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3✨ Another water based creepy short story. #HauntedShelves #TeamFlurken @PuddleJumper

There were a few good stories, but most were not that great. Maybe it's time to admit I don't like Lovecraftian fiction.

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference between those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
- The Silver Key ?️

"Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times he was snatched away while he paused on the high terrace above it."
- The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

Included in the anthology I'm reading, this story is more whimsical than "At the Mountains of Madness", though it is linked to Lovecraft's horror stories through its main protagonist, Randolph Carter, and a selection of Cthulhu Mythos gods, notably Nyarlathotep. ⬇️

The title story is one of my favourites of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos stories. If "The Call of Cthulhu" is his "Lord of the Rings" then this story is his "Silmarillion" - ok, Tolkien is orders of magnitude greater in terms of literature and sheer depth and complexity of conception, but Lovecraft is great in his own area.
There is no dialogue as the story is the first-person statement of polar expedition lead, William Dyer, who may be a great ⬇️

"Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept upright with folded down tentacles - and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books."

Similarly to the Elder Things, I like to know my books are safely shelved and racked before I settle into my sleeping frame and fold down my tentacles for a quick millennium-or-two nap. ???

My flibbertigibbet brain is struggling to settle, so I'll feed it something I've chewed before, although not previously this edition, which as well as the title novella includes several Dreamland stories which I also like.
Ian Miller's cover art of an Elder Thing is fantastically chaotic & likely to induce the madness that overruns an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.
Lovecraft's aliens evoke the strange body plans of the vastly ancient Ediacaran ⬇️

Sent out my #CreepyChristmas package today!

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The 4th season of The Lovecraft Investigations, The Haunter of the Dark, was as bat-shitly occult-conspiracy-theoryesque as previous seasons, which you definitely need to listen to to make any sense of it. There's often a lot of exposition between action sequences, but this one seemed to lean a bit too heavily into that, so 4⭐ rather than 5. Some amusing/disturbing caricatures of political figures, & a ton of stuff about UK establishment fascism.