H. P. Lovecraft
How the man known as Howard Phillips Lovecraft[1]came to have an Uncyclopedia entry written about him is a fact of whose blasphemous origins we shall never be privileged to know. That it is written at all is miracle enough, for we live on a placid island of literacy in the midst of black seas of slobbering idiocy and it was not meant that we should use a spellcheck. The great unwashed, each mashing their keyboards in the darkness of their parents’ basements, have hitherto harmed us little in our blissful ignorance; but perhaps their random effusions have now conspired to create an article of whose utter, brain-blasting idiocy will send us screaming to our nearest Webster’s (or at least mildly tick us off).
Who wrote it though, is a mystery; for the following is a peculiar message that had suddenly and unexplainably materialized as an article on Uncyclopedia after an eldritch power failure of the website's server during a stormy night when wolves, ravens and cicadas alike were unusually persevering in a combined cacaphonic frenzy yet unheard of and a massive aurora borealis was observed all across the northern hemisphere. Not one among the living knows where the message came from, other than that the message itself hints at an origin so horrible and blasphemous that it is perhaps best left unknown.
- ///Here begins the message///
The message[edit | edit source]
If you can read this, that means I am probably dead. It was during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at Miskatonic University that I lived in the locality known as Quastro Plango in Providence where the black tarred river Megamoltron meets itself (or ends, depending on how you see it), a time during which I befriended the dread horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a grevious mistake as it turned out in retrospective. Ever since the unspeakable precipices which thus triggered my haphazardous effugi from that wormridden poorhouse district, I have been unable to locate the locality of Quastro Plango though I have since examined every map of the city whether new or withered and yellowed, a fact which I find both singular and perplexing.
Much of the details of Lovecraft's birth, curiously twisted education, rise, fall, death, foul renaissance, and crucification on a queerly shaped cross of stygian dimensions[2] have been lost to the ravages of ineluctable time. All we have left save my own dubious memories of the ramblings of the horror writer is this curious, yellowed manuscript, found in the oldest districts and alleys of Providence beneath a black Byzantine church with two-hundred-fifty-foot spires in an abandoned McDonalds restaurant where at night a phantom white-bearded daemon swineherd drives about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing, to try to piece together the story of how this monstrous and utterly degenerate cartooni-ni-ni-ni... No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit restaurant! It's voodoo, I tell you ... that spotted snake ... Curse you <insert name here>, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do! You were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you! Look at me - listen to what I say - do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter?
I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down demons from the stars... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now - the things that devour and dissolve, that fats and instructs the very worms that gnaws and vexes the nethermost caverns, the dull scavengers of earth that festers and swell monstrous to plague it - but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get!!! Stirring, dear sir? 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust ... wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?... Iä! Iä! Hastur! Hastur! Hastur! Cat-huloo fatanng yang kipperbang... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial... Magna Mater! Magna Mater!... Atys... Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun... agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!... Ungl unl... rrlh ... chchch... Iä! Iä!- Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn...
This is what they say I said when the police found me in that McDonald's restaurant later... found me while I was trying to strangle a Ronald McDonald statue with a large vuvuzela thrusted up my rectum while bellowing forth purportedly horrible blasphemies in an abrasive and yet horribly sepulchral voice that was not my own and in languages I cannot claim to fathom to any degree of coherency. Now they have locked me into a padded cell, demolished that haunted restaurant and taken the paper slips away from me to be locked into a restricted governmental archive, and yet I feel that I must tell what was written on it even though I know that the ghastly contexts and otherwordly depths it hints at would be enough to annihilate the very soul of anyone for whom fate has been merciful enough to spare this knowledge that no sound mind should possess, for if it is true, then we as a species must reevaluate our place in the universe and accept that we may be lowest of the many sapient races that has come and gone and those who are yet to come. The psychiatrists must be made to believe me, but the authorities have, despite careful searches and investigations, been unable to locate the district of Quastro Plango where I lived next doors with the horror writer and documented his life as foretold by himself and which I know must exist, although I do not know in what dimension.
Though I miss not those narrow, odorous alleys and disproportionally steepy and crooked streets of Quastro Plango in its slummed bleakness of the early industrial age, and shudder at the thought of the ancient, abandoned cybercafé which the shockingly wrinkled Norweigian fishermen I spoke with one evening whispered of in such frightened words, its very existence alone would be the only proof to the authorities of my shrivelled sanity. But my God, if they had only seen the face of that blue-green, pungently swamp-smelling thing I caught with one of its many hands in my cookie jar last week!!! It had been said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and I now see with blood-red clarity how true that sentiment is. His books, his damnable books - they must all be burned in the fires of the next Walpurgis Night... They say the madman is dead, but I know differently. Those foul knaves, those ignorant fools!!! Did you really believe that that was your own hand in the cookie jar?!
