recently made to a museum of antique objects.

In the dream, Lovecraft answered the curator with the response:

"Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden- girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams."

Jesus.

Dude had WAY smarter dreams that I do. that made a lot more sense.

I hardly ever remember my dreams, and when I do remember my dreams - it’s usually something random and fucked up. Like, I’m dating my former mother-in-law but I don’t want to be, but I have to do because it’s keeping my dog alive, and no one can go to France if I don’t - and everyone’s mad cause the train is late and I don’t even want to be on the train because I need to be back at the oﬃce to make my sandwich.

I don’t get a seed for a cool short story.

I just wake up with a feeling of, “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

Lovecraft then used this for a brief synopsis of a new story outlined in his notebook at ﬁrst in August of 1925, which developed organically out of the idea of what the bas-relief [bass relief] in the dream actually might have depicted.

In a footnote for his writing down of his own dream, Lovecraft then ﬁnished with the suggestion "Add good development & describe nature of bas-relief [bass relief]" to himself for future reference.

Once he’d drafted The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] - H. P. didn’t love it.

Didn’t hate it either - just wasn’t his favorite story.

Lovecraft regarded the short story as "rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches".

Initially, Weird Tales rejected it, and it was only after a friend of Lovecraft’s lied to the editor and told him that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere that it was accepted for publication.

Crafty. That’s a good friend.

Now let’s go through this story point-by-point. It’s not a long tale. Let’s dig into the beginning of HP’s world of cosmic horror.

B. Plot Summary

The story's narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of various notes left behind by his great uncle, George Gammell Angell [angel] a prominent professor of Semitic languages at Brown University who died in the winter of 1926.

Angell is spelled in this story with two l’s - just like the street Lovecraft lived on with Papa Whipple and the house after that as well. Love little personal touches like that.

It begins:

PLAY FROM BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ax7fxaxcT3c&t=73s

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of inﬁnity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or ﬂee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

PRESS STOP

These opening lines, some of the most famous words H.P. Lovecraft ever wrote, work to frame the fear- and awe-inspiring cosmological scale of the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] mythos [mi thos] revelations that are to follow.

The unfathomable power, remoteness, and magnitude of Lovecraft's beasts remind Thurston of mankind's insignificance as nascent colonizers of a planet hanging "in the midst of black seas of infinity." Thurston's nihilistic tone betrays the gravity of his findings, even before he has related them to the reader.

Now we get into the story. It’s actually several stories— all the notes of people who have, in one way or another, interacted with these strange beings.

The ﬁrst chapter, "The Horror in Clay", concerns a small bas- relief sculpture found among the notes.

PLAY STARTING AT :10 SECONDS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd54ArIzqzI

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”

PRESS STOP

This is Thurston's description of the ceramic sculpture of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] that his granduncle possessed. Here’s where the theme of language ﬁrst comes in— Thurston can describe other people’s descriptions of it, but he still starts to doubt his sense of language and reality.

Despite the fact that Thurston can see what the creature looks like, its appearance is still baﬄing and otherworldly. In fact, the statue is so strange that Thurston feels the needs to justify what he sees by blaming his "extravagant imagination."

The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based his creation on a dream Henry had of "great Cyclopean cities of titanic blocks and sky-ﬂung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.”

Before his death, the narrator’s uncle Angell had also discovered reports of "mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world— including a group of people who dressed in white robes while awaiting a “glorious fulﬁllment.”

Cult! Cult! Cult!

The second chapter, "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse” [luh grahs] , discusses the ﬁrst time the Professor had heard the word "Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] " and seen a similar image. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, a New Orleans police oﬃcial named John Raymond Legrasse [luh grahs] asked the assembled antiquarians to identify an idol carved from a mysterious greenish-black stone.

Legrasse [luh grahs] had discovered the relic months before in the swamps south of New Orleans, during his raid on a voodoo cult.

The idol resembles Wilcox's sculpture from the ﬁrst chapter, and represented a "thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters.”

On November 1st, 1907, Legrasse [luh grahs] led a party of fellow policemen in search of several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community.

Lovecraft writes:

PLAY AT :13 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTcZEt-T86U

“Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s [luh grahs] men as they plowed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muﬄed tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.”

The police found the victims' "oddly marred" bodies being used in a ritual where 100 men—all of a "mentally aberrant type"—were "braying, bellowing, and writhing" and repeatedly chanting the phrase: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn".

After killing ﬁve of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse [luh grahs] interrogated the men before learning "the central idea of their loathsome faith":

PICK UP PREVIOUS AMBIENT SOUND VIDEO WHERE LEFT OFF

"They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men ... and ... formed a cult which had never died ... hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] , from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him."

PRESS STOP

The prisoners identify the conﬁscated idol as Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] himself, and translate their mysterious phrase as "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] waits dreaming."

One particularly talkative cultist, known as Old Castro, named the center of their cult as Irem, the City of Pillars in Arabia, and referred to a phrase in the Necronomicon: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

The Necronomicon is a ﬁctional grimoire [ greem-wahr ] —or book of curses—that appears in several of Lovecraft's tales.

For Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi fans - this Necronomicon would be the inspiration for the Evil Dead trilogy’s Necronomicon.

Fuck yeah.

Also known as “The Book of the Dead" and "Naturom [not ur ohm] Demonto” [dih mon toe] - it’s an ancient Sumerian text that has the power to harness the The Kandarian [kan darr ian] Demon an ancient demonic spirit that is the primary source for the creation of Deadites and several other types of supernatural occurrences upon the world of the living.

Basically - some college kids ﬁnd this book and accidentally release a bunch of demonic entities - all Hell breaks loose and chaos ensues.

Really fun cult classic campy humor B-horror franchise.

“This is my BOOMSTICK!” - how can you NOT love Ash?

And the book it’s based around is inspired by Lovecraft.

Back to Inspector Legrasse [luh grahs] - he’s spoken with some cultists.

And now he’s come to the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri to ask them if they know anything about this…. Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] and if they recognize the small carven idol the cultists in Louisiana were found worshipping.

One of the academics present at the meeting - is a guy named William Channing Webb, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University.

He states that during an 1860 expedition to the western coast of Greenland, he encountered "a singular tribe of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness".

Webb claims the Greenland cult possessed both the same chant and a similar "hideous" fetish. Thurston, the narrator, reﬂects that "My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were.”

Meaning by this time, reading his grandfather’s notes - he was still a skeptic. But he’d soon not be….

Now onto the third chapter, “The Madness from the Sea”.

Thurston reads an article dated April 18th, 1925, from the Sydney Bulletin, an Australian newspaper.

He begins by express his deep regret that he ever found the Sydney Bulletin article that led him to Johansen's diary.

It begins:

“If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total eﬀacing of the results of a mere change which ﬁxed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper.”

