You know, there’s something to be said for someone who can take Charlie Brown and H.P. Lovecraft and weave them together. Take a look at John Aegard’s The Great Old Pumpkin over on Strange Horizons Fiction. I came across this earlier this morning when it popped up in my RSS aggregator over at bloglines in my BoingBoing feed. The tone, the use of adjectives, the descriptions (and yes, the very low amount of dialog) all make this work very….er, Lovecraftian, as the snippet below will show:

The camera fell from my nerveless fingers and into the clouds below as I beheld this blood-curdling horror. Instead of friendly cross-eyes and gapped teeth, into its wide orange visage were sawn jagged spirals of alien script, and though of course I could not read the glyphs, simply witnessing them was enough to understand their meaning. They dragged my mind away to their subject-places, each of them impressing upon me a cavorting pageant of despair and rot. Worse than that was what lay behind those awful incisions, for instead of a candle or (for safety reasons) a lantern, within the Great Old Pumpkin burned a queer kind of furnace that was tended by thready, murmuring minions. This furnace emitted not light and heat but rather madness, and with horror, I realized that its emanations were not illuminating the clouds, but rather that the clouds were fluorescing under them, just as a squid will fluoresce under certain radiations.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an interesting person. Often compared with Edgar Allan Poe, his stories of fantasy and horror did not begin to gain prominence until the late 1940’s, almost a decade after he died in poverty and obscurity in 1937. His stories - some of which were published in small magazines such as Weird Tales from 1908 through 1923 - are full of unspeakable evil, horrors from beyond the grave, and disruptions in time and space. Stories such as The Call of Cthulu, The Lurking Fear, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, formed a large part of my reading during seventh and eighth grade. For some reason I get the impression that the powers that be at good old St. Hilary’s wouldn’t have been too happy if they would have actually paid enough attention to me to notice what I was reading. A somewhat disturbing revelation is that Lovecraft’s works - as odd, twisted, and horrifying as they can be - are all said to be directly inspired by his nightmares.

Lovecraft

In addition to the Great Pumpkin/Lovecraft mashup above, the web is full of other Lovecraftian excitement. Whether it is a Lovecraft Mad Lib Generator, a Lovecraft Film Festival, the Cthulu Lexicon, the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, or the Lovecraft Historical Society you can definitely get your fill of all things horrible. I’ll close out with what has become the most famous Lovecraft quote, from one of his signature works The Call Of Cthulu:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”