Nay; the hack horror writer, whose hypnotically thick and soporific voice I can still hear whispering even as I am writing this one last memorandum, merely lies dreaming, dreaming I say, and we... we are the dreams... By will I shall vainly send my message, with fleeting hope that one day there may be some medium capable of receiving this biography of H. P. Lovecraft I have written, out across the illimitable aether of background radiation in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter. It is no small task to speak about the unspeakable, describe the indescribable, to illuminate that which the sun must never alight, but by Jove, leastways I shall try.
I know now that my time draws nigh, for I sense once more the filthy acid-breath of that blue-green monstrousity that looked at me that frightful night with glossy black eyes filled with what I now understand to be limitless, prehistoric hatred and whose blasphemous, malformed visage I only now realises bears a putrefied, sardonic semblance to that of Howard Phillips Lovecraft nigh irrecognisable to anyone save one such as I who have spoken to and lived next doors to the madman in his hellbound workroom, the repellent spectre which haunts me further now even in the recurrent dream I have every night save those when the doctors are merciful enough to give me dream-suppressing medicine. Tonight I shall break free of this mental institution even though I know I will die trying...
Early life[edit | edit source]
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born during the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Earth to the sounds of muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes in an horribly ancient, black basalt castle in the Providence countryside as the only son of Winfield Scott Lovecraft and Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft. During the night of his birth, nine dozens of naked, mindless negros from Bongo-Bongo Land danced ceaselessly and tirelessly that night around a grotesque phallus symbol of prodigious proportions, which was painted in the colors of an unknown, indescribable spectrum and made to resemble the hideous visage of the unspeakable Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young who ever spawns new nightmares made flesh from her towering ebony fortress on the Lower East Side. The birthscene with its unearthly blasphemous rituals that no sane person should ever cast eyes on was so horrible that both of his parents went mad afterwards and had to spend the rest of their days in Arkham Asylum.
There they were separated in two different padded cells and kept describing horrible visions of odd shadows and unearthly geometric patterns resembling rotating candy canes with lilac undertones to the psychatrists, though nobody else could see such things. Because of this, the young Lovecraft had to be fostered by Whipple Van Buren Phillips, a grandparent so shockingly aged that he was born in an egg in the prehistoric Iapetus Ocean, and by two aunts who were subhuman morlocks practicing ancient, forbidden witchcraft lore originating from antediluvian Atlantis. During his childhood, young Lovecraft's non-mammalian grandfather read the Necronomicon by the fabled Abdul Alhazred to him. The accursed tome thenceforth became his favourite book.
When Lovecraft was merely four years old, he was abducted by the winged, starheaded, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica and taken outside the three dimensional space-time continuum to the black throne of the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth whose name no lips dare speak aloud, where he wrote his name with his own blood in Azathoth's Black Book. Thus, his mind and soul became the property of Azathoth, the blind idiot god amidst the bubbling, monstrous nuclear chaos outside angled space and was cursed to spend the rest of his life writing the daemon-sultan's memoirs ceaselessly since that torpid, amorphous, mindless blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity was busy doing absolutely nothing for all eternity.
Lovecraft did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for him as in that same second there crashed down upon his mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory, the aeon-withered, abysmal blueprints for Azathoth and his cosmic pantheon's unfathomable life span, which become deeply engraved into the young Lovecraft's tormented subconsciousness, being forever a slave to the Outer Gods. Then Lovecraft fell into a deep sleep and reemerged, wholly remade, in 1895 with the forbidden knowledge of countless, unhallowed centuries deeply embedded into the darkest corners of his mind and which would shape his life forevermore.
Since that frightful day, from his childhood up until his eventual death in adulthood, the fearsome cosmic entities Nyarlathotep and Hastur would come through a narrow fissure in the fabric of time and space every odd Friday to keep bringing him instructions on what to write, which is, of course, all real. The one leverage they had on him, should he fail to comply, was this: if he refused, they would forcibly acquire Hollywood filming rights for one or more of the works which he had already written. Knowing full well that any movie based on his writings would drive the world population mad from such indescribable and inappropriate cosmic truths, Lovecraft had no choice but to remain the inofficial vocal chord of the dark gods from beyond, not wanting to plunge the world into utter anarchy and mass hysteria.