The article reports the discovery of a derelict ship in the Paciﬁc Ocean with only one survivor—a Norwegian sailor named Gustaf Johansen, second mate on board the Emma, a schooner which originally sailed from New Zealand.

On March 22, the Emma encountered a heavily armed yacht, the Alert, crewed by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas [ kuh-nak-uh] and half-castes" from Dunedin [duh need un], New Zealand.

Kanaka [ kuh-nak-uh] means South Sea Islander in this context. It can also mean “native Hawaiian.”

That city of 135,000 looks so fucking cool, btw. Beauty of a city. Holy shit I looked it up on Youtube so I’d know how to pronounce the damn place - my instinct said to say “Done din” - what the fuck? And I fell in love with this place.

Sorry - couldn’t not comment on how beautiful that city looks. Back to the puzzle Lovecraft’s narrator is piecing together.

After being attacked by the Alert without provocation, the crew of the Emma killed everyone aboard, but lost their own ship in the battle.

Commandeering their opponent's vessel, the surviving crew members travel on and arrive at an uncharted island.

With the exception of Johansen and a fellow sailor, who then died as they made their way back to Auckland, New Zealand due to madness from seeing whatever was on that uncharted island, the remaining crew members perish on the island.

Johansen never reveals the cause of their death.

Thurston travels to New Zealand and then Australia, where at the Australian Museum, he views a statue retrieved from the Alert with a “cuttleﬁsh head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal".

FUCKING Cthulhu!! [kuh thoo loo]

Same monster those cult weirdos in Louisiana were worshipping.

Thurston now travels to Oslo, Norway - another gorgeous city, holy shit - where he learns that Johansen died suddenly.

Johansen's widow provides Thurston with a manuscript written by her late husband, which reveals the fate of everyone aboard the Emma.

Thurston writes these lines after apprehending Johansen's diary: “I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me til I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise.”

In the diary, the uncharted island Johansen came across in the the South Paciﬁc is described as "a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh".

Duh, duh DUHHHH!!!!!

The crew struggle in comprehending the non-Euclidean geometry of their surroundings. When one of the sailors accidentally opens a "monstrously carven portal", he releases none other than Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] .

PLAY FROM BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Q6kO-X-ZQ

“The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled…

"It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway. ... The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vingtillions of years, Great Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] was loose again and ravening for delight."

PRESS STOP

Johansen and a sailor named Briden climb aboard the yacht before sailing away. However, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] dives into the ocean and pursues their ﬂeeing vessel.

Johansen then strangely turns his yacht around and rams it directly into the creature's head, which bursts with "a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunﬁsh—only to immediately begin regenerating.”

The Alert escapes from R'lyeh, with Briden having gone completely insane - there’s that Lovecraftian madness again- and dying soon afterwards.

After ﬁnishing the manuscript, Thurston realizes he's now a possible target, thinking: “I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.”

Thurston realizes he has discovered more than he can sanely withstand, and fears he has become a target for assassination by Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] cultists. His ﬁnal line is a send-oﬀ:

“Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

This ﬁnal line implies that the reader, too, has now become cursed, by knowing too much about the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] cult.

DAMN IT!

I’ve read this story four fucking times now - I’m TRIPLE CURSED.

Fuck Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] up, Nimrod! Git him! Yip, yip, yaw!

Now that we know the contents of the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] story — what about this story made it so scary to initial readers? What about still creeps so many out in a lingering, memorable way?

Literary analysts have some thoughts.

They feel a lot of the fear - and the fear with cosmic horror in general - hinges on the premise that we use language to interpret reality and these monsters are beyond language— so they are beyond our reality.

Fear of the unknown is so instinctively strong - and they are SUPER unknown.

My wife Lynze is super afraid of the possibility of alien species visiting our world.

I ﬁnd it exciting, she ﬁnds it terrifying.

Why?

The unknown. In her mind, IF aliens are real, and IF they show up here on Earth, and then IF they encounter us - we have no idea what their intentions are. What they might and could do to us.

If she was a kid in the 1920s and 1930s, Weird Tales would have freaked her the fuck out.

I’m willing the role the dice. I’m so curious. I want to see them.

That theme of “what is real? - what is reality?” begins with the fact that Lovecraft composes "The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] " in the epistolary [ ih-pistol larry ] format, written as a series of documents.

Speciﬁcally, Lovecraft's story follows a recursive epistolary [ ih- pistol larry ] structure of letters, and letters-within-letters, and so forth.

The further Thurston delves into these manuscripts and the reported memories and dreamscapes they unfold, the more tenuous his grip on his own sanity becomes.

The more documents he reads, the more he wonders— what’s real? What’s not? Is he real?

Again I think of Lovecraft’s own experiences with insanity here. By the time he wrote all this, his own father had gone insane and died in a mental hospital. And then his mother had ALSO gone insane and ended up dying in the same hospital. And he had a nervous breakdown himself, several episodes of severe depression. Several long bouts of crippling anxiety.

Of COURSE one of his greatest fears is going to be losing his mind.

Lovecraft's ﬁction in this story and others imagines reading and writing as cursed acts, and represents the theme of the human quest for forbidden cosmological knowledge to be at once irresistible to a certain kind of intellectual seeker and a cursed enterprise.

You can know things about the universe— but only at a price. And there’s no guarantee that you’ll even understand what you learn. And sometimes the price you pay for trying to understand is having your grip on reality permanently and irrevocably loosened.

What makes Lovecraft's monsters unique - especially for the time he wrote them in - is that they simply defy human comprehension, which explains why the many fumbling attempts by the story's characters to ascribe detail to them via oral and written forms of communication inevitably fail.

What pours out of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] 's monolith is described as "a darkness almost material"—a literalization of something unknown and insensible to the human mind.

Awareness of Cthulhu’s [kuh thoo loos] reality changes everything the characters think they know about the world.

What if all the old religions are wrong?

What if there ARE gods - but NOT the gods we’ve been told to worship?

What if there are terrifying gods and what if they never left the Earth? They’ve been right here with us the whole time, sleeping. And now they’re awakening again. And a terror we never even dreamt of is awakening with them?

Yeah - scary shit.

Lovecraft would write more about Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo].

And he would introduce new gods and monsters into his growing universe that other authors would add details to after his death. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/ﬁction/cc.aspx

So who are some of the other beings in this strange ﬁctional universe?

Let’s meet some. But ﬁrst. Just one moresponsor.

PLAY FROM BEGINNING https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=vUg39QRrFzg

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PUSH STOP

Sorry about that. I didn’t even want to run that add. The founder of Whipple pistol whipped me until I agreed to read that.

VII. Other Eldritch Monsters/Places:

https://bookstr.com/list/top-ten-h-p-lovecraft-monsters-who-arent- Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] _Mythos [mi thos] _deities#Table_of_Great_Old_Ones

A. Great Old Ones:

Let’s start oﬀ with the broad category to which Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] belongs— the Great Old Ones.

