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Mr. Howard Phillips, I Presume?

Gotta love how descriptive Lovecraft can be:

“The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry and madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed 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 one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemonic heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.’”


Excerpt from “The Call of Cthulhu”, from The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales by H.P. Lovecraft as edited by S.T. Joshi
I forgot how immersive his storytelling can get since I picked up a collection of tales from a library in Australia. I didn’t know at first who I was reading; it wasn’t only until I saw the name Cthulhu on a bumper sticker a year later. Funny how things come back to you sometimes. Nevertheless, always a good read.