Surprise--one more quick story for Halloween week!  Dagon is an early Lovecraft story, where he's feelling out the Cthulhu Mythos, but hasn't quite articulated it out yet.  It's also a nice companion piece to last week's "The Temple".  Both are last testaments of dying men, and both have WWI naval combat as the central plot device, and both rely on the ocean and it's mysteries for their crowning horror.

It also has some of the great literary tics that Lovecraft would become known for--particularly the suicide note feverishly scrawled and cut off in the last sentance.  This has been parodied many times, but perhaps not so well as Patton Oswalt's Onion AV Club review of KFC's Famous Bowl.

Have a great Halloween!

If you want to revisit them, you can listen to my previous entries The Colour Out of Space and The Horror at Red Hook by clicking the titles. 

As with last year, music is provided by those legendary purveyors of post-rock, Slint from their 1991 album Spiderland. 

Enjoy everyone!

A few shownotes: 

All of this information comes from Steve Nissenbaum's amazing, Pulitzer nominated "The Battle for Christmas", one of the best pieces of social and cultural history I have ever read. 

Much of the music came from the various recordings of Nowell Sing We Clear, whose records you can buy at Golden Hind Music. 

I've also included clips from A Charlie Brown Christmas, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Family Ties, Twas the Night Before Christmas by Rankin/Bass, and:

Carl Dellinger's recitation of the Cherryville Shooter's Chant

Elton John's recitation of "A Visit from St. Nickolas"

and the following Clips from Archive.org:

A Few Christmas Songs

Christmas Melody

Thanks Mark Hammersteiner!
Happy Halloween!

In this weeks introduction, I quote from an undated letter where Lovecraft describes how he found an incantation that figures into the Horror at Red Hook.  I found that letter in a great collection called The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft

It's a collection of some of Lovecraft's stories, with the obscure and mythological terms annotated.  The annotations are written by S.T. Joshi, who I mentioned in last weeks introduction, and who is perhaps the greatest living scholar of Lovecraft's life and writings.  It's a great collection and well worth picking up. 

Music this week is, once again, all from Slint's majestically great and creepy album Spiderland. 

Here's a picture of Lovecraft's house at 169 Clinton St. in Brooklyn, taken recently by dhp. 

It'll be three parts, released over the next few weeks until halloween.  Hope you enjoy it!

Music for this episode:

"Lovecraft in Brooklyn" by the Mountain Goats from the album Heretic Pride. 

"For Dinner..." by Slint from the album Spiderland.

Shownotes:

1.)"ABCs" by K'Naan Featuring Chubb Rock from the album Troubadour

2.)"No Epiphany" by Fucked Up from the album The Chemistry of Common Life

3.)One Great City - The Weakerthans from the album Reconstruction Site

I tried out some "special effects" near the end--hopefully they sound fitting, and not lame and out of place. 

This year, I thought I'd do one better.  For a variety of reasons, I love his story "The Colour out of Space".  Perhaps no other story of his is so tied to the landscape of western New England, where I currently reside, but not for long.  Thus, in the spirit of celebrating Halloween, commemorating the place I love so much, and relishing the reading outloud of elaborate prose, I've decided to do a series of podcasts where I read the story.  This is part one, probably of three--expect the rest in the next few weeks, as Halloween approaches. 

It's a great story, and I hope I do it justice. 

Download It Here