An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of the cosmic horrors that exist in the universe, with Lovecraft constantly referring to the "Great Old Ones": a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep.

The majority of these have physical forms that the human mind is incapable of processing; simply viewing them renders the viewer incurably…. can you guess?

Yes - insane!

MADNESS!

There are dozens of these— just gonna mention a few.

1. Kassogtha: Starting oﬀ with Kassogtha, Cthulhu’s [kuh thoo loo] sister and mate.

Of COURSE that big monster is a sister fucker.

She’s described as literally just a big pile of tentacles and in turn gave birth to Nctosa and Ncothlu, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] ’s daughters.

Don’t bother with pronunciation updates for those fucked up names - Lovecraft nerds. Not even Howard Phillips Lovecraft knew how to actually say this shit.

Everyone’s guessing.

As for Kassogtha herself, her abilities are ill deﬁned but she can grab her victims with her tendrils and yank them in to devour them whole.

She’s also noted for being particularly bad tempered and violent, causing other Old Ones to tread carefully around her.

Love it.

Love that other monsters are like, “What the fuck is Kassogtha’s problem today? I just asked her how she was doing and she destroyed a whole city and said ‘you’re next!!’”

2. Azathoth:

Next Great Old One!

“The Blind Idiot God’, Azathoth is basically a sentient singularity, sitting at the very center of the universe.

Azathoth lies constantly in a deep slumber, kept there by other powerful deities who constantly sing to the creature to keep him in his induced, eternal hibernation.

For if Azathoth were to ever awaken, the entire universe would end just like that. All it would need is a moment where it opens its eyes and boom! Everything gone.

That’s fun. No pressure on those other gods to keep singing.

I had hard time ﬁguring out what song Lovecraft said they had to sing, and when I found out what song it was - REALLY not what I was expecting, but now that I know it, of course it would have to be this song.

PLAY AT :19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqMGUHPbcBI (I keep forgettin’ lyric video - play as long as it feels right)

YES! Of course it has to be sang some Michael Motherfuckin’ McDonald! Who ELSE!?! Who else could sooth the great god but Triple M???

Been FAR too long since I McDonald’d you.

Hail Triple M! Continue to croon Azathoth to sleep and save the universe.

3. Y’golonac:

NEXT GOD!

Y’golonac is a god of pure evil and sadism, who just straight up enjoys torturing humans.

He gets oﬀ on dozens of perversions that can barely be conceived by human imagination and perception, his acts stretching the limits of human comprehension.

Sounds like someone Albert Fish, Bob Berdella, the Truck Stop Killer Robert Ben Rhoades, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Ng, Leonard Lake, and other torturous serial killing dirtbags we’ve covered would have enjoyed worshipping.

He takes a physical form through possessing human hosts -, manifesting as an obese man without a head or neck, with a mouth in the palm of his hands.

He seeks humans with similar perverse tastes to become his servants, coming to them when they read forbidden literature.

His true form is sealed behind a wall of bricks, deep in ancient ruins beneath the earth.

I love this guy’s fucked up imagination.

4. Yog-Sothoth:

Yog-Sothoth is another incomprehensible being. It deﬁes visualization. Although it does appear to humans usually as a mass of glowing orbs or other strange tendrils reaching out from the abyss.

There is an agreement between many writers and fans that Yog- Sothoth is an omniscient being outside of the material realm, meaning that it is ultimately a god that knows all.

Here’s a description of this outer god that comes from a Lovecraft fan site:

PICK UP ON THE “ Dark Ambient Music (Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Horror, Suspenseful) “ WHERE IT LEFT OFF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Q6kO-X-ZQ

“It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self— not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no conﬁnes and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG- SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign…"

PRESS STOP

https://cosmic-horror-rp.fandom.com/wiki/Yog-Sothoth

Two more Great Old Ones.

5. Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] :

Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] - also known as the crawling chaos.

It is an evil god that can shape-shift into over a thousand diﬀerent forms. The character was ﬁrst found in Lovecraft’s poem titled Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] .

And this is the one thought to have inﬂuenced Stephen King when he conceptualized his most infamous bad guy, Randall Flagg.

That ﬁrst poem was published in 1920 and is part of the original Lovecraftian canon. This being also appeared in a few other stories published throughout the years.

This beast is so scary that like the sight of a basilisk [ bas-uh- lisk], one glance is enough to drive a man insane. When it assumes the form of a human, it turns into an Egyptian Pharaoh.

6. Rhogog:

And last one - referred to as the The Bearer of the Cup of the Blood of the Ancients - there is Rhogog. Rhogog is a black leaﬂess oak tree, hot to the touch and with a single red eye at the center.

And what does it DO!?!

Um…. well… it is a being of darkness, holder of unimaginable power.

What kind of power?

DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT! UNIMAGINABLE!?! Just know it’s really, really bad.

Now to some of the other non-God creations.

B. Mi-Go:

Let’s talk about the Mi-Go— strange alien types. An extraterrestrial species from the planet Yuggoth - implied to be the dwarf planet Pluto.

With an appearance like a cross between fungus and lobsters, mi- gos are…. fucking weird.

They ﬂy through the vacuum of space, zooming between Earth and Pluto with the aid of their supernatural wings.

They worship other Lovecraft gods, acting as servants to them, being classiﬁed as a hostile and rather vicious alien species.

In ancient times, they waged a war here on Earth against the Elder Things - a diﬀerent alien species - long before humans came into existence.

C. Ghast: The humanoid Ghast is not exactly the ﬁrst monster that people conjure when they think of one of Lovecraft’s monsters, which is a shame since Lovecraft gave us a huge collection of awful beasts to choose from.

The Ghast has no nose or forehead but boasts a pair of kangaroo legs with hooves, with which they hop around and scoop up all of the delicious Gugs they can eat.

Speaking of Gugs…

https://puzzleboxhorror.com/lovecraft-week03/ D. Gug: Banished to the underworld for appalling oﬀenses done against the Great Ones, these giant monsters live in huge towers in their underworld home. Hello Hollow Earth!

Their arms split into multiple forearms with massive talons and razor-sharp tooth-ﬁlled mouths that open vertically. Despite this terrifying description of these horrible monsters, they’re still Ghast food, which really speaks to how scary those fuckers are.

Four more, starting with Shoggoths

https://puzzleboxhorror.com/lovecraft-week03/

E. Shoggoths:

The Shoggoths were created by the Elder Things as a slave race, taking the form of grotesque blobs covered in dozens of eyes. They have tremendous strength and are nearly invincible against forms of physical attack.

Eventually, they developed a consciousness of their own and rebelled against the Elder Things, resulting in them roaming the dark spaces of the world in the modern day.

Creators of the monstrous Shoggoth race, the Elder Things aren’t actually all that evil - not compared to the other monsters present in the Lovecraftian universe - despite the fact that just laying eyes upon their starﬁsh-plant hybrid alien forms will drive the viewer to madness.

