Hello and welcome to the travel cast episode 334. The

travel cast is a weekly audio fiction magazine that brings strange stories

by strange authors to strange listeners such as yourself.

I'm your host, Norm Sherman.

H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month begins here on the travel cast this week.

Our fifth annual celebration of one of weird fiction's greatest cyclopian monolithic,

charnel, tenibrous, myasmic, other adjective, then another one, founding fathers.

The guy who put the babble in indescribable, the nutter in unutterable, the art in swarthy half-breed, and the smoldering man

anus in smoldering manuscript.

With prose so purple, so bloated and unfathomable,

it could easily be mistaken under the pale gibbous moon

for the loathsome squamous figure of McDonald's grimace,

corpulent,

shambling across the dunes of some distant stigian shore,

eventually disappearing into the surf,

into waters deep and cold and black as the very primordial eons they were born of.

One of my favorite things about Lovecraft is how he took all that standard writing advice

you typically hear feverishly jibbered at writing workshops, write what you know, show, don't tell, and turned it all on its head.

Then he took that profane foot-faced upside-down advice monster and started a cult with it,

made the simple townsfolk worship it, carved its hideous

toe-fingered likeness into edifices of moldering stone, made them mate with that abhorrent

upside down advice hell-end, in some obscene, probably handstand like

...