Past the sleeping city, the river sweeps, along its left bank, the old canal creeps.

I did not intend that to be poetry, although the scene is poetic, somberly, gruesomely poetic, like the poems of Poe.

Too well I know it, too often have I walked over the grass-grown path beside the reflections

of black trees and tumble-down shacks and distant factory chimneys in the sluggish waters that move so slowly and cease to move it all.

I shall be called mad and I shall be a suicide.

I shall take no pains to cover up my trail or to hide the thing that I shall do.

What will it matter afterward what they say of me? If they knew the truth, if

they could vision even dimly the beings with whom I have consorted, if the faintest realization might be theirs of the thing I am becoming,

and of the fate from which I am saving their city. Then they would call me a great hero, but it does not

matter what they call me, as I have said before. Let me write down the things I am about to write down and let them be taken as they will be taken for the last ravings of a madman.

The city will be in mourning for the thing I shall have done, but its mourning

will be of no consequence beside that other fate, from which I shall have saved it.

H.Podcraft.com Those were the first few paragraphs of the Canal by Everl Whirl, an author who haunted the pages of

weird tales for decades and who is kicking off our month on creature features here on the

H.P Lovecraft literary podcast.

We're here at H.Podcraft.

I'm Chris Lanky.

And I'm Chad Fifer. The reader we heard at the top is my old friend Carrie Gets.

This story, The Canal, it was one of H.P. Lovecraft's favorite stories.

In the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales,

editor Farnsworth Wright wrote,

H.P. Lovecraft has gone through his file of Weird Tales

...