SO MUCH MADNESS! Lovecraft was mostly about madness.

And talking about all these monsters - I can’t stop thinking about Dungeons and Dragons right now. And Magic the Gathering. And Stranger Things.

Just like the Mi-go, the Elder Things are actually aliens who built colossal cities and societies that predated all human civilizations; the Elder Things had a history of chaos and war between the Mi-go and the Great Race of Yith.

F. Yith: Another great race of aliens created by Lovecraft, the Great Race of Yith is a foe that battles with the Mi-go and the Shoggoths.

The Planet Yith was set to be destroyed billions of years ago, but the inhabitants used their psychic powers to install their consciousness into the hardiest race of creatures they could ﬁnd.

So the Great Race of Yith became a four-armed, conical Earth- bound race; one set of arms had claws, the other a set of horns and then their head had eyes, ears, and of course, the Lovecraftian- famous tentacles.

And where are these bastards today? They’re not. They don’t exist presently. They only exist in the past AND in the future.

Smart.

Because this Great Race can travel through time - they foresaw their own destruction by the Flying Polyps - yet another group of weird, destructive, fucked-up aliens.

So - before the fateful day of their inevitable demise, the Yith transferred their best minds forward through time into the bodies of the "beetle folk" - the coleopterous race - Earth's dominant species in the future after humankind is destroyed somewhere between eight and ﬁfty million CE.

Before becoming beetle folk, the Yith collective minds into a vegetable species living on Mercury.

NOICE!

G. WOHSIDEUNAKS: Now for the Woh-sideun-aks.

The Woh-sideun-aks were like a strange cross between frogs, leopards, salmon, and small tanks.

A race of Cyborgs from GooTall-ih-stook, they have mechanically enhanced bodies shaped like atoms.

The secreted a substance similar to custard and made a “meep Tweet” kind of sound that signaled telepathic thoughts of terror.

Their tongues came out of their eyes and their eyes were where a tongue should be - making them vulnerable to attack while eating because that’s when they were kind of blind. That’s the only time you could hope to kill one before it killed you.

And their primary function in the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] mythos was… to suck Lovecraft’s dick.

You heard me.

That’s probably why he wasn’t terribly interested in earth women.

The man had a cosmic hard on for Woh-sideun-aks.

Their vaginas were made of metal and shaped like an inverted donut crossed with a parallelogram.

And they had seven breasts made out of the smell of poppyseed muﬃns shaped like aluminum that tasted like the color teal.

Can you picture all that? NO!?! OF COURSE NOT!

They are TOO MUCH FOR YOUR FEEBLE HUMAN MIND TO COMPREHEND!

Think not of the Woh-sideun-aks for you will GO MAD! And also - it is a waste of time to think on them since I clearly made all that up.

I wonder how many Lovecraft super fans acted like they’d heard of those things before I got to the blowjob part because they simply couldn’t bear the thought of NOT knowing about one of his many strange, cosmic creatures?

“Oh yeah, the Woh-sideun-aks. Yes, of course I have! I know everything Lovecraft. GooTall-ih-stook - I thought that’s where they were from.”

H. Father Dagon [ dey-gon ]: Last one comes from the ﬁrst story Lovecraft had published in Weird Tales - Dagon [ dey-gon ].

Father Dagon [ dey-gon ] - as he’s called by his worshippers - is a deity who rules over the Deep Ones - an ocean-dwelling race of ﬁsh people things who love to fuck humans.

Not kidding this time. They ﬁnd us super hot. Cultists can entice them to the surface through ritualistic orgies.

Hail Luciﬁna I think!

Father Dagon [ dey-gon ] is a gigantic sea creature that dwells in the seas.

Worshipped by a devout cult of humans and Deep Ones, Dagon [ dey-gon ] only appears physically in the short story named after him, where he erupts from the ocean to embrace an unholy monolith.

His existence though - casts a long shadow over other stories.

These are just some of the creatures that populate the universe Lovecraft created that inspired many of his contemporaries to build onto towards the end of his life and after his death.

A universe authors still set stories in today.

A universe that continues to inspire the imaginations of those drawn towards Lovecraft’s cosmic horror.

Now - to once more showcase the strange world these creatures lived in - let us dig into arguable his most famous story outside of The Call of Cthulhu - “At the Mountains of Madness.”

It was written in February/March 1931 and rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length.

It was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of another pulp magazine - Astounding Stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness

And it has been reproduced in numerous collections.

In this tale, on September 2nd, 1930, the Pabodie Expedition, from Miskatonic University in Arkham, sets oﬀ for Antarctica.

A small advanced group, led by Professor Lake, discovers the remains of fourteen prehistoric life-forms previously unknown to science, and also unidentiﬁable as either plants or animals.

Six of the specimens have been badly damaged, while another eight have been preserved in pristine condition. The specimens' stratum places them far too early on the geologic time scale for the features of the specimens to have evolved.

When the main expedition loses contact with Lake's party, a geologist named Dyer and his colleagues investigate.

Lake's camp is devastated, with the majority of men and dogs slaughtered, while a man named Gedney and one of the dogs are absent.

Near the expedition's campsite, they ﬁnd six star-shaped snow mounds with one specimen under each. They also discover that the better preserved life-forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on both an unnamed man and a dog.

The missing man is suspected of having gone utterly insane and having killed and mutilated all the others.

Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth ﬂy an airplane across the mountains, which they identify as the outer walls of a vast, abandoned stone city, alien to any human architecture.

For their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, the builders of this lost civilization are dubbed the "Elder Things."

By exploring these fantastic structures, the men learn through hieroglyphic murals that the Elder Things ﬁrst came to Earth shortly after the Moon took form, and built their cities with the help of "shoggoths" — biological entities created to perform any task, assume any form, and reﬂect any thought. There is a hint that all Earthly life evolved from cellular material left over from the creation of the shoggoths.

We are all PART SHOGGOTH! Team Meatsack and Team SHOGGOTH!

As more buildings are explored, the explorers learn about the Elder Things' conﬂict with both the Star-spawn of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] and the Mi-Go, who arrived on Earth shortly afterwards.

The murals also allude to an unnamed evil lurking within an even larger mountain range located beyond the city. This mountain range rose in one night and certain phenomena and incidents deterred the Elder Things from exploring it.

When Antarctica became uninhabitable, even for the Elder Things, they soon migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.

Dyer and Danforth eventually realize that the Elder Things missing from the advance party's camp had somehow returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, have returned to their city.

They are ultimately drawn towards the entrance of a tunnel, into the subterranean region depicted in the murals. Here, they ﬁnd evidence of various Elder Things killed in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering placidly, apparently used as livestock.

Penguin-cows. Those evil bastards feed on some of our cutest creatures. Of COURSE they do! Probably some kitten and puppy cows around there too if you looked hard enough.