Mental illness[edit | edit source]
Because of his horrible abduction as a toddler, Lovecraft was always cursed by experiencing night terrors, an especially vivid form of nightmares. His horrific dreams always began with him lying motionless in his bed while hearing how his bathtub is suddenly beginning to fill itself in the bathroom. Two minutes later, once the tap turns itself off, he always hears oddly distorted splashing noises whose pitch and timbre seems to be unlike any other eartly sound - if sound it may even be called - followed by the ominous sensation of hearing diminutive webbed feet marching in loathsome unison towards him while dripping water on the floor. As he brings himself to look, he always see the shape of twelve hidious rubber ducks with bloodred, vampirish fangs, an upper beak tapering into one cream-white tentacle, and white glowing eyes as cold as the bleakest midwinter nights of Crocker Land sardonically parading towards him in inhuman exultation in kinematic patterns more resembling quadrupedal reptiles than that of bipedal avians as the things of dread begin climbing up on him. While six of them starts to peck a large hole in his cranium to sever the synapses that runs between his ganglions, dendrites and motor neurons one by one, the others whisper the truths- the truths that man should not, can not, know- about the Great Old Ones in his ears as he begins to awake screaming.
Education[edit | edit source]
When Lovecraft was six he began his education at Arkham Unspeakable Catholic School. At the age of seven, he was bitten by a radioactive adjective during an English language class. That day, the groundwork for he who would one day be referred to as the "Master of Horror" or the "Father of Modern Horror" was laid. Having both sold his soul to the Outer Gods and became addicted to profusely using superfluous descriptions that really gets under the readers skin and sentences so long that the whole known universe cannot contain them, he was now ready to master the writing medium to spread the gospels of the dark gods, Azathoth and Nyarlathotep. A year later he was expelled for excessive use of obscure adjectives in his creative writing class. A nervous, eldritch, breakdown subsequently forced him to be homeschooled until he obtained a scholarship to the privileged Miskatonic University, based in Pickmantown, Cthulhuchusetts, USA, where he studied advanced non-Euclidean geometrics and the blasphemous Swedish in which the Necronomicron itself was written.
The years following Lovecraft's graduation are shrouded in stygian mystery, though it is believed that it was during this time he made a the first of his pilgrimages to one of the forgotten shrines of elder evil (as marked on the "Providence Guide to Visiting Forgotten Shrines of Elder Evil"). In 1928 Lovecraft moved to the nearby town of Innsmouth, in order to further his education in the occult. It was here that he endeared himself to the local subhuman, degenerated fishermen, most of whom shared the same surname, and several of the same heads and limbs.
Career[edit | edit source]
In 1931 Lovecraft acquired part-time employment as a stripper at Happy Cthulhu Seafood Hut (or, Olive Garden, as it's known in some parts of Lithuania) to pay for face elongation surgery. The "food" at Happy Cthulhu was said to give him the giggles, which in turn inspired many of his darker cartoons. Lovecraft began to enjoy his job and even started experiencing irregular bouts of severe contentedness. To combat the abnormality, his doctor recommended racism. However, it all fell into ruin the dark day when he finally managed to bring himself to attempt eating today's dish for himself. Though it may have looked like your ordinary meal with spaghetti, meatballs, tomato sauce and broccoli, he felt that their relation to him was not the same as that of the spaghetti, meatballs, tomato sauce, and broccoli he knew in another and dimly remembered life. The nature of the difference he could not tell, yet he shook in stark fright as it impressed itself upon him. Then it dawned upon him: it was the spaghetti. Normal as it may have seen at first glance, he only now saw that their geometric shape was not that of ordinary spaghetti but were non-Euclidian cosmic superstrings that were the other worldly end of sightless Stygian depths where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.
Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the waiter arrived with the bill. As the qualmish spectacle continued, he felt a sudden relief that he did not know the recipe, for in that unimaginative, unaesthetically mixed dish straight out of the great Food Guide Pyramid of Giza he sensed the workings of a monstrous and invincible evil and of causalities that would shatter his very soul had he not been guarded by a blissful ignorance, and briefly considered vegetarianism in his smothering moments of cold perspiration. He heard voices, and yowls, and echoes in the restaurant, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea. And when that sardonically glittering surface of the tomato sauce seemed to reflect the ancient phantasmagorial abysses that the mad Swede Abdul Alhazred had quietly spoken of in muffled and frightened words, and when he turned a meatball over with his fork to realize all too late what a shocking resemblance it bore to his own monstrous grandfather, he cringed in disgust and reached clumsily and awkwardly about for the table salt, noticing as he did so the annoying absence of any table knife.
