Lovecraft Month – Page 2 – The Drabblecast

Drabblecast 384 – The Cats of Ulthar

On December 5, 2016

We begin our month-long celebration of H.P. Lovecraft with a dramatic reading of “The Cats of Ulthar.”

Lovecraft Month is our yearly celebration of H.P. and his sprawling mythos. All this month you’ll enjoy some awesome original stories commissioned just for Drabblecast listeners. We’re excited to be featuring works by three of our favorite authors, Rachael K. Jones, Jeremiah Tolbert, and Frank Key.

The Cats of Ulthar is one of Lovecraft’s shorter pieces. It was originally written in 1920.

Story Excerpt:

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

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Drabblecast 370 – The Little Mermaid of Innsmouth

By Drabblecast

On September 13, 2015

In Drabblecast, Fantasy, Horror, Lovecraft Month

The Drabblecast presents: “The Little Mermaid of Innsmouth” by Caroline M. Yoachim.

This is a new take on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fish tale, replete with all the Lovecraftian lore you should expect from The Drabblecast!

Story Excerpt:

Tomiko knelt at the table, across from her father, carefully holding her back rigid and straight as they ate their breakfast. She hoped the formal posture would make him take her arguments seriously, but he barely looked at her as he ate mix of rice and nattō, fermented soybeans that gave off a pungent smell and overpowered even the constant fishy odor of her father’s skin.

Enjoy (full story is printed below the player):

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Drabblecast 369 – In The Walls

By Drabblecast

On September 6, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

The deadliest things in war are not bullets and guns, but hunger and desperation.
I’m hungry.

Penny gets the bed tonight, I’m on watch, Erik is out looting for food and supplies. If he were white, he tells us seriously, the press would say he was scavenging. But for him, it’s looting.

Not that there’s a press anymore. The newspaper we stuffed inside our makeshift mattress were all from three weeks ago. Then the newspaper company was bombed. That was a week after the Internet service provider was bombed. And while we missed the Internet, no one missed Comcast.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 63 – Doorstepping

By Drabblecast

On August 31, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

There was a buzz at the door. Mike Jansen sighed. Just when you got yourself settled after a long day working on the cheese counter; just when you were looking forward to some quality TV; the door had to go. He’d been standing up all day. His feet were killing him. He nestled down into the settee, deciding to ignore the buzz. He turned up the TV a little.

Buzz. Buzz. Bleedin’ buzz.

The caller was a persistent fellow and no mistake.

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Drabblecast 368 – Restless in R’lyeh

By Drabblecast

On August 30, 2015

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Dear Doctor Saperstein,

I’m a 44-year-old librarian from Kansas and a loyal reader of askdoctorsaperstein.com. Last night, after a relaxing day spent gardening, binge-watching “America’s Got Talent,” and organizing my snowglobe collection, I had a nightmare. A hideous octopus-headed monster performed a ukulele solo on “America’s Got Talent,” then killed and ate Howard Stern. Afterwards, Heidi Klum chanted tunelessly in a harsh alien language (possibly German). When I woke up, I was filled with unspeakable dread and all the snow in my snowglobes was whirling around as if someone had shaken each one. What could it mean?

–Worried in Wichita

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Drabbleclassics 24 – Cinderlands (176)

By Charity Helton

On August 29, 2015

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Dexter crouched beneath the toxic fruit trees in his grassless back yard, turning over black earth with the spade he’d taken from the old man, and every shovelful revealed worse things:
clumps of cinders and the dust of ashes; rusting nails, practically dripping tetanus; wickedly-curved shards of brown glass; bullets of various sizes, crusted with dirt; and a foot or so down, fragments of black-stone statuary…

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Drabblecast 367 – The Whisperer in Darkness pt. 2

By Drabblecast

On August 20, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I will quote from memory – seeking for special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can.

To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his terror, was he now sane in his deliverance?

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Drabblecast 366 – The Whisperer in Darkness pt. 1

By Drabblecast

On August 9, 2015

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred – that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night – is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return.

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Drabbleclassics 8 – The Wish of the Demon Achtromagk (214)

By Charity Helton

On September 29, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Fantasy, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Strange

Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind.

It was silent. And soft. And dark…

Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horror (an ‘oh so huggable’ one) by Drabblecast favorite Eugie Foster.

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Drabblecast 337 – The Only Game in Town

By Drabblecast

On September 4, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

Walking back up the road toward home, I saw Rich Hartzell locking up his cabin. His car was stuffed to the roof with cardboard boxes and black trash bags; only the driver’s seat was empty.

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Drabbleclassics 6 – The Outsider (175)

By Charity Helton

On August 31, 2014

In Drabbleclassics, Horror, Lovecraft Month, Mystery

Here it is again – the very first H.P. Lovecraft month special! Listen in as we try to figure out what it’s all about at the end of the episode!

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken…

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Drabblecast 336 – The Mouth of God

By Drabblecast

On August 21, 2014

In Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

There’s a dream you have.

It’s not a proper dream. It’s impatient, fired with urgency. It arrives without warning, veering suddenly out of the night.

You’re kneeling on the bridge. It’s late afternoon. Clouds mass low in the sky, seagulls wheel over the bridge spans, humidity hangs thick in the air. Cars speed by on either side of you, the whoosh of
their passage filling your ears.

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Drabblecast 335 – To Whatever

By Drabblecast

On August 17, 2014

In Comedy, Drabblecast, Horror, Lovecraft Month

H.P. Lovecraft Month continues with an originally commissioned story: “To Whatever” by Shaenon Garrity.

To know or not to know is the penultimate question in Lovecraftian horror. What mysteries lie beyond the wall of our understanding? What if we were to commune with whatever lay beyond that wall? Or in that wall? That is the crux of this week’s story.

Story Excerpt:

To whatever lives in the walls—

Please stop taking my half & half.
Let’s get this out of the way: I know you’re there. Don’t think I’m unaware of the scrabbling sounds, the walls creaking from your bulk, the way my razor in the morning is never exactly where I left it last night. Richard always said it was the building settling—as if a building, however old, could take apples out of the fruit crisper—but he was as wrong about that as he was about a lot of things beyond the scope of this note. And since he moved out I feel you’ve gotten bolder.

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Drabblecast B-Sides 50 – The Nameless City

By Drabblecast

On August 11, 2014

In Drabblecast B-Sides, Horror, Lovecraft Month

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

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Category: Lovecraft Month

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