The men are then confronted by a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a shoggoth, and escape. Aboard the plane, high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something which causes him to lose his own sanity.

Dyer concludes the Elder Things are survivors of a bygone era, who slaughtered Lake's group in either self-defense or scientiﬁc curiosity.

Their civilization was eventually destroyed by the shoggoths, which now prey on the enormous penguins. He warns the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from the site. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/ﬁction/mm.aspx https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness

Here’s a cool passage from this story - Dyer recalling his and Danforth’s escape from the ancient and evil Antarctic city as best he can:

Previous video - play from where it left oﬀ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8Q6kO-X-ZQ

“Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream-fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion.

It was as if we ﬂoated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The grey half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog.

They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will ﬁnd them still undisturbed.

It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we ﬁrst felt the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced; but not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky.

There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty- foot cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race’s early and un- decayed technique – a farewell from the Old Ones, written ﬁfty million years ago.

Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled blocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east.

The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape.

The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice- vapours, and the cold clutched at our vitals.

Wearily resting the outﬁt-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate ﬂight, we re-buttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aëroplane waited.

Of what had set us ﬂeeing from the darkness of earth’s secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.

In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills – the probable ancient terrace – by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead.

Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below us – once more outlined mystically against an unknown west.

As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapours having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite deﬁnite or conclusive.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elﬁn line of pinnacled violet whose needle- pointed heights loomed dream-like against the beckoning rose-color of the western sky.

Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow.

For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls.

For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land – highest of earth’s peaks and focus of earth’s evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night – beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively.

We were the ﬁrst human beings ever to see them – and I hope to God we may be the last.”

PRESS STOP

More madness! More hints of cosmic horror too terrible to properly describe.

I think Lovecraft is great at turning on your imagination because he doesn’t spell out ALL the details. He lets you ﬁll in the holes as you see you ﬁt.

He provides the backdrop of despair and anxiety - and the dark mood of impending doom.

He makes it clear that horrors await - powerful, evil horrors - but he stops short of spelling out what those horrors are. He only gives a vague shape to the monsters, knowing the reader will want more and be forced to come up with the rest of the details on their own, thus tailoring the story to the darkest imaginings of their own minds.

Well played, Lovecraft. Well played!

Kadath is some unknown and horrible ancient city, by the way. Leng is a cold arid plateau on which this city may sit.

In the posthumously published Lovecraft story, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, both are mentioned. It’s not clear if they exist only in dreams, or in the “real” quote/unquote Lovecraftian universe.

VIII.Controversies:

Now - time to address some controversies regarding Lovecraft I referenced earlier before wrapping this baby up.

Lovecraft… not surprisingly…. was a bit of a lunatic.

He was an anglophile - a person who LOVES all things British. He felt that the world’s best writers were British. The world’s best culture was British. He supported the British monarchy. He actually opposed democracy and thought that America should be governed by an aristocracy. He probably ONLY jerked oﬀ to erotic thoughts of British women.

He proudly proclaimed that his bloodlines had not been tainted by anyone not British.

He was almost correct. He had a tiny bit of Irish and Welsh in the family tree - he was close.

And he was SO into being British that his pride turned into racism, and he thought anyone and everyone who were NOT of British descent were inferior to various degree.

That’s what the guy who spent the majority of his life living with Mommy and/or his aunts thought.

That HE was superior.

Even though he married a Jewish woman, he was actually incredibly racist - even by the standards of his own era.

Lovecraft’s bigotry is most evident in his voluminous correspondence.

He wrote somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 letters in his lifetime. SO many fucking letters. Often numerous letters a day.

And in his letters, he candidly expressed contempt for Jews, Black people and non-white immigrants and voiced an overwhelming fear of “miscegenation.” [ mi-sej-uh-ney-shuhn] or, marriage between races.

He praised Southerners for “resorting to extra-legal measures such as lynching” in their eﬀorts to keep the races separate, writing “Anything is better than the mongrelization which would mean the hopeless deterioration of a great nation.”

Eeek.

In 1912, he actually wrote a poem called “On the Creation of [N- word],” which imagines Black people as “beast[s]” wrought by the gods “in semi-human ﬁgure ﬁlled with vice.”

Dude was SO racist, he had a cat named [N-word] Man.

And that cat ran away when he was 14. So actually, his FAMILY had that cat.

He was raised in a SUPER racist household. His family never approved of his marriage to Sonia Greene because she was Jewish.

Why was he so racist?

Part of it was the time he lived in.

A lot of people were racist to some degree in the early 20th century.

Also - clearly - his upbringing had a lot to do it. When your family is okay with the name of that cat - you’re being raised in a way that is almost undoubtably going to turn you into an aggressive racist.

And then there’s mental illness.

Like his mom, he was a super anxious, fearful person.

He was afraid of the world around him. Of people diﬀerent than him.

He was ﬁlled with fear all the time - fear that also made his ﬁction great. He was a weird recluse for almost all his life, holed up in a home with family who I have to imagine were probably also super racist.

So should we sick cancel culture on Lovecraft in some revisionist way?

I don’t think so.

Why?

What good would that do?

I think we address it, talk about it, and move on.

Dude’s long dead. He’s not gonna fucking care if we scrap his work now or not.

And, racist or not… he wrote a lot of great shit. You can’t just take that away from him. He also wrote a lot of shit that people of all races have since enjoyed.

AND … think about this especially woke listeners possibly cringing right now - currently, a black man and executive producer, Jordan Peele, is making FAR more money oﬀ of Lovecraft via the show Lovecraft Country on HBO than Lovecraft himself ever made.

Lovecraft Country is a series about a young black man, Atticus Finch, who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his ﬁctional tales.

Cancelling Lovecraft now would be A) illogical, and B) it would take a lot of work away from a talented cast full of black actors - like Jonathan Majors who plays Atticus Finch, and actors of numerous other races.

All of these actors are making are more in life than Lovecraft ever did. The show’s helping support a lot of non-white, not-British families and advance a lot of non-white, not-British careers.

So in a way - he’s already being punished.

Also - he lived a pretty punishing life. I mean, you heard me talk about it - dude never did anything but struggle. And then he died a painful and young death.

I also like to think that, if he were revived somehow, and could meet this cast, he would see the error of his early 20th century ways.

And if he didn’t? Well, then he’d be a racist son of a bitch who still wrote some really cool cosmic horror a long time ago.

I like to separate the art from the artist as possible. Hard enough to ﬁnd artists I really like - if I also have to approve of all their personal stances to enjoy what they create, ah shit, I’m gonna be left with almost no one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Personal_views https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-08-13/ lovecraft-country-hbo-hp-lovecraft-racism-explained

IX. Recap

Now let’s recap.

