Home - Humor from a.r.k Matt McIrvin mmcirvin@world.std.com

I apologize for the misspelling in what follows.

Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.horror.cthulhu
From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin)
Subject: Re: The Cthulhu in the Rye
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 1999 20:10:48 GMT
Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
X-Newsreader: MT-NewsWatcher 2.4.4

ltricardo@aol.com (Richard D Magrath) wrote:

So, what non-horror literary characters do you think would be good in a Mythos story? Personally I'd like to see Holden Caulfield facing the vile unnamable horrors that slither and writhe in eldritch dimensions that man should not know of. You?

LtRicardo@aol.com

So my first thought was Olaf Stapledon as Lovecraft, but that would just sound like Lovecraft as Lovecraft, only with slightly worse prose. My second thought was Thomas Pynchon as Lovecraft, but that would just be Pynchon as Pynchon, only without the explicit sex. My third thought was Heinlein as Lovecraft, but he already wrote "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag." And somebody else already thought up "H. P. Lovenstuff."

Then I fell into the outer layers of dream where the degenerate priests of inaccessible Leng murmur blasphemies to the Other Gods of universes whose names no man dares speak aloud, and the following fragment came to me:

All of the shambling nightmare-creatures advanced toward Susan Calvin except the sixth, which stopped with a shudder.

Calvin's index finger shot out toward the sixth ghoul and she shouted "That one!" Donovan hit the key which released the ravening troops of the cats of Ulthar into the other twelve compartments, and the room filled with their keening cries as they did feast heavily upon the spawn of Cthulhu.

--

"How could you have known?" Randolph Carter smiled after he had regained full control of the inhuman thing whose body he now inhabited.

"It was a classic First/Second Law situation." said Susan Calvin. "The Second Law is: No indescribable horror from unseen dimensions of blasphemous Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the hoary Nyarlathotep shall fail to consume the sanity and spirit-substance of a living earthly creature, unless such consumption should conflict with the First Law. Therefore the unadulterated writhing monstrosities in the other chambers advanced without hesitation. But the one whose form you shared was subject to the First Law."

"And what is the First Law?"

Susan Calvin's steely expression softened for a moment and she gave a rare smile. "The First Law is written in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Azrahed, and no man-- or woman, I daresay-- may speak it aloud." She wrote it on the back of a Multivac printout and showed it to the Carter-thing.

"Ah, yes, it's perfectly clear to me now," he said.

And:

Ransom looked upon the eldritch many-tentacled horror with disgust.

"What bothers me about these creatures," he said to me, "is the uncouth spectacle of the whole thing. Infinite gulfs of horror, unseen whatsits at the center of space and time, as if the sheer size of the operation is supposed to cause us to bow down in paralytic fear-- and after a while it starts to seem downright clownish, like the posturings of a schoolboy... or a febrile American. The important thing about evil is that it's not worth bothering with-- and the infinite majesty of good can ultimately cut it down to size."

At first, there was no change; it continued to shriek and gibber mad passages from the forbidden Pnakotic Manuscripts, writhing with unbridled vigor. Then, without warning, a shaft of golden light fell upon it from the strange coffin-like affair in which Ransom had returned from Thulcandra, and it shrank to a tiny dot and vanished in a puff of smoke.

Ransom smiled and brushed the dirt from his shoulders. "That's how a God-fearing Englishman deals with this sort of thing. Tea?"

-- 
Matt McIrvin    http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/
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