I’m halfway through re-reading H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadows over Innsmouth” novella. “Shadows” is about a man who travels to a New England town called Innsmouth in to appease his antiquarian fancies, but uncovers eldritch horrors that drive him to the point of insanity. I’m smack in the middle of some Lovecraftian mania. I’m re-discovering all of his prose work as well as the derivative Call of Cthulhu Role Playing Game by Chaosium after years of actively avoiding them.

A while back, while I was riding through a pretty tough depression, I read my first Lovecraft story, Dagon. I had never seen nihilism as I saw in those 6 or so pages. Lovecraft’s horror, which is really scifi inspired, tells us that humanity is but a grain of salt in the endless ocean of the universe. The wind will blow us away one day and no one will ever notice. There are other things out there, things that have been here along, and will stay here long after we are gone. I was hooked. I read Lovecraft exclusively for five or six months until it affected my sleep. I had a dream in which I had a conversation with a Mi-Go, Lovecraft’s cunning Fungi from Yuggoth, in a public bathroom. The affair was distinctly Lovecraft in style. I hid in one of the stalls in order to avoid going insane by the creatures alien countenance. The thing hovered in front of the stall and talked to me in a trembling, high pitched tenor. I woke up at 3:00 am sweating. I decided I had enough Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos.

The years have reduced the impact that dream had on me. And now I crave more of Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors. Innsmouth beckons me to go back to finish Shadows.

Please pray for my soul if I don’t update this blog by tomorrow.

PS. You owe it to yourself to check out Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu quick start pdf. Get a group CoC group going and tell your own macabre fantasies of horror and dreadful discoveries.