H. P. Lovecraft has been sucked!

Born in Providence, Lovecraft struggled to make ends meet almost his entire life. He wasn’t conventionally successful. He dabbled in publishing but it never paid the bills.

But that wouldn’t stop him from basically reinventing horror.

Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was “cosmic horror,” the basic premise of which is that the true workings of the universe are beyond human comprehension and that humanity's place in the cosmos is terrifyingly insigniﬁcant.

A key feature of many of his stories is the existence of powerful, extraterrestrial or supernatural entities that inﬂuence or threaten the human world in subtle ways, and whose mere perception by human observers often drives the latter to madness.

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is one of the Great Old Ones, a group of powerful beings from another place that now inhabit Earth, waiting to rise up - when the stars are right - and destroy the human race so they can rule the planet.

The story that would put Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] on the map was the 1928 short story “The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] .”

In it, it is said that Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] currently lies in a dreamlike state in the underwater sunken city of R’lyeh, waiting for the time when the Old Ones shall rise again.

It would be this story, and many others, that would be the sees of the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] , an expansive ﬁctional world that many people have contributed to.

And although Lovecraft's readership was limited during his life, his reputation has grown over the decades, and he is now commonly regarded as one of the most inﬂuential horror writers of the 20th century.

Lovecraft and his stories have had a profound impact on popular culture, from movies to television and books, from Neil Gaiman [gay mun] to Stephen King to Stranger Things- to the X Files and more.

Even heavy metal bands and video games have been inspired by him.

Weird British-hard-on-having reclusive super racist or not - it’s hard to imagine the world of horror without him.

Now let’s head to today's takeaways.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

X. Top Five Takeaways:

1. Number one! H. P. Lovecraft was a master of horror. He understood deeply that terrifying monsters were terrifying not only because they represented a physical threat to us but because they could make us doubt our own sense of reality.

2. Number two! Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] is a scary-as-fuck ancient being trapped beneath the Earth that’s basically a giant clusterfuck of tentacles and other animal features.

He’s the source of all human anxiety— just seeing him will drive you insane— and the object of a bunch of cults.

CULT! CULT! CULT!

3. Number three! H. P. Lovecraft’s influence on horror is hard to understate. He influenced so many authors, filmmakers, and others.

He basically invented his own subgenera of horror, “cosmic horror,” that plays on people’s fear of the unknown as it relates to space and whether or not something much more powerful lurks somewhere out there, a theme that’s been explored in countless pieces of media since.

4. Number four! The Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] truly is one of the most expansive pieces of lore ever created, written by a number of science ﬁction and horror writers.

You too can contribute to the Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Mythos [mi thos] — unless you’re afraid of what knowledge you might discover!

5. Number ﬁve! New info! Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] has ALSO entered the world of politics.

The monster has appeared as a parody candidate in several elections, including the 2010 Polish presidential election and the 2012 and 2016 US presidential elections.

The faux campaigns usually satirize voters who claim to vote for the “lesser evil.”

In 2016, the troll account known as "The Dark Lord Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] " submitted an oﬃcial application to be on the Massachusetts Presidential Ballot. The account raised over $4000 from fans to fund the campaign through a gofundme.com page.

Gofundme removed the campaign page and refunded contributions.

C’mon, GoFund! Have a sense of humor!

The Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] Party in the UK, another pseudo- political organization, claim to be 'Changing Politics for Evil', parodying the Brexit Party's 'Changing Politics for Good.’

Another organization, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] for America, ran during the 2016 American presidential election— but, of course, did not win.

Here’s why some think Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] would be a good president:

“Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] has destroyed no less than ﬁfty sapient species in this galaxy alone.

He’ll remove big money in politics by removing all “Masters of the Universe” from existence.

Experts say Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] ’s plan to eat Wall Street accountants is the toughest and most bloody of all presidential candidates.

Who needs to build a wall when consuming the planet in endless madness is just as eﬀective?

If not Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] , then who? Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] ? Shoggoth? Please…

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] would not institute a theocracy in America. As a real God, Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] would have no need to force people to believe in it.

After you are eaten, your eﬀective tax rate will be ZERO.

Because the nihilism of cosmic terror is preferable to the nihilism of the two party system.

It’s willing to do what no other candidate will.”

https://Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] foramerica.com/ https://Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] foramerica.com/reasons/

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

XI. Final Announcements

A.Episode has been sucked!:

Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] and Lovecraft have been SUCKED! Whooo!

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team:

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley for audio engineering, the Script Keeper Zaq Flanary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, Liz Hernandez, Beefsteak, and Logan the“Art Warlock” Keith.

Quick congrats to our ﬁrst three time Timesuck Trivia Champion!

Bodhi210

With 7,476 points.

You’re a MONSTER Bodhi210!

And now, in our 12th round, he may get the top total trivia point total once more and become the 1st annual Knowledge In Nimrod Super- Supreme Grand Champion of the World.

C.Next Episode Preview:

Next week on Timesuck, we delve back into the realm of true crime with notorious English serial killers Fred and Rose West.

Frederick Walter "Fred" West and Rosemary Pauline "Rose" West were an English married duo of serial killers and serial rapists who killed at least a dozen young British girls, including several of their own daughters.

Yeah. They’re fucking full-on-evil. Such a crazy story.

Both of these people had strange and terrible childhoods.

Steﬀ Coxscurvey fodder worthy childhoods.

By Fred’s own account, sexual abuse of various kinds was common in the household; he claimed his father had sexual relationships with his daughters and taught him bestiality.

Holy shit.

Rose, meanwhile, was the daughter of Bill Letts, a schizophrenic who constantly sexuallyabused her, her siblings and her mother, Daisy.

And then Fred and Rose met in 1968 and bonded in the worst of ways.

Their future home would be a terrifying one for both their children and their victims, nicknamed the “House of Horrors” by the British press.

So much sex. SO much. So much abuse. They beat and molested their children and lived in a house that was more of a sex den for Rose’s johns than a real home.

Meanwhile, they were picking up young women, taking them back to their house for sex, and murdering them in their cellar fuck dungeon.

THIS is the crazy ass story we’re sucking on Timesuck.

D.Segue to Timesucker Updates:

And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO

XII. Timesucker Updates

1. Let’s start oﬀ with an awesome update to a recent update. Remember Cummins Law victim and BBQ master Jacob Lubbers? We talked about him maybe losing out on a bunch of tasty sauce sales to Schnucks thanks to an ill-timed blue tooth situatiuon. Well - things are turning around thanks to the Timesuck community. Jacob writes:

Sir Dan,

Thank you so much for reading my story on the pod! Proving once again the cult of the curious is the best squad on the planet I was flooded with online orders for Full Boar BBQ!!! I also received many emails of support from the listeners and even was contacted by 4 different friends from my high school I hadn’t spoken to in some time I did not know were Timesuckers. I likewise found the awesome spin off page “cooks of the curious” on Facebook and have been chatting with folks on there. No word yet from the Schnuck’s but there is hope. Thank you from Full Boar BBQ to everyone who reached out and supported-and suck on!

