“Had his work … been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency innate, so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At any rate, the man’s work was very closely linked with his notions.” —“The Horror in the Museum” In our previous column (“Trail of Cthulhu Today”), […]
Author Archives: Kenneth Hite
“The more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the future he became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and intellectual disintegration was a tremendously deep-seated and ominously accelerating movement.” —“The Mound” Outside his early Dunsanian works, and the anomalous “The Tree,” Lovecraft sets his stories in his own time, his own […]
“It is only when I have found what was supposed to be psychic turned into extortion that I have condemned and exposed it. Or when I have watched it ladled out to some trusting soul until it became a one-way ticket to an asylum.” Rose Mackenberg, quoted in the Chicago Tribune (Aug. 5, 1945) Born […]
“I have anticipated my narrative because I do not wish to recur to the horror more than is necessary.” —Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914) In 1914, former President Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, along with the Brazilian Colonel Cândido Rondon and the naturalist George Cherrie, descended the unmapped Rio da Dúvida, the […]
“In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. … There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing […]
“Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us.” — At the Mountains of Madness You may have heard whispers in the aether, or seen faint shimmerings on the tablets […]
“The last conscious effort which imagination made was to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist. I must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one’s reason if there were too much of them.” — Mina Harker’s journal, 1 October (26 July 1894) Dracula isn’t the only […]
“Surrealism is meant for me, because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It […]
“As he replied to my mocking allusion to the beetle by echoing my own words, he vanished, — or, rather, I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued, or there seemed to issue out […]
“While America needs you, my son, you shall not die!” — Bruce Carter I, to the Fighting Yank (Bruce Carter III), in Startling Comics #35 (Sep 1945) The Shield was the first, and Captain America was the greatest, but lots and lots of heroes donned the red-white-and-blue and punched Nazis in the 1940s. Many of […]