This is the last rational act he performed that week. For that carefully sprinkled salt had arrayed itself in forms that all too well reminded him of the stellar constellations leading the way to the everblack carcass-planet Yuggoth, and when the broccoli displayed an uncanny resemblance to the squid-face of the ever-dreaming horror that is Cthulhu, he merely screamed and raced madly out of that restaurant and into the narrow alleys of Providence, his screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter. God! Those carrion brown balls of sinews, processed meat and cholesterol-ridden fat! Those nightmare recipes choked with the Swedish, Celtic, Roman, and English cuisines of countless unhallowed centuries! Madness rides the star-wind... Tomato sauce squeezed from tomatoes of vermillioned soil choked with the gleaming white bones of the dim aeons of screeching pagan rites...
When his psychatrist learned over H. P. Lovecraft's nervous breakdown over a perfectly ordinary dish of spaghetti with meatballs and his nearly obsessive far-fetched associations of black voids and eldritch abysses with just about anything, Lovecraft knew that his culinary days of gastronomical prospecting were well nigh over. Though Lovecraft insisted that his horror had been real and motivated, his psychatrist gently explained to him that sane persons don't freak out over restaurant meals and dashes off without paying the bill. Lovecraft wondered quietly if his fragile composure may have had something to do with him signing his name in his own blood in Azathoth's Black Book. Was he compelled to do nothing save for writing the daemon-sultan's unspeakable memoirs? What horrible cohesions had ensnared him so distastrously?
Though a respected writer of horror fiction, he is best remembered now for his cyclopean comic strip in the Providence newspaper the Daily Groin, where he created the Cat-huloo mythos, featuring a rascally eldritch feline that managed to get himself into all manner of japes and scrapes.
The Cat-huloo strip ran for over 27 years, printed on alternate Wednesdays, and with a bumper 9 frame strip published on Saint Nyarlathotep's Days.
However, with the success of the comic strip, there also came sadness for Lovecraft as in 1928, his house was demolished by a swarm of nameless, unspeakable honey-crazed killer slugs. In 1928 H.P. Lovecraft met S. C. Starcraft and W. O. Warcraft. Both soon became his best friends; they spent years writing about each other in various books. These books were the inspiration for the Necronomicon, because no one could read them without laughing a lot; which Lovecraft swore meant they drove the reader mad with terrible, blasphemous, cosmic truths. In 1929, he attempted to kill Nietzsche's Übermensch as a response to his harsh criticism of Cthulhu. Failing miserably, Lovecraft was hospitalized with nine broken ribs, three knife wounds, and a critically damaged sphincter. In 1934, Lovecraft was himself arrested for possession of an illegal and cyclopean moustache. During this time, he produced some of his darkest work including the acclaimed tale "It's Raining Elder Gods" which was posthumously nominated for several Hugos, Nebulas and a Bram Stoker Award. His coming out of the closet was a cause for great celebration amongst Lovecraft admirers everywhere, including Rio Linda.
Death[edit | edit source]
When the newspaper finally canceled the strip in late January of 1937 in response to the public outcry, started by the mad Swede Abdul Alhazred, editor of the abhorred adult magazine the Necronomicon, over the notorious "Cat-huloo shot JFK" cartoon, it was the final stroke for the now tragically depressed Lovecraft. He knew now that his time was nigh, for no man or woman among the living could abuse and overuse that many unpatented adjectives and adverbs over the years without karma eventually coming back to bite you in the ass.
In early February of 1937, he began to hear strange nocturnal scratching noises from his workroom window when he was not present, and while trying to expose the voyeur saw nothing at first but heard faint demonic giggles as if from a sinister voice pitched by helium inhalation and seemingly chattering in Dutch language, noticing as he did so several torn out pages from a bizarre, perverse and sadomasochistic pornographic magazine specializing in brutal and yet shockingly realistic anthropo-animalistic female-cephalopod tentacle rape lying scattered outside in his garden.
At five such occasions, while staring out of the workroom window, he could swear that he saw a large peculiar dog dressed in a canine Captain Marvel suit running back and forth restlessly in highly irregular kinematic patterns while howling strangely in front of the moon by the horizon, far away in the barren, desolate old meadow which had once been the site of an ancient Indian burial ground. At one night he went out in the woods to investigate, and presently heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, and saw the dark form of the strange dog looming up in the moonlight. Lovecraft leaped up at once and raced madly out of those woods and across endless leagues of plateau till he reached the increasingly treacherous safety of his home - doing this not because the dog had been wearing a Captain Marvel suit, but because it had asked him for directions on how to promptly reach the summit of the Brocken...
