fragment

''naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. creative minds are uneven and the best of fabrics have their dull spots... moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconcious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast... therefore we must judge a weird tale... by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... if the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature,''

h.p.lovecraft, super natural horror in literature.


''a portrait, a painting ... paint it today. white pear trees and a wysteria... the wysteria long embedded in the under shingles of the low roof, ... the pear an english bartlett-a french cuissemadame ... yet a beautiful thing, a perfect thing is inevitably broken. the small bird, fallen from its nest was so hideous, so wormlike with a repellent gruesomeness the smooth, clean, snakelike angleworms or the flat garden grubs never had. the egg was so pretty ... the small bird was an uncanny monster. ... the child {claw like hands,} ... a bird or intermediate, of a lost reptile race, clawing its way into the pear-wysteria tangle ... a portrait? paint it yesterday, wreathed with cornflowers-paint it today ... crawling into the rabbit hutch ... scent of old straw ... crawling, crawling with the elbows scraping ... to be rewarded at the last with a vision of eight pink bodies. to be lifted one by one from the nest of tight packed straw...''.

h.d, paint it today.

landscape piece

''west of arkham the hills rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. there are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. on the the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old new-england secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. ...

''in the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal, and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry... it was too much like a landscape of salvator rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of horror.''

h.p.lovecraft, the colour out of space.

body of mythos

[the insect musicians: alazif of the mad new zealander graeme revell.]


'' original title al azif--azif being the word used by arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons. ''

h.p.lovecraft, history of the necronomicon.


''the zen monks of china and japan, who have long practiced a form of buddhism that emphasizes meditation, ask themselves the following bizarre question: what is the sound of one hand clapping? ...

''jesus of nazareth, who might be likened to a zen master; often spoke in parables, which means a roundabout way of talking, deliberate evasion, riddles. jesus even tells us why. he speaks in parables, he says, because he does not want anyone but his disciples to understand him: "he who has ears to hear, let him hear," which happily brings us back to the sound of one hand clapping...

''yet the question remains what is the sound of one hand clapping? simply put, the sound of one hand clapping is the sound of your own ears... perhaps, if it were quiet enough, if you put down this book and listened again for the sound of one hand clapping, perhaps then you'd hear something--did already hear something--well staticky...

''you need extreme quiet to hear such things because what you are listening for is very subtle, very simple, very overlookable, "a still small voice." with practice however, it will sound as loud as you like. so go back, be still, listen...''

j. nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

a little nearer

[i]'' who knows the end? what has risen many sink, and what has sunk may rise. loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of man ... [ii] i dream of a day when they may rise above the billows ... of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. the end is near ...''

h.p.lovecraft, [i]the call of cthulhu, [ii]dagon.

the body of mythos

''the bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. its designs however were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; ... it seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster of a form which only a diseased fancy could concieve.


''if i say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human charicature, i shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing ... a pulpy tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful ... ''

h.p.lovecraft, the call of cthulhu


''not only can the yogi experiance the vagus nerve in and of itself, but by means of neurological connections to the vision area of the brain at the back of the skull, he or she can even visualize the nerve... is such a visualization a myth? and if so, what myth is it? our answer is that it is not a single myth but refers to an entire genre of myth; slaying the kraken, or, sea monster. ... it is a description of the brain and its twelve cranial nerves. the myth of the kraken, whose many tentacles reach deep into the viscera, is a description of the struggle with the vagus nerve.''

j nigro sansonese, the body of myth.

keziah mason

''in the changeless, legend haunted city of arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the kings men in the dark ... which had likewise harbored old keziah mason, whose flight from salem gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. ... there was much in the essex county records about keziah mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the court of oyer and terminer ... she had told judge hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, ... then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.

body of mythos

''suddenly, a distant tremor shook the house,and there came a faint and distant whirring buzz, that grew rapidly into a far; muffled screaming. it reminded me, in a queer, gigantic way, of the noise that a clock makes, when the catch is released, and it is allowed to run down.

''gradually, the whirring noise decreased, and there came a long silence. ... yet a constant "blurred" sound was in my ears. now that i noticed it, i was aware that it had been with me all the time. it was the world-noise.''

the house on the borderland, william hope hodgson.