Jacob Lubbers Owner/ CEO Full Boar BBQ (812)309-3094 [email protected] https://fullboarbbqproducts.com/

Jacob! I LOVE this. hahaha! Praise Bojangles.

That’s fantastic that you were ﬂooded with orders. I hope you’re ﬂooded with more. Thrive, Full Boar BBQ man, thrive!

I hope you’re stuck in the kitchen until the wee hours of the night making more sweet sauce.

And now I’m hungry.

Happy for you dude.

2. Super Sucker Blake McCall didn’t get Cummins’ Lawed, but, the recent Karl Denke suck did fuck up his day a bit. Here’s Blake:

Hey suck master how’s it going?

My name is Blake Mccall and I’ve been listing for at least two years now and I wanted to write in and tell you how fucked this is.

While listening to the Karl Denke suck you mention grilled ass cheeks when describing Denke’s apartment and what police found inside.

When describing it was around lunch time at the manufacturing plant I work at, and when describing the apartment I began to smell the food from the kitchen that was being prepared - lmao.

On top of that, the daily special was pork tenderloin and you started talking about how pork sales dropped in the area Denke was from.

This made my decision to skip lunch as all I could think about was a large man with a beer grilling ass cheeks on like a Weber grill lol …. standing out front people walking by and sniﬃng the air like when your neighbor BBQS lol - then he nods like “oh ya smells good right”

Thanks for the unforgettable laugh you awesome sucker and thx for doing what you do. You make learning so much better. Hail Bo jangles praise triple M and I tip my hat to Luciﬁna

Your forever listener Blake M

Damn Blake! You REALLY picked the wrong day to listen to Denke! Holy shit - hope you can enjoy pork again now.

And thanks for the kind words. I’m glad I can share some info with you. I learn so much each week as well.

I love it.

Always wish I could remember more but a little more knowledge each week is better than none I guess. Hail Nimrod my friend.

3. Recently Single and Hopeful Sucker Josh Treon wants to thank some of you. He writes:

Hello Suck Master!

I’m a regular for both Scared to Death and Timesuck. Probably going to end up adding to that soon haha. I’ve loved Timesuck since the moment I’ve found it.

My ﬁrst suck was the Operation Paperclip (3 outta 5) suck and I’ve always just jump around between work and married life.

Became an oﬃcial Space Lizard a couple months ago and got some SWEET merch.

Between then and now my wife asked me for a dissolution of marriage. I was absolutely distraught and BINGED the suck so hard and I gotta say.

Your sweet sweet voice got me through some dark moments.

I even posted to the Cult of the Curious 2 page because I wanted to be respectful of timing when I started to date again and I just gotta say GOSH DANG everyone’s helpful!

I was at a weird spot when I posted it, but the group really got me out of a funk by the end of it all.

I just wanted to contact you and say thank you for building such an amazing content machine and on top of that a community that absolutely kicks ass. Sorry for the long message, Hail Nimrod, Praise Bojangles and Glory Be to Triple M! again thank you Suck Master I couldn’t imagine a better person to Suck with. -Josh Treon

JOSH! So glad you’re doing better and glad some cult members helped out. That shit always makes my heart feel so good. I love seeing all the support.

Life is often such a dark motherfucker and some kindness delivered at the right time can truly save lives.

We don’t need to Cthulhu to scare us - divorce, death, disease, despair - we have enough words that start with d alone to ﬁll our days with more than enough fear.

Thank god we also have c words like care, compassion, and kindness.

I KNOW THAT LAST ONE STARTS WITH “K” BUT IT CAN SOUND LIKE “C” SO JUST FUCKING GO WITH IT.

May Luciﬁna bless your romantic endeavors, Josh.

4. Now smart Sack Jason Miller has an update regarding a fear I chaired in the Mao Zedong episode. Let’s get smarter. He writes:

Dan, I am Jason Miller

After listening to the Chairman Mao podcast, you mentioned that you were worried about the Chinese holding so much of our bonds. I want to know why you feel that way. I have heard folks say that they fear China "calling the debt due" and for bonds this is impossible.

If this is your stance, you have bad information.

How bonds work is that the Issuer (USA) has a deﬁcit to meet its needs and issues bonds to generate cash to meet its need. The issuer issues the bonds with the following items: (FV) The face value: The amount to buy the bond typically $1,000 (N) The term: The length of time the issuer will hold the funds. (I/Y) The Interest: the % amount of the face value paid to the holder at set intervals as payments generally twice a year (FV(I/Y) =PMT/2).

The holder (China) pays the face value and waits for the term to be met, and receives interest payments for the bonds, and then the face value back.

For simplicity's sake, we will not get into discounts and premiums for the issuing of bonds, and assume everyone buys at the par value, nor how the bond market moves inverse to the interest rate.

The important thing to remember is this the further out a bond is from the maturity date the Less it is worth.

In the finance field, we have two formulas Yield to Maturity (YTM) and Yield to Date (YTD) to figure out the value of the bonds.

With China holding that much debt they have no reason to act against the debt issuer (the USA) which could trigger a bond default. The only thing that China can do is sell their existing stockpile of bonds, at a discount the “Nuclear option” of selling the debt means nothing.

Be afraid of the time when China stops buying bonds; due to the USA being addicted to the Chinese cash to pay for its overspending.

2020 revenue $3.42 trillion (income) 2020 Budget $6.55 trillion (Spending) 2020 deﬁcit $3.13 trillion = 3.42-6.55 2020 Debt 2019 debt + 3.13 new debt

Reading https://www.investopedia.com/terms/y/ytd.asp https:// www.investopedia.com/terms/y/yieldtomaturity.asp https:// www.thebalance.com/fy-2020-federal-budget-summary-of- revenue-and-spending-4797868 https:// businessﬁnanceessentials.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-4- valuation-and-bond-analysis/ https://www.investopedia.com/ articles/investing/040115/reasons-why-china-buys-us-treasury- bonds.asp https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china- bonds-explainer/explainer-will-china-dump-u-s-bonds-as-a-trade- weapon-not-so-fast-idUSKCN1SY0BS

Jason!

Thanks for sharing this information.

Yeah - I guess that particular fear I have is unfounded. I did fall, thanks to some economic ignorance on my part, into the “When China calls its debt due we’re gonna be fucked” camp.

What you wrote out makes sense - it’s the possibility of China refusing to buy our bonds that could be terrifying.

The way those bonds work - it’s in China’s economic interest for the US to thrive and always be able to pay our debts back, right? In that way - they should root for us to prosper.

Also, thanks to the sources you left for further reading which will remain in the show notes - Japan owns about as much of our debt as China does in the form of these bonds. Didn’t know that.

I was worried that the Chinese government owns too much of our land - and - I do worry about foreign land investment.