Since that fearful night, the descent of H. P. Lovecraft's sanity into madness only escalated. And when in March he developed a sudden, fiendishly overwhelming and yet unmotived coulrophobia and a manic, irrestistable urge to read the novel Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder over and over again, he could not doubt but that his sanity was slipping away from him piece by piece. Not long after, H. P. Lovecraft vanished in broad daylight without a trace, no doubt the work of some primordial demonic evil.
One night his body was found three days later, neatly stuffed into the glove compartment of a contemporary Ford CX car parked on the roadside in the woods near the desolate meadow and with his left arm and forefinger mysteriously pointing towards a certain point in the sky in a locked rigor mortis position, this point being somewhere between the Lynx and Auriga constellations. Crime scene forensics found him embalmed in a strange, loathsome peanut-like oil and transformed into a nightmarish blasphemy with huge, savage paws. A faux copy of the forbidden book known as Unaussprechlichen Kulten was found nearby with a number of unidentifiable stains and strange, indecipherable hieroglyphs written in goat blood in the right margin. He had smothered himself to death in souvenir royal silver jubilee tea-towels, and used the curious Voorish Sign. But what still puzzles and worries the scholars in neolithic paleontology at Miskatonic University even today more than anything else was merely this; in a rural grocery store a mere kilometer away, on the backside of a Kelloggs cornflakes package, dumbfounded witnesses discovered an irregular caret followed by this enigmatic text written in Ancient Aramaic but here translated to modern English, undoubtly in H. P. Lovecraft's own handwriting but hastily and slovenly written as if in some sudden bout of sheer mind-consuming panic:
"Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back."
So it ends, and begins anew...
- ///Here ends the message///
Legacy[edit | edit source]
“Start with a regular ghost story or some such. Liberally add the words 'chthonic' and 'eldritch'. When in need to choose between a number of synonyms, always pick out the most obscure and archaic one and add another adjective in front off it just for good measure. Then make up a bunch of words and phrases with clusters of vowels or consonants, and add those. Voila!”
“Hmmmm... this guy is a bit of a pessimist, isn't he? Could need a good cheering up, had he not been dead already.”
H. P. Lovecraft have inspired many works since his unholy death, in the forms of movies, fan fiction, toys and popular culture. For instance, you can now build your own Lego non-Euclidian space-time portals to access the horrific realms of the unknown, more than likely disappearing with nothing more left than a stain of blood and a fading scream that bystanders may notice.[3] In honour and recognition of his works, H. P. Lovecraft had a brand of sauce named after him. H. P. Lovesauce has been a long time perennial favourite, especially in British cuisine, despite allegations that its consumption may carry a risk of accidental invocation of the Elder Ones. Recent tests by the FDA suggest that H. P. Sauce may also cause hallucinations, dementia and paranoid schizophrenia. These findings are published in the journal Nature, but can not be read in this plane of existence. Notable films and television based upon his works are, amongst others, "In the Mouth of Madness" by John Carpenter, American Idol and Lost, which completely ripped off Shub-Niggurath as inspiration for the Smoke Monster. Unbeknownst to most people, the language of the Necronomicron is actually a distorted version of Cthulhuian black speech.
See also[edit | edit source]
- Cthulhu Day
- Atlantis
- Cthulhu
- UnNews:Ask Cthulhu
- Southmead (really, there is a connection)
- The H. P. Lovecraft Code
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Although some argue that H. P. actually stands for "Hewlett Packard" or Harry Potter, or "Hungary's Prince".
- ↑ Which is but one of many interpretations of what actually happened the day when Lovecraft met his rumoured death and undoubtly one of the more easily digestable to mere mortals.
- ↑ http://www.dangermouse.net/wolfe/lego.html
- Horror
- Portal Highlights
- Articles about a person written in the style of that person
- Articles written in the first person
- Bat Fuck Insane
- Human-like Aliens
- Long articles that ramble on about nothing
- Mental Illness
- Writers
- Dead people
- Cthulhu
- Rhode Island
- People too smart to believe in God
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Racists
- People of English descent
- People in Hell
- People you should never leave your girlfriend alone with
- People Who Are Still Dead
- People who are heavily categorized