Foreign investors - much of them corporations - do own at least 28.3 million acres of just farmland, valued at $52.2 billion - about the size of the state of Ohio as of 2019. China as of 2019 owned 191,000 acres worth $1.9 billion.

https://apnews.com/article/e541895e692545ee80d0fc609cf40011

That scares me at ﬁrst glance.

But I guess if those investors tried to use that land as a club of some sort to beat down America with, the government could take it back.

With consequences of course.

I just wish we had more of an ability to be independent. And I’d think about my country no matter where I live. It’s scary to have to depend on foreign governments for food, power, medicine, clothing - whatever.

I’ll at least worry less about foreign debt thanks to your message! Leaving all the links to sources you left in the show notes for any other listener to do some further digging. Thank you!

5. Now one last message. Some cool extra Seven Wonders knowledge from another Smart and Caring Sucker Amanda Winter. And a reminder to be tolerant. Amanda writes:

Hello Suckmaster Flex and team!

I'm writing about the ancient wonder suck, and the Pyramids at Giza. I graduated 3 weeks ago, with a Master's degree in astrophysics, and every Friday night, I give lectures and star tours at my local planetarium. I always include the Pyramids in my programming. You mentioned that some people believe they pointed to the stars on Orion's Belt. While this is a common misconception, the pyramids DO line up with a trio of stars in the Draco constellation, the main star being “Thuban”.

We all know the Earth spins, but most people don’t know that the Earth also wobbles like a top. However, due to the size of the Earth and space itself, this wobble takes tens of thousands of years. Back when the Pyramids were being built, Thuban was actually the Pole Star, acting as Polaris, or the North Star does today. And in approximately 10-20 thousand years from now, our current North Star (Polaris) will no longer be the pole star, as the Earth continues its wobble. Just a fun fact that I thought you might enjoy hearing!

Keep up the excellent work! Amanda Winter

P.S. As you know, June is Pride month. LGBT+ youth, as especially Trans youth have an exponentially higher rate of suicide than their cis-straight peers. I volunteer for an organization called “Free Mom Hugs”. We work with LGBT+ meat sacks of all ages who have been rejected by their parents. Sometimes it’s as simple as a hug, sometimes we even take in youths who have been kicked out of their homes or assaulted by their own families. It would mean a lot if you would give a few words of encouragement to your LGBT+ listeners and let them know that they are loved and supported exactly as they are.

Amanda!

First oﬀ - what an awesome fucking organization. YES - LGBT+ listeners should be reminded there are plenty of people who love them as they are and don’t care what legal, consenting holes they want ﬁlled or to fuck and by whom.

Too much worry over that. God doesn’t care. Direct anyone who thinks God does to me - have them send scripture to back up their argument, and I can send back more scripture to prove them wrong.

Good Christians and good members of other religions get that. Those who don’t? Don’t worry about them praying for you- you pray for them.

Nimrod assures me he and Luciﬁna love the shit out of you - and Triple M has hugs for all.

Amen.

And thanks for that cool star info smarty pants.

So many big brains and even bigger hearts in the cult!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

XIII.Goodbye!

A.Goodbye!:

1. Thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions Podcast, Meatsacks.

Don’t name your pets anything super racist this week. Just focus on writing cool stories instead and continuing to keep on sucking.

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Sources from Timeline:

Sources: Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (2nd Edition) by Daniel Harms. (The primary source.)

Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (1st Edition) by Daniel Harms. (Only consulted for data omitted from the 2nd Edition.) Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Arkham Unveiled. Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Beyond the Mountains of Madness. Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep [knee are leth oh tep] . Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Escape from Innsmouth. Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Kingspost: City in the Mist. Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Return to Dunwich. Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] : Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. "Glimpses" by A.A. Attanasio. "Darkness, My Name Is" by Eddy C. Bertin. "The Shadow from the Steeple" by Robert Bloch. "The Shambler from the Stars" by Robert Bloch. "The Horror from the Bridge" by Ramsey Campbell. "The Inhabitant of the Lake" by Ramsey Campbell. "The Insects from Shaggai" by Ramsey Campbell. "The Moon-Lens" by Ramsey Campbell. "The Room in the Castle" by Ramsey Campbell. "Azathoth in Arkham" by Peter Cannon. "Strange Manuscript Found in the Vermont Woods" by Lin Carter. "The Last Test" by Adolphe de Castro (with H.P. Lovecraft). "Where Yidhra Walks" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr. "The Black Island" by August Derleth. "The Dweller in Darkness" by August Derleth. "The Gorge Beyond Salapunco" by August Derleth. "The House in the Valley" by August Derleth. "The House on Curwen Street" by August Derleth. "The Keeper of the Key" by August Derleth. "The Return of Hastur" by August Derleth. "The Seal of R'lyeh" by August Derleth. "Something in Wood" by August Derleth. "The Watcher from the Sky" by August Derleth. "The Gable Window" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Horror from the Middle Span" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "Innsmouth Clay" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Shadow in the Attic" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Shadow Out of Space" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Survivor" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Watchers Out of Time" (incomplete) by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "Witches' Hollow" by August Derleth (in "posthumous collaboration" with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Horror at Martin's Beach" by Sonia H. Greene (with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Mound" by Hazel Heald (with H.P. Lovecraft). "Out of the Aeons" by Hazel Heald (with H.P. Lovecraft). "The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard. "Black Man with a Horn" by T.E.D. Klein. "All-Eye" by Bob van Laerhoven. "The Terror from the Depths" by Fritz Leiber. "Arthur Jermyn" by H.P. Lovecraft. "At the Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft. "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Call of Cthulhu [kuh thoo loo] " by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft. "Dagon [ dey-gon ]" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Dunwich Horror" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Haunter of the Dark" by H.P. Lovecraft. "Herbert West- Reanimator" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Hound" by H.P. Lovecraft. "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by H.P. Lovecraft (with Harry Houdini). "The Lurker at the Threshold" by H.P. Lovecraft, with August Derleth. "Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Rats in the Walls" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Shadow Out of Time" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Silver Key" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Temple" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Thing On The Doorstep" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Unnamable" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft. "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" by H.P. Lovecraft. "The Fairground Horror" by Brian Lumley. "Rising with Surtsey" by Brian Lumley. "The Big Fish" by Kim Newman. "The Invisible Empire" by James van Pelt. "Dope War of the Black Tong" by Robert M. Price. "The Shunpike" by Robert M. Price. "The Beast of Averoigne" by Clark Ashton Smith. "The Colossus of Ylourgne" by Clark Ashton Smith. "The End of the Story" by Clark Ashton Smith. "The Holiness of Azédarac" by Clark Ashton Smith. "The Maker of Gargoyles" by Clark Ashton Smith. "Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith. "The Silence of Erika Zann" by James Wade. "The Return of the Lloigor" by Colin Wilson. "The Barrens" by F. Paul Wilson.